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Always Cola, Rarely Essential Medicines

21 March 2011 By Leave a Comment

Always Coke Rarely Essential Medicines

Last week we received and email from one of our Virtual Advisory Board members, Prashant Yadav, drawing our attention to a paper just published by INSEAD and co-authored by Prashant YADAV, Orla STAPLETON and Luk N. VAN WASSENHOVE. The paper is entitled: Always Cola, Rarely Essential Medicines: Comparing Medicine and Consumer Product Supply Chains in the Developing World.

A year or so ago we came across an early draft of this paper and this led us to contact Prashant who has been a source of energy and encouragement ever since. We are particularly pleased with the concluding paragraphs reproduced below – the emboldening is mine:

Interestingly, many new initiatives have begun that are attempting to replicate some of the key success factors observed in the consumer product supply chains. For instance, Village Reach is an innovative model to deliver vaccines and drugs in Mozambique that circumvents the asset specificity problem in medicine distribution through creative bundling with other products. The Affordable Medicines Facility for Malaria is a pilot project to understand how points-of-sale and the breadth of the distribution channel can be expanded for anti-malaria medication (Laxminarayan and Gelband 2009) to achieve efficiencies without compromising quality or traceability. The ACT Watch project is a multi-year multi-country study funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to use a third party to gather market data for anti-malarial medicines. The government of Tanzania has started a very successful Accredited Drug Dispensing Outlet (ADDO) program to increase the retail points of dispensing essential drugs. Similar initiatives are underway in Zambia and Ghana. A new project called ColaLife is trying to utilize the secondary distribution channels of Coca-Cola in developing countries to carry ‘social products’, such as oral rehydration salts to save children’s lives.

We remain very excited about how the multidisciplinary nature of technical expertise being made available to the field of global health through individual commitment, private philanthropy and government receptiveness is promoting innovations that can mimic the effectiveness and efficiency of soft drink supply chains while preserving the safety and traceability that are vital to medicine supply chains.

Related post: How Coca-Cola’s distribution system works

Filed Under: Coca Cola Campaign, Reports Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

ColaLife headlines in NESTA guide

7 July 2009 By 1 Comment

ColaLife on Social By Social
Yesterday (7/7/09), at Reboot Britain, NESTA launched ‘Social By Social – A practical guide to using new technologies to deliver social impact’. ColaLife is one of the case studies featured in the online guide and headlines on the website.
:-)

Filed Under: Coca Cola Campaign, Reports Tagged With: , ,

Help to raise the profile of ColaLife on our Birthday

18 May 2009 By Leave a Comment

Would you like to do something really significant on the birthday of ColaLife’s Facebook Group? If yes, then please comment on these two independent articles: click on the links below and add a comment, mentioning ColaLife, to the article you see. This will really help raise our profile. Thanks.

NextBillion.net
Can Big Companies Drive Development through Enterprise? President Clinton and CEOs Weigh In

Business Week
Coke: On Doing Well by Doing Go
Your comment won’t appear immediately as comments are moderated

Onwards and upwards!

Filed Under: Coca Cola Campaign, Ethiopia, Reports, Tanzania Tagged With: , ,

ColaLife gets mention in HARVARD report

17 May 2009 By 3 Comments

Harvard Report Cover

Last week the HARVARD Kennedy School and the IFC published their report into the research into Coca-Cola’s Manual Distribution System undertaken in East Africa in the summer of 2008. We reported on this here. The report can be downloaded here: harvard-ifc-mdc-summary-report-final (PDF, 2.3 MB).

The good news is that ColaLife is mentioned:

In November 2008, once the study’s initial findings were available, Coca-Cola convened a multi-stakeholder dialogue in Tanzania to seek input on the fi ndings. The session was attended by development practitioners from the NGO, government and international agency community to debate and explore some of the research recommendations in more detail. Co-facilitated by Business Action for Africa and the International Business Leaders Forum, the dialogue included a wide range of participants including local, regional and international representatives from organizations such as Save the Children, Population Services International, Enablis, CARE International, Colalife, the U.K.’s Department for International Development, the United States Agency for International Development, SNV Netherlands Development Corporation and UNICEF.

And so does the distribution of social products:

In these two countries and others where the MDC model is being implemented, there is potential to leverage this network of thousands of small enterprises that are located in low-income communities to achieve broader development goals, such as the distribution of social products or support for social marketing. This broader effort cannot and should not be the responsibility of the company alone. Nor must it undermine the core commercial viability of these small enterprises. Failure to maintain profi tability would clearly undermine the business model and thereby jeopardize the long-term contribution it can make to development. Yet, by working in partnership with other companies, donors, government bodies or development experts there is potential for the network of MDCs to be leveraged in a targeted way to address other development needs.

This is a huge achievement given that this was the starting point . . . . when there was no mention of social products at all:


Find more videos like this on Business Fights Poverty

Simply brilliant!

Filed Under: Background Data, Coca Cola Campaign, Reports, Videos Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,