Breaking things down, cutting things a different way
July 30, 2010 by Simon Berry · Leave a Comment
Graphic from ColaLife Scenarios - Africa Village with shop
ColaLife is a very simple idea. However, if it’s to work it will require people and organisations to work together who have never worked together before. In other words it’s complicated. This has led me to think that perhaps we should take things one step at a time. Our current published strategy does this. First we want to do fieldwork and build the partnership that would be necessary to trial the ColaLife idea and then support this partnership in the co-design of the trial and then do the trial. But may be we should break things down further.
What if we cut things another way? We could focus initially on the issues associated with the distribution chain before we start carrying ’social products’. This would look at the following:
- Options for the design of the AidPod (single use; possible secondary uses; re-usable; biodegradable; insulated etc)
- The design of the boxes that would carry them before the individual AidPods are introduced into the drinks crates
- The design of the procedures and processes including:
- When and how to introduce the AidPods into the system to cause the least friction (both logistical and legal)
- Risk assessment for the partners involved
- How to mitigate these risks
- How to effectively track AidPods
- All the informational and motivational elements including:
- What incentives would be required, if any, to ensure wholesaler participation?
- What would be the key motivators for the retailer?
- What would be the key motivators for the bottler/haulier?
- What temperature fluctuations would the contents of the AidPods experience?
Such a trial would not require all the regulatory clearance necessary if we were carrying medicines but would provide the information we would need to determine which ’social products’/medicines could be carried. And this may whet the appetite of the regulators and make the acquisition of regulatory approval more simple down the line.
Thoughts?
Is wealth creation the new philanthropy?
October 24, 2009 by Simon Berry · 4 Comments
An AidPod’s view of a Coca-cola crate - so much unused space!
Preparing for the Rotterdam conference has served as a reminder that the private sector is there TO MAKE MONEY. People outside the sector say to me, over and over again:
“But why wouldn’t they [Coca-Cola] just do it [ColaLife]?”
The answer is that they will not do anything that interferes with the money making machine.
You can debate the rights and wrongs of this as long as you like but ColaLife is not a debating society! We are trying to work with what’s already there and put things together in new and creative ways to solve an age old disaster that unfolds in developing countries every single day.
So what if the Coca-Cola distributors who took aidpods in their crates made more money than those that didn’t? We’ve always said that this is a possible model but perhaps it should be THE model.
Coca-Cola always say that their bottlers and distributors are ‘independent’ businesses, which is technically true, but I have seen the look of panic on the face of an ‘independent’ distributor when you put an aidpod in one of ‘their’ crates of Coca-Cola.
The fact is that Coca-Cola is very powerful and the livelihoods of most of their small distributors depend on a strong relationship. Distributors would not want to do anything that would jeopardise that relationship. So Coca-Cola would have to agree, or even encourage, their distributors to increase their income by carrying aidpods in Coca-Cola crates.
So perhaps our strategy, in terms of our relationship with Coca-Cola, should be simply to get them to agree to, and ideally promote, the notion of their distributors carrying aidpods in their crates and getting paid for doing so.
What others are saying about ColaLife- ColaLife on Flickr
-
Auto-translation
.gif){kind=small}
