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Moving towards District selection

9 January 2012 By Leave a Comment

Crunch time is approaching in terms of which Districts we select for the ColaLife trial. The ‘tension’ between the desire to go for what academics call a ‘randomised cluster trial’ – the gold standard in trial design - and the practicality you encounter on the ground; the way free markets work and the impact of the personality and approach of different distributors and wholesalers, is being brought into sharp focus. This is nothing new we’ve been discussing this for weeks and have just had another 2-hour Skype call about it tonight.

Visiting places and talking to wholesalers really helps. Jane and I went to Choma and Kalomo yesterday (Sunday) which really brought things alive in terms of how the trial might work. Kalomo is a classic market town serving a huge rural hinterland. You can see from the geotagged photos on the above map that every other ‘shop’ is some sort of wholesaler, there to serve retailers coming in to buy supplies.

Today we met another wholesaler in Lusaka who operates in Eastern Province and we’re planning a trip to Petauke on Wednesday to talk to the person who runs a Coca-Cola wholesaler there.

We need to decide on Districts by the end of play on Wednesday so that we can get sign-off of the Terms of Reference for the Monitoring and Evaluation work and go to tender for the supplier of these services to the project.

But before the trip on Wednesday we have our first implementation partners meeting tomorrow (= exciting). A key part of this meeting will be the training partners in the use of our Huddle system which will be the key tool for collaboration, communication and information sharing for the project.


A retailer on a trip for supplies near Mazabuka

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

The biggest day so far for ColaLife

6 December 2011 By 1 Comment

Yesterday (5/12/11) was the biggest day so far in ColaLife’s development. It started with a presentation to the Johnson & Johnson Africa Contribution Committee (ACC). It seems that this committee reviews all of Johnson & Johnson’s social investments in Africa and holds its meetings in different African countries on a peripatetic basis. Both of our key contacts were present at the meeting and it was great to be updating them of the progress we were making on our new home territory.

There is huge interest and willingness to support ColaLife and a realistic understanding that we will have successes and set-backs over the next two years and that we need to learn from both. The relationship with Johnson & Johnson feels right. There is a feeling that we are in this together. There is a real sense of partnership.

Despite the flakiness of our internet connection at times, I have taken to using the online SlideRocket system for presentations. The presentation that I gave to the Johnson & Johnson committee is embedded below. I recorded an audio track on my phone using AudioBoo but have been unable to upload it due to a poor internet connection over the last few days. I will add the audio when I can. You will need to be online to view this (go online now).

After the presentation we went over to the DfID section of the British High Commission to set-up for the kick-off meeting with implementation partners which ran from 3-5:30pm and could have gone on for a lot longer. We worked most of the weekend preparing for this and it went really well. Jane did most of the brain work and I made the props!

Workshop tools and materials | 5/12/11
Workshop tools and materials. Clockwise from bottom left: Mock information inserts; soap; PedZinc blister packs; model cardboard carton (the real one will probably measure 40 x 40 x 40cm); model ADKs; sachets of ORS; vouchers laid out on a copy of the Gantt chart

We used a technique described to us by our friends at Boxwood to surface issues arising from the supply chain aspects of the projects. The technique works like this: you use a model, or the actual item to be distributed and you give it to a person from the first organisation in the supply chain. They describe their role to everyone else and hand the item to a person from the second organisation in the supply chain. They describe their role and pass to a person from the third organisation and so on until the item reaches the customer. Of course it doesn’t go as smoothly as I have just described as the whole process generates discussion and questions and deepens the understanding of the process for all those involved and those observing.

In the ColaLife Trial we will be distributing two things: the vouchers and the anti-diarrhoea kits (ADKs). In the case of the vouchers there is also a redemption process to consider and in the case of the ADKs there is the process of procurement of the packaging and the components and the assembly of the ADKs that all needs to be taken into account.

Both of these exercises took a lot longer than we anticipated but worked brilliantly at surfacing the issues and deepening collective understanding.

We had intended to follow these exercises with group work to look at the other dependencies in the project but we ran out of time so partners took away copies of the Gantt chart to study by themselves and get back with any issues they may have.

We then moved on and joined others at a Reception for ColaLife at the High Commissioner’s residence hosted by the High Commissioner himself Tom Carter. To this we’d invited all the people who had helped us to get this far. Stakeholders attended who had contributed to the trial design but were not now directly involved in the delivery. We hope that many of them will join the trial steering committee to advise but also learn as the trial progresses. Zambia’s Vice President, Guy Scott, attended which was a great honour and it was really good that our contacts from Johnson & Johnson were there too.

So we now have everyone re-engaged and thinking more clearly about their role pending the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Ministry of Health which is ‘in the system’ and we hope will emerge soon. Once the MoU is signed we will be able undertake an official launch and we will be on our way.

 

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

Announcing the AidPod Mark VIb

16 October 2011 By Leave a Comment

We had a bit of a fright when we went to the local Supermarket to buy a crate of Coca-Cola for a presentation we are giving this week to find that the predictable had happened and Zambia Breweries (SABMiller), the Coca-Cola bottler, had capitalised on the new lighter and stumpier bottles we reported on earlier and have produced a more compact crate to match.

Unfortunately the Mark V AidPod does not fit the new crates. The AidPod is too deep and hits the dividers in the crate which means it sits too proud of the bottles. Time for a re-design. So I’ve spent the last couple of days with a new crate working out the new profile of the Mark VI AidPod. Mark VIa, the first attempt at a new design, still had the shoulders as a feature. However, this has always been a bone of contention as it would complicate the production process and make the AidPods more expensive to produce. So the Mark VIb has no shoulders and its cross-section now looks like this (see picture). It is still half-length (116mm approx), just like its predecessor and so 10 ADKs will fit into one crate.

The big question is, is the new design big enough to take all the proposed components of the Anti-Diarrhoea Kit (ADK)?

We have samples of the soap that will be part of the kit and we also have samples of the PedZinc zinc supplements but we have yet to finalise the ORS we will use. So on Saturday (15/10/11) we went into Lusaka to combine a bit of research, into what was available on the market, with the purchase of some ORS samples. When we got home we were able to see if the components would all fit into the new AidPod. Watch the video to find out!

Here is a set of 9 pictures which show the new AidPods in the new crate (you’ll need to be reading this on the blog to see this slideshow I think):

Filed Under: ColaLife Pre-Trial Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Please dig deep and support ColaLife | the riders are ready

26 August 2011 By Leave a Comment

Nigel Bill Bryson
Nigel Bolding and Bill Bryson
On 7 September two ColaLife supporters will catch the ferry to St Malo and spending the next 4 days cycling the 400km from Dinard to Deauville (D2D). They are doing this to give you the excuse to sponsor them. All the money raised will come to straight to ColaLife, Gift Aid enhanced where possible. They are covering all the costs of doing the trip themselves.

The two riders are Nigel Bolding and Bill Bryson. And you can sponsor them online here:

CLICK HERE to sponsor Nigel
CLICK HERE to sponsor Bill

Nigel is ColaLife’s top fundraiser and through his company – The World’s Best Hotels – he has also provided free accommodation for Jane and I during our travels over the last year. Nigel and Bill have worked very hard to make this ride possible and it’s been very hectic pulling things together.

However, Nigel was determined to do another ride after the success of last year’s ColaLife B2B Ride (Boulogne to Biarritz). Nigel said:

Our aim is to work through the whole alphabet and raise as much money as possible for ColaLife in the process so we can’t afford to take a year off! Last year on the B2B ride we managed to raise £6,000 and it’s great to see the impact that funding has had. It paid for the trips to Zambia over the last year where the co-design of the trial happened with local people. As a result, ColaLife now have a fully costed plan in place and this is raising the money ColaLife needs to run the first trial. Funders have committed $350,000 already and we are confident the rest will be in place before the end of the year.

The money we raise this year will be used to follow-up interest ColaLife has generated in other countries and help get things happening on the ground there.

Please sponsor us if you can and help us create the next sprat to catch the next mackerel!

Other giving options
If you’d like to give regularly to ColaLife through a standing order you can do that HERE.
If online giving is not for you then the offline giving options are HERE.

Why Bill and Nigel are cycling for ColaLife.

Thank you!

Filed Under: Coca Cola Campaign, colalifeD2D, Participation Ride 2011 Tagged With: , , , , , ,

A mini AidPod anyone?

22 July 2011 By Leave a Comment

Mark IV AidPod with PedZinc packages

I had a great meeting yesterday with Chris Griffin at the PI Global offices in London talking about the packaging aspects of the trial. I was also able to loan him the various bottles and a crate, on loan to me from Zambian Breweries. These will obviously be crucial in defining the cross-section of the AidPod. We then went on to talk about the length of the AidPod.

A tension has been emerging with this aspect of the AidPod over the last few months. We had originally envisaged that the AidPod would be the full length of the width of the crate ie about 225mm long. This would be big enough to carry the components to treat at least two episodes of diarrhoea: four sachets of ORS, two courses of Zinc supplements and two 25g bars of soap. This thinking was based on research that showed that the biggest indicator of whether a child gets ORS is whether or not the mother, or care-giver, had ORS available in the home at the time of the attack.

However, this makes the ADK (Anti-Diarrhoea Kit) twice as expensive as it needs to be and goes against the guidelines laid down by the late, great C. K. Prahalad* and others who say that when creating products for consumers earning $1-2 dollars a day, price, a low price, is absolutely crucial. These markets are completely different from more developed markets. In developed markets the starting point when pricing a product is your costs, then you add your margin to arrive at the sale price. In poor markets you need to turn this model on its head. You start from the amount people are able/willing to pay (the price) and then work backwards and design the product with a low enough cost to meet the need and enable a profit margin to be made.

On balance, we have concluded (I think) that we need to take the latter approach and so the ADK will have to be as cheap as possible to produce which points to a mini, or half-length ADK. This has the added benefit that we can get 10, not 5, ADKs in each crate.

But what about the research that indicates that ideally you need ORS and Zinc in the home to maximise the likelihood of treatment? Well, what we are banking on is that having ADKs available in the local retail kiosk is nearly as good as having one in the home. The trial will indicate whether or not we are right.

What is helpful is that, coincidentally, the PedZinc component of the ADK comes in a box which is fully compatible with half-length, mini AidPod – see the image above.

* C.K. Prahalad Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits

Filed Under: AidPod, Coca Cola Campaign, design, Meetings, Zambian pilot Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

At last! A peek at the ColaLife Trial Plan

18 July 2011 By Leave a Comment

ColaLife Trial Plan EXEC and Key Diagrams CoverMany of our regular readers will be itching to see the culmination of our work over the last 3 years: our plan for the first field trial of the ColaLife concept – the snappily named ColaLife Operational Trial Zambia (or COTZ, when you are trying to fit it into a funder’s 600 character project description!).

We always said that ‘the devil is in the detail’ and it has taken 3 years: . . . from our first convening on Facebook in 2008, our link-up with BBC Radio, engaging with The Coca-Cola Company, our UnLtd award which has kept food on the table and came just in time as Jane and I decided we had to commit ourselves full-time, the sponsored cycle ride across France, our three trips to Zambia (Oct 2010, Jan 2011, May 2011) . . . All this has culminated in just 14 pages! Plus some very useful charts and diagrams, and for those who are not faint hearted: 39 footnotes and 17 pages of Appendices.

The Executive Summary and the key pictures, charts and diagrams can be downloaded here (PDF, 537 KB).

Because the plan still under consideration by funders, and partners have yet to sign the memoranda of understanding, we can’t yet put the full plan in the open – despite our commitment to Open Innovation. However, if you’d like more than the Executive Summary, you can also request a fuller version of the plan here.

We’ve built the plan using a co-design process, from a well understood need, but from the bottom up. The plan is not a rushed response to a funding opportunity. It is a detailed, and fully-costed, description of how we propose to rigorously test the ColaLife concept in Zambia through a local cross-sector partnership. The formulation of the plan has only been possible because so many big players have been willing to work together in an ‘unlikely alliance’ involving some of the biggest names on the planet. Here are just some of them:

Implementation partners:

  1. Ministry of Health, Republic of Zambia
  2. UNICEF, Zambia
  3. Zambian Breweries plc (Zambian subsidiary of SABMiller plc)
  4. Keepers Zambia Foundation, Zambia
  5. Medical Stores Limited, Zambia
  6. ColaLife

Partnering sub-contractors:

  1. PI Global (ADK Packaging)
  2. Mobile Transactions Zambia Limited

Operational research contractor (still to be selected by UNICEF, through competitive tender)

The planning process would not have been possible without the support at global level of The Coca-Cola Company, SABMiller and Johnson & Johnson and Janssen Pharmaceutica. We are also grateful to Rohit Ramchandani, currently studying for his Doctorate in Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, for his input on the trial design and many others too numerous to mention here, but many of whom are listed in the acknowledgements contained in the plan.

The plan has triggered confirmation of support from the Johnson & Johnson Corporate Citizenship Trust. Jane and I worked with a small team at Johnson & Johnson/Janssen Pharmaceutica in their ‘Innovation Bootcamp’ from October 2010 to January 2011 and this helped to challenge and refine the ColaLife concept.

The plan is now with potential funders, and we’ve been able to approach them with 25% of the total of USD1.354m we need already confirmed in cash and in-kind from partners.

Having the commitment of the Johnson & Johnson Corporate Citizenship Trust is a huge boost and will give some reassurance to others. However, we appreciate that other funders will still have to work hard to support us as we are not always responding to a specific ‘call for proposals’ from them.

We hope that the funders will now be able to show the same creativity and flexibility that we have seen from all the partners and supporters of the plan so far.

This is a really significant milestone in ColaLife’s short life. Thanks to everyone who has helped us get this far.

Onwards and upwards!

Filed Under: Coca Cola Campaign, Featured, Funding Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Project Logic Version 6

24 March 2011 By 2 Comments

ColaLife Pilot Logic Model v6
Click on the above image to see the document full-size on Flickr

This is a post for the development specialists amongst you and to reassure everyone else that we are making progress and doing a really thorough job on the design of the pilot. This is the pilot on a single sheet. There is a logic to it. Read it from the bottom up and ask yourself if the activities described will produce the outputs we need and if the outputs will contribute the outcomes.

I’ve reported on the project logic before. This is about the sixth iteration of this. Jane has been leading on this work from the ColaLife end and we are grateful to the staff at UNICEF in Zambia for their guidance and to our research adviser, Rohit Ramchandani, for his input.

Onwards and upwards.

Filed Under: Coca Cola Campaign, design, Zambia Tagged With: , , , ,

ColaLife website and blog upgrade

6 March 2011 By Leave a Comment

ColaLife's new website

Here we are at last with our upgraded website and blog. If you subscribe to our blog posts and are reading this in your email please click here to take a moment to look at what we have done. The new design seeks to:

  • make it much easier for visitors to comment and to see the comments of others – now you can even comment on featured posts from the homepage
  • make the site more attractive by using the excellent photos supporters have given us over the last three years
  • get the key current items on the homepage in the part you see without scrolling

I’d like to thank Copyblogger|StudioPress for donating their Genesis Framework/Corporate theme to us. This has given our new online home a much crisper look. The theme is also very easy to use and has loads of configuration options which will stand us in good stead for the future.

I’d also like to thank Dave Briggs for providing us with our first website and hosting it for the first 2.5 years. Cheers Dave.

I’d also like to thank my Dad who gave the pages on our site an unsolicited proof read.

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

ColaLife makes it into the Buckminster Fuller ideas bank

15 February 2011 By Leave a Comment

ColaLife has made it into the prestigious Buckminster Fuller Challenge Idea Index which was published yesterday (14/2/11). Our entry is here. This is the second year running that we have been featured and last year we made in to the semi-finals.

The email informing us of this development said:

We admire your commitment and truly believe that the solutions to our intractable problems lies in the hearts, minds and synergies between those of you on the front lines of what Fuller called comprehensive, anticipatory design. This design approach crosses disciplines, transcends conventional process and gives us the tools, perspectives and strategies to take on and solve once and for all the global problems before us. Bucky called himself a comprehensive anticipatory design scientist – we think this pretty much sums you up too.

Which is nice :-)

Filed Under: Awards, Buckminster Fuller, Coca Cola Campaign, Featured Tagged With: , ,

Zambia Diary | Day 5, Visit 2 | The Workshop

21 January 2011 By 2 Comments

Zambia Workshop 21 Jan 2011
Group work: indicative skills and participation – for the form used, see below

Jane and I were very pleased with the way the workshop went. It seemed to go very well. I can take no credit for the design, that was down to Jane. I just did the techie bits! Jane put all she’s ever learnt from our workshopper friends into this one! Elizabeth Gray-King will recognise the ‘Wall and Hammer’ technique although we just used red and yellow post-it notes: red for problems and barriers and yellow for solutions and insights.

Everyone we wanted to be there was there – 17 people from 11 organisations. Dr Nilda Lambo from UNICEF kicked the workshop off explaining UNICEF’s interest in the well-being of children in general and ORS/diarrhoea and innovation in particular. Nilda was accompanied by three of her colleagues: Rogers who heads the Mother and Child Health team; Jesper who is a monitoring and evaluation specialist and Precious who is part of the Social Policy and Economic Analysis team and helped with the administration for the workshop.

Other organisations present, in alphabetical order, were: CHAZ (The Churches Health Association of Zambia); JSI; Keepers Zambia Foundation; Medical Stores Limited (MSL); Ministry of Health; SABMiller – Coca-Cola bottler; the Society for Family Health; Transaid and World Vision.

THE PILOT | SOCIAL MARKETING THE PILOT | DISTRIBUTION
A sample of the outputs produced through group working relating to two aspects of the pilot: Social Marketing and Distribution. Red = barrier/problem; Yellow = solution/insight

As well as confronting the challenges we may face moving forward and coming up with solutions to these (with red and yellow Post-Its), we also did group work looking at the level of interest and experience for the different roles in the pilot. The levels we used were:

  1. We have skills and experience in this area;
  2. We have data/intelligence in this area that we would be willing to share;
  3. We would, in principle, be interested in an implementation role in this area;
  4. We would, in principle, be interested in leading in this area

The form we used can be downloaded here: A3 format; A4 format. We’ve ended up with three of these sheets completed by the three groups and these will be invaluable in mapping expertise and interest in the different aspects of the pilot from the different potential partners.

We have a follow-up meeting with UNICEF on Tuesday next week to look at the Logical Framework for the pilot. In the meantime we’ve got a lot to digest whilst we start turning all these workshop outputs into a pilot plan.

Of course, we have no formal commitments yet and there is a way to go before we see signed partnership agreements, but we have made a great start. A big thank-you to all those who gave up their Friday morning to participate and to UNICEF for providing the collaboration platform.

[Those interested in the use of social media, please read on.... We met with Ruth yesterday at Keepers Foundation Zambia for the first time this trip and she had been following this diary since we arrived and so was fully briefed on the meetings we'd had and the people we'd met. At this workshop, at least two participants came with a print out of pages from this blog. So this diary is helping potential pilot partners to keep informed of developments as they happen. Try doing that effectively using email! ]

Filed Under: Coca Cola Campaign, ColaLife fieldwork, Events, Zambia, Zambia Diary Jan 2011 Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
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