Apologies for the lack of blog posts lately. There is a lot happening but, if I’m frank, a lot of it is not very exciting. We are in a necessary, but rather dull bureaucratic phase as we try to get the last bits and pieces in place to start the trial. We have confirmation [...]
PedZinc samples arrive from Tanzania
15 June 2011 by Leave a Comment
Regular readers will remember a mini-panic that we had back last month when we visited the Medical Stores Limited (MSL) warehouse to find the type of Zinc supplements we wanted but packed in boxes of 100 tablets (10 blister packs of 10 tablets each) – see the picture below. This is a real problem for [...]
Zambia Diary | Day 9 and 10, Visit 3 | Visit round-up
24 May 2011 by Leave a Comment
I’m writing this sat at my desk back at home if front of a boarded up window which someone put a brick through while we were away. Luckily, it looks like they were just after the keys for the scooter that belonged to our house minder who was round at the Co-op at the time. [...]
Zambia Diary | Day 8, Visit 3 | From lowlight to highlight
20 May 2011 by 3 Comments
On Tuesday night (17/5/11) I was worried when a potential problem was revealed to me that I hadn’t even thought about. Fortunately, we don’t get a lot of unpleasant surprises in ColaLife because we have been kicking the concept around our thousands of supporters for three years and this has meant that a lot of the issues [...]
Zambia Diary | Days 6-7, Visit 3 | SABMiller, Jhpiego, DfID and Partners Meeting
20 May 2011 by Leave a Comment
We have another couple of interesting days to report on, so here goes. On Wednesday (18/5/11) we arrived at SABMiller ten minutes early for our meeting and as we went into the reception I put my phone to silent. 40 minutes later we were still in reception. We’d sort of lost track of time as [...]
Zambia Diary | Days 2-5, Visit 3 | UNICEF, MoH, KZF, MSL and Baltimore
17 May 2011 by 2 Comments
It’s been a busy and varied few days. A lot of the weekend was spent preparing for the workshop UNICEF had asked Jane to run on ‘Participatory Techniques’. The image above is of her doing just that into the evening. This request came after the workshop Jane ran on our last visit to pull stakeholders [...]
Zambia Diary | Day 1, Visit 3 | UNICEF, MSL, MTZL and San Francisco
14 May 2011 by Leave a Comment
MTZL Vouchers (apologies for the poor quality of this image) I got up early to talk to Alison and Mark about vehicle allocation. But I was too late, they’d already gone. Mark had taken Alison to her new pre-school and dropped her off so that we had use of her car . With support like [...]
A little reminder – why we are doing this
12 May 2011 by 6 Comments
After a couple of days with the lovely Ian and Judy Goldman in Pretoria: early morning walks (Simon and Ian); intellectual discussions (Ian, Judy and Jane); discussions on World Music (Simon and Ian); exasperation with technology, especially Word (jane and Judy); etc etc, we have just arrived in Lusaka to a very warm welcome from [...]
Zambia Diary | Day 13 | Return to Lusaka from Mpika
1 February 2011 by Leave a Comment
Not much to report from today (Saturday, 29/2/11) as the day was spent returning to Lusaka from Mpika. This return journey really brought home how far Mpika is from Lusaka (and how big Zambia is). We started off at 9.10am and arrived in Lusaka at 5:50pm. We stopped in Serenje for fuel and just south [...]
Zambia Diary | Day 2, Visit 2 | MSL and SABMiller
18 January 2011 by 1 Comment
Jane outside Zambian Breweries We knew that today was one of the most important of our trip as it included a meeting with three members of the senior management team at Zambian Breweries, a wholly owned subsidiary of SABMiller, and the bottlers of Coca-Cola in Zambia. But the start of the day was going to [...]
