Building unlikely alliances to save children's lives
One of the good things about Twitter is that in concentrates the mind. Can you get your thought, your hypothesis, your joke or witticism down to just 140 characters?
As we’ve got deeper and deeper into the ColaLife project a hypothesis has been developing about supply chains. I’ve been trying to get this hypothesis down to 140 characters for a while now and I think I may have doen it:
It might be better for the last ‘the’ to be a ‘that’.
Your thoughts please . . .
Regular readers will know of my involvement in Honda’s Dream Factory where Honda have brought together nine ‘Cultural Engineers’ who are doing interesting things. Honda is supporting us in our work in various ways. So far, ColaLife has been part of a week-long exhibition in Brick Lane, held last summer (2010) and this August (2011) ColaLife was featured in Hello! Magazine. Both of these opportunities have enabled us to reach new audiences and link up with people who can help us make the ColaLife dream a reality.
Yesterday (27/9/11) Honda went a step further and offered to donate the vehicle we need to run the trial in Zambia. We’d costed this at USD 40,000 in our trial plan, so this is a real benefit for us: USD 40,000 we don’t have to raise. As I type, a vehicle is on its way to Zambia and should be there when we arrive in a week’s time on 6 October.
We are very grateful for this generous support from Honda and impressed in their willingness to invest in innovation – not only just for their own products, but in the world outside. I’m sure that Honda will benefit through the association with the Cultural Engineers in their Dream Factory even if none of us – the engineers and Honda – are sure exactly what that benefit will be at this point.
The collaboration will continue moving forward – look out for a series of advertorial articles in The Sunday Observer in the autumn and the ‘Idea Hack Day’ which will bring all the engineers together in the same place for the first time at The Guardian offices in London in November.
To keep informed, follow @ourdreamfactory and @Honda_UK on Twitter.
I’ll leave you with a video . . .
As we build up to our move to Zambia to oversee an independently evaluated trial of the ColaLife concept, interest in what we are trying to achieve has reached new levels.
In the last few weeks we have had three mentions in HELLO! Magazine (@hellomag) with a full-page spread in the 22 August 2011 issue. This has been thanks to Honda’s Dream Factory initiative which I am very pleased to be a part of – I’m one of the nominated ‘Cultural Engineers’ - we are all dreamers who are trying to make their dreams come true! There are some interesting people in this group and we are all getting together for the first time in November in the Guardian Offices in London . . . . more on this later.
Popular media is all very well and it really boosts our supporter numbers which has been important and has given us the power we need to engage the powerful organisations required to make ColaLife work.
But when it comes to funding, credibility is important and it helps if you feature in UN Publications and academic publications like The Lancet. We were in both this week which is more than we could have hoped for.
On Monday (12/9/11) a thematic report – Innovating for Every Woman, Every Child – was published by the UN’s Every Woman, Every Child initiative (EWEC) looking at innovation in the areas of child and maternal health. The report is being published, as a peer reviewed report, and distributed through The Lancet. You will need to register and download the PDF version. This is all very inaccessible, however, thanks go to Talea Miller of PBS Newshour for writing about the report and choosing to highlight ColaLife in this blog post on the PBS Newshour site.
This blog post has generated quite a lot of excitement on Twitter with an original tweet by The Gates Foundation being re-tweeted many times.
What I’m really looking forward to though is the publication of the results of the ColaLife trial in The Lancet in a couple of years time!
Well the boys made it to the end of Day 1 of the ColaLife D2D ride nearly unscathed. There was a minor fall apparently with only minor damage (bike or person wasn’t specified in the tweet).
You can follow all the excitement(!) by keeping an eye on the hashtag #colalifeD2D. A fun way to do this is through TweetChat. If you sign in using your Twitter password you can take part in the ‘conversation’.
You might want to send 140 characters of encouragement their way.
There’s still time to sponsor Bill and Nigel:
>> Sponsor Bill here
>> Sponsor Nigel here
100% of your donation goes to ColaLife. Nigel and Bill are covering all the costs of this ride themselves.
Related posts:
What we will do with your money and the return you can expect on your investment (8,400%)
Why Nigel and Bill are cycling for ColaLife
More about the ride and the riders
Regular readers will know that we are very interested in the SODIS process which uses clear plastic bottles and sunlight to kill the pathogens in water and make it safe to drink (previous blogs on SODIS).
Well here is another innovative use for PET bottles which I was pointed to today through Twitter. A sun pipe to bring light into the home. It’s nothing to do with ColaLife but I thought I just had to note it.
I have experience of sun pipes – I had two installed to bring light into the middle of a mid-terrace house in London. They obviously only work in daylight but it is incredible what little light you need for them to be effective. The ones I had fitted cost several hundred pounds to buy and install. This approach is classic ‘bottom of the pyramid’ thinking and innovation. Take a basic idea and re-engineer it cutting out all the costs you possibly can so that those living on a dollar or two a day can benefit. This is what we need to do with the ADK.
Last Thursday I highlighted a public webinar that then took place on Friday (8/4/11) to discuss the report on the ‘Poverty Footprinting’ work undertaken by SABMiller, Coca-Cola and Oxfam in Zambia and El Salvador. ‘Poverty Footprinting’ is a technique being used by Oxfam to assess the impacts big businesses have on the local communities they operate in. It doesn’t just look at the business’s operation in isolation but explores the impacts up and down the value chain; in the businesses that supply inputs, through to the businesses and individuals that distribute and sell the products.
Anyway, you can now re-run the webinar and the Q&A session here. This will be of particular interest to those who were unable to join the over-subscribed webinar on Friday.
It is a coincidence that SABMiller and Coca-Cola have come together with Oxfam to do this work in Zambia (and El Salvador) at a time when we will be working with SABMiller (with the support of Coca-Cola) in Zambia on the ColaLife pilot.
In the Q&A session, Afzaal Malik from Coca-Cola gave a really good summary of how big businesses are seeing the development landscape changing; they are moving away from pure philanthropy (although this still happens) to the leveraging of their business activities to have a bigger impact on the development of the communities in which they operate (40:36)*. This is not new and it’s been happening to an increasing extent over the last 5 years or so. We were struck by what Afzaal Malik from Coca-Cola said in the Q&A session when he was talking about the new kind of relationships big businesses were developing with stakeholders from all sectors to achieve this. He said:
And in this process you will need healthy doses of humility, lots of flexibility and patience and you need to look at these partnerships in the long term.
This certainly matches with our experience sitting on the NGO side of the fence!
We were also pleased that Andy Wales was able to mention our plans for collaborartion with SABMiller on the ColaLife pilot in such positive terms (35:00)*.
There is quite an active Twitter stream around this webinar as I type this. If you want to join in, the hashtag is #PovertyFootprint.
The full report can be downloaded here (PDF, 3.9 MB)
* Numbers in brackets are the points in the video in mins:secs. Drag the slider to these points to move straight to them.
It all started with a tweet. This one:
Two weeks ago I was driving through Lusaka listening to Claudia Hammond’s ‘Health Check’ programme on the BBC World Service which transmits on FM in Lusaka. At the end of the programme Claudia said she was on Twitter, so I tweeted.
A series of exchanges resulted in me pitching up at Bush House at 11am yesterday (4/11/10) for an interview with Claudia. When I got there Euan Wilmshurst from Coca-Cola was there as well. This is the convening power of the BBC in action. Coincidentally, the last time Euan and I met face to face was for the BBC iPM interview that went out earlier this year on 25/4/10. It was this interview that made me realise that my decision, 6 months earlier, that I needed to give up my job to make ColaLife happen was the right one.
Claudia Hammond (presenter) and Paula McGrath (producer) of Health Check give the AidPod the once over
The interview will go out on Monday on 648 MW in the UK at the following times: 10:30; 15:30; 20:30 and on Tuesday at 01:30 on Radio 4. It will also be available on listen again on the Health Check page on the BBC website.
Do a search on ColaLife in Amazon and this book pops up. Why? Because its author, Chris Arnold, is a ColaLife supporter and writes about ColaLife. He says:
FROM HUMANITARISM TO PLANETARISM
<snip>
The power of the web for good and bad is just amazing. What starts as a small group can soon become massive and so influential big brands have to listen. One example is ColaLife, created by Simon Berry. It all started as an idea on Facebook, and exploded. Berry has been trying to get Coke to use their vast distribution network to help deliver life-saving medications and information in developing countries. This concept, ColaLife, could help save hundreds of thousands of people (www.colalife.org).
Amusingly, one of Coke’s great straplines, when translated into one of the Chinese languages, reads ‘ Bring your dead back to life’. Now, more seriously, brands like Coke, Pepsi (and many other mass distributed products) could soon be the new saviours, preventing millions of deaths from water-related illnesses. According to WaterAid, one billion people lack access to clean water and every day 5,000 children die as a result of drinking dirty water. In many regions of the world, people have to walk miles to get water. Water that’s often dirty, polluted or infected with disease, and it’s often shared with animals.
Quoting Simon Berry: ‘Our idea is that Coca-Cola could use their distribution channels (which are amazing in developing countries) to distribute rehydration salts to the people that need them desperately. Maybe by dedicating one compartment in every 10 crates as a life as the “lifesaving compartment”? ‘ Gives new meaning to Coke’s famous straplines ‘Life tastes good’ and ‘Coke adds life’.
WaterAid is not a great fan of distributing rehydration salts for treating diarrhoea (it’s a short-term solution) preferring to educate people about hygeine and putting in proper sanitation and clean water supplies. But Simon’s campaign is gathering a mass of supporters by using the power of Web 2.0 and social networking to spread the word and create a digital community of activists. (Almost 4,000 joined the open group on Facebook).
This case illustrates how one person can very quickly gain enough momentum to be as powerful as a major charity in applying pressure to large corporations. This is a new concept of David and Goliath. Whereas the old model placed charities as the champions of a particular issue or cause, now any passionate, driven member of the public can soon gather a force behind them and push for change. There is some evidence that issue [web]sites are gaining more followers than traditional charity sites in the States. Could common causes replace charitable organisations as the main influencers in the future?
We are very grateful to Chris for drawing attention to our cause but inevitably things have moved on:
[Neither ColaLife nor Simon Berry benefit from sales of this book].
Spot the ColaLife imagery in the collage above
It was announced last night (17/2/10) that ColaLife is through to the semi-finals of the global Buckminster Fuller Challenge. This is brilliant news. It’s exactly the sort of recognition we need and yet again raises the credibility of the ColaLife concept. It’s time to move on from the very positive campaigning stage to actually make trials of ColaLife happen. Every single ColaLife supporter needs to take some of the credit for this. We would not have got anywhere without the huge numbers of supporters on the Facebook Page, the Facebook Group, Flickr, Twitter and . . . . It was ColaLife supporter, Maria Ana, who alerted us to the challenge – thanks Maria Ana.
The Buckminster Fuller website says:
The thirty semi-finalists currently under consideration have undergone a rigorous review including an interview with the individual or team behind the strategy. They were advanced from a pool of 215 entries that were submitted in Fall 2009. The titles, entrants names and a 50 word summary of their project is listed below.
Congratulations to all of the Semi-Finalists and everyone who entered this year’s Buckminster Fuller Challenge. Those who have opted to have their work published will be featured in the Idea Index in March.
The press release is here (PDF).
So what do you think of our chances?
In true ColaLife style we will now increase our expectations. We entered the Buckminster Fuller Challenge with the aim of getting this far. Now we want to win!
This is the Christmas eCard that went out all Trovus users this week. Thank you again to the Trovus team for their support for ColaLife.
The links are:
Facebook
ColaLife Website
Twitter
The people behind Trovus are long established supporters of ColaLife and their Trovus Revelations service keeps us informed of who is visiting this website which is pretty handy when you are running a campaign!
