Zambia, here we come

This time tomorrow Jane and I will be in the air on our way to Lusaka, Zambia on the overnight flight and we have an exciting two weeks ahead of us. We will be meeting with the ‘Who’s Who’ of the public health and drug logistics sectors of Zambia. In addition, we will be meeting with Dr Prashant Yadav, Professor of Supply Chain Management at the MIT-Zaragoza International Logistics Center. We had a really helpful telephone conference with Prashant earlier in the year which really helped refine our thinking and inspired these scenarios. Prashant just happens to be visiting Lusaka at the same time as us.

Until late last night (Friday), staff at SABMiller UK were working to set up the conditions that will enable us to meet with SABMiller Zambia which is the final piece in the jigsaw. SABMiller are the bottler of Coca-Cola in Zambia.

The plan is to meet people face to face and then to run a workshop on 20 October (week 2) to bring as many of the players as possible together to look at the scope and scale of a possible future trial of the ColaLife concept. We also plan to ‘get out’ a bit and talk to people outside Lusaka, especially mothers.

I will blog what I can, when I can. I’m not sure what our connectivity will be like at this point. I’m also going to experiment with an audio diary. The lovely people at audioBoo have set things up so that I can record feelings, thoughts and the odd interview (hopefully) during the day and then upload them at the end of the day.

This is the RSS feed for the audio diary: 

And this is the podcast feed: 

Or you can listen to the episodes on audioBoo here: Zambia Diary on audioBoo

Here’s the first episode of the Zambia Audio Diary. Nothing too heavy. Just a snapshot of thoughts and feelings:

🙂