Zambia Diary | Day 4 | Contact with SABMiller

The big news from today is that I have made contact with the right person in SABMiller and we are going to meet on Saturday. We were secretly getting a bit concerned about this!

The person we will be meeting is Chibamba Kanyama who is the Corporate Affairs Director at Zambian Breweries, a subsidiary of SABMiller. However, Chibamba is much more than Corporate Affairs Director: he writes a weekly column for one of the national newspapers on business affairs; is passionate about supporting young people in enterprise; is an author and blogs here. Jane thinks we might get on!

Today we had just one meeting: with John Msimuko, the Executive Director of Keepers Zambia Foundation (KZF). KZF have been pioneering the work on SODIS here in Zambia and I featured a video of theirs in a previous post. It turns out that John knows 3 people who were on the same team as me when Jane and I lived and worked worked in Mpika: Dutch Gibson, Carl Berryman and Ian Goldman. Dutch is still here in Zambia and runs The Conservation Unit. Ian Goldman is a member of our virtual advisory board and now works in the President’s Office in South Africa. John is keen to participate in the workshop next week which is great; KZF will be the one of two purely Zambian NGOs at the workshop.

The rest of the day has been spent preparing for next week’s workshop. I hope people come because it’s going to be a cracker! Really looking forward to it myself! We’ve also been trying to consolidate the learning and insights gathered so far.

I’ve said it before, but people here have been so generous with their networks and this is a case in point. We met with Dr Bonface Fundafunda at the Ministry of Health – a huge (as in very tall) but gentle man (in all senses) who knows everybody. He suggested that a person we should speak to is the local Crown Agents representative (they have the management contract for Medical Stores Ltd). Straight after our meeting with Bonface, we called Mulenga from Crown Agents – another very generous networker. He met up with us straight away, gave us loads of insights, and suggested we speak with a doctor contact of his in Mpika (where we used to live). Anyway, before I could say ‘thank you’ he’s got said doctor on the phone and he’s passing the phone to me. It’s Dr Nachi Kuanda on the other end . . . . the grand daugher of Dr Kenneth Kaunda who was the Zambian President when we lived here! Unfortunately we are not going to have time to visit Mpika this time but next time we will! I look forward to having tea with Dr Kaunda in Mpika in the near future!

You can read the whole of the Zambian Diary here and the audio diary is here.