Zambia Diary | Day 10 | Workshop day

Left to right: Me, ColaLife; Charles, Society for Family Health; Ian, Medical Stores Limited; Victor, Transaid; Ruth, Keepers Zambia Association

Today was another rewarding day. We were up early to load up all the workshop resources which included two crates of Coca-Cola with AidPods in them and we set off for Hodi – the Zambian NGO who were hosting the workshop. After setting up the room with quotes from people we’d met all around the walls, I called Panji at SABMiller as previously arranged. We’d not spoken before but even so he answered the call with “Hello Simon”, so he’d obviously been briefed and had my number in his phone which was very reassuring. We arranged to meet at 10am tomorrow.

We were very pleased with the way the workshop went and together we re-worked the scenario we’d been using as a conversation starter based on the experience of the workshop attendees and got agreement that Jane and I should lead on writing up a trial plan based on this in consultation with the workshop participants. The scenario we ended up with was a distribution mechanism that would work through commercial channels and would benefit from the lessons learnt from the current project underway to distribute anti-malarial drugs and rapid diagnosis kits by a similar means. This is the outcome we had been hoping for.

While workshop was in progress, our contact in the Ministry of Health had arranged a meeting with one of the Directors there and this will take place at 2:30 tomorrow.

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