ColaLife, Buzzbnk, World Economic Forum on Africa and Lusaka

Buzzbnk 1st milestoneFirst of all, a big thank you is due to all those who put their hands in their pockets last week to take us to the first Buzzbnk milestone. This releases the £3,000 donated so far through the Buzzbnk towards our next trip to Zambia to tie up the loose ends with local partners on the pilot plan. This will be used as the basis of our approach to funders for the pilot. We hope to get the latest draft of the plan to partners on Sunday before we depart for Cape Town. Cape Town? Why Cape Town?

Back in March I was invited by Africa Investor to contribute to the Corporate Foundations Roundtable for Social Entrepreneurship in Africa. Initially, I was asked to contribute to the session on partnerships but things got better. I’ve now been asked to pitch ColaLife to the impact investors at the conference. The roundtable will run on the day before the World Economic Forum on Africa (WEF).

On receipt of this news, I reached out to influential ColaLife supporters to see if we could raise the profile of ColaLife through the many other activities that will be underway alongside the WEF. The result is a busy week in Cape Town which I will be reporting on through this blog.

So far so good, but alas, there was no funding to get us to Cape Town. Again the feelers went out and we are grateful to SABMiller (London) for the funding to enable us to travel to Cape Town and to The World’s Best Hotels for providing us with accommodation while we are there.

I’ll be blogging during the trip and will be reinstating the audioBoo podcast diary. More details to follow.