The downside of the commitment to blog in an open and transparent way is that you have to be the purveyor of bad news as well as good. Here’s some bad news.
On Wednesday night at 9:30pm Zambia time we got a call from Grand Challenges Canada to say that our bid to them for scale-up funding had not been approved by their Investment Committee (IC). This leaves a 1 million dollar hole in our 3-year scale-up plan. As well as being a significant amount of money it’s strategically important too, as a large proportion of this money was ear-marked for undertaking operational research to capture and share the learning that we will generate during the scale-up process.
We are grateful to Grand Challenges Canada for their support for the trial – they contributed $CAD100,000.
Given the results of our trial (see below) and GCC’s aims we thought we were a great fit for the follow-on scale-up funding which supports:
Bold ideas and integrated innovation – the co-ordinated application of scientific/technological, social and business innovation – with a strong likelihood of achieving substantial and measurable health gains in an under-resourced setting
So just when we thought it was “safe” to take some leave(!) we find ourselves searching for another funding partner. Help and suggestions in this regard would be gratefully received.
Finally, we are also grateful for all the enthusiastic support we have received from GCC on social media over the last couple of years. Here’s a sample:
The key headlines from the ColaLife Operational Trial in Zambia (COTZ) – Sep-12 to Aug-13:
Request access to ColaLife’s Findings and Learning
The data contained in this blog post: Findings in this blog post are unpublished and based on initial analysis of data from the ColaLife Operational Trial in Zambia (COTZ). Final calculations may vary and will be published in peer reviewed literature in due course. In the interim, the following citation may be used: Ramchandani, R. et al. (2014). ColaLife Operational Trial Zambia (COTZ) Evaluation. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore. Related correspondence should be sent to Rohit Ramchandani (roramcha@jhsph.edu) and copied to Simon Berry (simon@colalife.org).
Did GCC give a reason for their refusal, or was it just a case of them having limited resources themselves, and deciding to prioritise causes less well-funded and with greater potential than Colalife? It does seem like something of a self-defeating volte-face after all getting colalife to this stage.
Hi Luke
The reason is not totally clear. They obviously can’t take all the projects they support initially to the scale-up phase of funding. However, we appeared not to fit the ‘models of scale-up/sustainability’ they like to see. I think there was a problem with our open source approach to this.
Our strategy is not to sustain ColaLife as another NGO beyond its useful life. We want the product concept and its end-to-end value chain to be sustainable through the adoption of what were learning by those with the long term responsibility for child health in different countries.
This is an unusual approach but experience has told us that the organisations needed to implement the ColaLife model are already in place, they just need to work together in a slightly different way.