Just before Christmas this independent academic analysis of our work was published by the prestigious IBM Center for The Business of Government. The work that went into this report was led by Paulo Savaget, a Gates Scholar completing his PhD at Cambridge University, who is now Assistant Professor at the University of Durham and a Researcher at the University of Oxford. The co-authors are Cassi Henderson and Steve Evans.
Paulo visited us in Zambia for several weeks as part of his research and it is interesting to read an independent academic’s analysis of what we did and how we did it. It was Jane, primarily, who supported Paulo in this work and introduced him to her ‘11 As of Access‘ paradigm – building out from the three or four “As of Access” often discussed in access to medicines. This paradigm is referenced prominently in the report:
In the report, ColaLife is presented as a ‘catalyst’, which brought together existing systems and processes to solve the problem of access to the WHO/UNICEF recommended treatment for diarrhoea – ORS and Zinc – in a way that is now self-sustaining in Zambia.
There is a strong emphasis on the value chain that ColaLife joined up, developed and made resilient.
The authors used a fostering analogy, which is a new way of looking at the way we operated. They describe ‘the catalyst’ as the ‘foster parent of the value chain’ and summarised this in the figure below.
The report will interest anyone who wants an independent assessment of our work in Zambia and an analysis of how to go about replicating our approach elsewhere.
We wish to thank the authors for choosing us as a case study and the IBM Center for The Business of Government for covering the costs of producing the report.
