ColaLife

Coca-Cola seems to get everywhere in developing countries, yet simple life-saving medicines don’t. Why?
That conundrum, that affront to a fair chance at life for children, gave us our name. We don’t apologise for the difficult question it raises.
Because, over four decades since Oral Rehydration Salts were discovered and two decades since the protective effect of Zinc was proven, 85% of diarrhoea cases are not treated with ORS and Zinc and diarrhoea is still the world's second biggest killer of young children. Killing around 500,000 a year - that's one a minute.
This tells us that current efforts to improve access are not sufficient and are working too slowly. ColaLife exists to transform access to diarrhoea treatment and is doing so with a sense of urgency. Our focus has become the acceleration of the uptake of the 2019 global recommendation that ORS and Zinc should be co-packaged. To enable this we have worked with others to establish the ORS/Zinc Co-pack Alliance (ORSZCA) which has its own web presence.
ColaLife is about disruptive innovation - small changes that will make a big, self-sustaining improvement.
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ColaLife trial highlights published by the BMJ

We are pleased to announce that the highlights of the ColaLife trial have now been published as a peer-reviewed paper by the BMJ in the BMJ’s Special Supplement on Social innovations in health. The title of the paper is: Emulating value-chains of fast-moving consumer goods to improve uptake of co-packaged ORS and zinc for childhood […]

The Kit Yamoyo is a hit

During the field trip on Thursday (8/11/12) the feedback we got on the Kit Yamoyo was 100% positive. When people were asked if the Kit Yamoyo was good the response wasn’t ‘Yes’ but ‘Maningi’ meaning ‘very’. However, I’m always suspicious that people say what you want to hear. Before our trip out on Friday morning, […]

ColaLife to close down at the end of 2023

It has always been the view of our board of trustees and the ColaLife co-founders that ColaLife should not outlive its usefulness. We’ve achieved far more than we ever anticipated. And the changes we’ve brought about now sit with mainstream organisations much more powerful than we could ever be. So, ColaLife will close down gracefully […]

It’s the value chain stupid!

Private sector people with supply chain experience will chuckle when they read this. It will be so obvious to them. But it’s not obvious to the rest of us. This is just one example of how public private partnerships are so helpful. What’s obvious to someone from the private sector may not be obvious to […]

Ceniarth agree to reschedule support to ColaLife

At the end of 2019, we started the final, 2-year, phase of our work supported by Ceniarth, reported here: Ceniarth to support ColaLife for two more years. As for many health initiatives, in early 2020, COVID intervened and we’ve had to revise our plans several times. We’re delighted to report that on 22-Apr-22, Ceniarth agreed […]

Success: WHO adds co-packaged ORS and Zinc to its Essential Medicines List

Our application* to get co-packaged ORS and zinc on the WHO Essential Medicines List has been successful. This is game-changer. It moves ColaLife’s work out of the ‘innovation box’ into the mainstream of global children’s public health – with better designed, easier-to-dispense diarrhoea treatment available for sick children – potentially everywhere. A summary of the […]

Zambian Government tender for 250,000 ORS/Zinc co-packs

The evidence just keeps on coming: the work we have done in Zambia, to transform access to the internationally recommended treatment for diarrhoea, will be self-sustaining. Click here for more blog posts on this self-sustaining theme. The latest evidence emerged last Monday (7-May-18) when this notice (on the right) was published in Zambia’s national newspapers. […]

What is self-sustaining development?

The Kit Yamoyo diarrhoea treatment kit under production in Zambia for the local Zambian market. The kit was designed and the local market developed using one-off donor funding. It is very common to hear the term “sustainable development” in international development discussions. But what does it mean? The phrase can be used interchangeably, to mean […]

Why branding is important for people living in poverty

Image credit: tweeted by Amy Nadine Dix @amyndix Thanks to our friends at Maternova (@maternova) for bringing this image to my attention just as I was thinking: “I must to a blog post about branding and poverty”. So, why is it that brands are so important to everyone, including those living in poverty? Why is […]

The ColaLife Playbook launches today (28-Oct-20)

After more than two years of development the ColaLife Playbook launches today as a living, online, interactive document that is open to all. Anyone can access it here: bit.ly/colalifeplaybook. ColaLife set out to help transform access to diarrhoea treatment in Zambia to save lives and reduce stunting. Now we want to assist others to do […]

Emulating Value Chains of Consumer Goods to Save Lives

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 […]

Dashboards as a motivational tool

We started using Android tablets during support visits to Kit Yamoyo retailers in mid-2014 (see Take a Tablet). This did two things. Firstly, it helped standardise these visits; to make sure that key things were checked and asked: Was the product displayed well? Did the retailer have a poster displayed? Secondly, it collected key information […]

How the ColaLife trial findings have influenced the design of Kit Yamoyo

The reasons for doing the ColaLife Operational Trial in Zambia (COTZ) were: to generate robust evidence of what works and what doesn’t; learn and improve. Following the trial, we did a root and branch review of the Kit Yamoyo design together with our manufacturing partner and other experts – looking again at each component including the […]

Supply chain theory in 140 characters

One of the good things about Twitter is that in concentrates the mind. Can you get your thought, your hypothesis, your joke or witticism down to just 140 characters? As we’ve got deeper and deeper into the ColaLife project a hypothesis has been developing about supply chains. I’ve been trying to get this hypothesis down to 140 […]

Latest figures on the use of zinc for diarrhoea treatment in Zambia

Zambia: Commercially branded co-packaged ORS and zinc – Kit Yamoyo (left) | Government branded co-packaged ORS and zinc (right) The latest Demographic & Health Survey (DHS, 2019) has just been published for Zambia. These surveys are undertaken every five years under the DHS Program. The report just published for Zambia (PDF 1.4MB) shows a dramatic […]