Success: WHO adds co-packaged ORS and zinc to its Essential Medicines List
In July 2019, WHO added co-packaged ORS and Zinc to their Model Essential Medicines List as the treatment for diarrhoea. This should be a game changer. ColaLife is working to help cascade this global change down to national Essential Medicines Lists.
Video: The ColaLife Story - October 2010 to May 2017
Click to view this 'milestone' TED-style presentation of ColaLife's work to date...
Our strategy for impact
ColaLife is not like most other organisations. We are working on a solvable problem and so we are planning… [more]
A reminder of our open source approach – get free access to our trial results and associated learning
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Help us help mothers help themselves
Please contribute to our Voucher Fund and introduce a mother to the life-saving Kit Yamoyo
Regulatory Approvals for Kit Yamoyo in Zambia
ColaLife has arranged for the registration of Kit Yamoyo and its various components in Zambia through… [more]
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 3 decades since Oral Rehydration Salts were discovered, more than a decade since the protective effect of Zinc was proven, 99% of diarrhoea cases are not treated with ORS and Zinc and diarrhoea is still the world's second biggest killer of young children.
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.
ColaLife is about disruptive innovation - small changes that will make a big, self-sustaining improvement.
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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) 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 change […]
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 – looking again at each component including the packaging. Our key objective in this review was […]
Top 10 achievements in 2018
2009’s top 10 | 2010’s top 10 | 2011’s top 10 | 2012’s top 10 | 2013’s top 10 2014’s top 10 | 2015’s top 10 | 2016’s top 10 | 2017’s top 10 2018 saw us move from self-sustaining development in Zambia towards the globalisation of our work. The cover page of our application to the World Health […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. The WHO Essential Medicines […]
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 […]
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 […]
