Video: The ColaLife Story - October 2010 to May 2017
Click to view this 'milestone' TED-style presentation of ColaLife's work to date...
Regulatory Approvals for Kit Yamoyo in Zambia
ColaLife has arranged for the registration of Kit Yamoyo and its various components in Zambia through… [more]
Help us help mothers help themselves
Please contribute to our Voucher Fund and introduce a mother to the life-saving Kit Yamoyo
A reminder of our open source approach – get free access to our trial results and associated learning
Request access to ColaLife's findings and learning
Our strategy for impact
ColaLife is not like most other organisations. We are working on a solvable problem and so we are planning… [more]
Kit Yamoyo packaging - looking to the future
ColaLife's Kit Yamoyo has really captured the world's imagination. Users in poor villages in Zambia,… [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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>>where we've got to
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Going off-piste! ORS sachet size
The skiers amongst you will know that there are big risks when going off-piste but the rewards are usually wonderful unless something awful happens. This is the territory we are in right now with the trial, as we find out, from both customers and world experts, what they think would work best. In our original […]
Demand-driven distribution chains – Step 1: Create a desirable product
I have written before about supply-led versus demand-driven distribution systems. ColaLife is seeking to demonstrate that you can establish a demand-driven system which will pull a public health commodity into remote rural communities in Zambia. The tweet-sized version of this hypothesis goes like this: “You can get a product or service to anywhere in the […]
Seven of the headline findings from the ColaLife trial in Zambia
colalife.org/openaccess 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: […]
How is ColaLife’s approach transformational?
ColaLife is not the only organisation working to use the private sector to deliver health products and services. Others include PSI, DKT and donor-funded programmes like SHOPS Plus. So why is our approach seen as transformational? The transformational nature of our work is based on combining the following: Focussing on WANT not NEED. Combining product […]
Gladys Imasiku explains how the Kit Yamoyo has affected her work at Kalonda Rural Health Centre
I have reported before that staff at the rural health centres within the trial areas are saying that fewer mothers are reporting to them with children with diarrhoea. In short, diarrhoea cases have gone down leaving staff to deal with more complex issues. This is of course anecdotal at the moment but we hope to have […]
Getting the syphon going
We are at a very exciting – albeit nerve-wracking – place just now right at the start of the trial. The situation we were in a few weeks ago, after our visit to see Chief Siachitema, is a really good metaphor for the situation we find ourselves in right now. Let me explain. As we […]
How Coca-Cola’s distribution system works
We’ve learnt a lot over the last two years or so about how the Coca-Cola distribution systems work and we thought it would useful to summarise our current state of knowledge so that others can fill any gaps or correct any misconceptions. Please comment. The first thing to realise is that Coca-Cola is a sort […]
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 […]
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. […]
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) 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 […]
