Proudly Zambian Awards and Kit Yamoyo

We are very proud to announce that Pharmanova’s Kit Yamoyo came second in the Proudly Zambian Product of the Year awards in Lusaka on Friday (24-Nov-2023). This is a highly contested, prestigious award. Congratulations to Pharmanova’s CEO, Mohammed Umar… … and to the whole Kit Yamoyo team at Pharmanova. You can read more about the […]

Clear Solutions: a new player in the drive to increase ORS and Zinc coverage

I’m very excited to draw your attention to a new player in the drive to increase ORS and Zinc coverage: Clear Solutions. Clear Solutions came out of the process I wrote about back in February: UNIQUE OPPORTUNITY: Would you like to be supported to set up a new NGO to improve access to co-packaged ORS […]

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 […]

Final Visit to Zambia – Week 4

Sunday 2-Jul-2023 to Tuesday 11-Jul-2023 (10 days) The main focus of this week was the ‘Kit Yamoyo Story’ event with Roma Chilengi, Health Advisor the the President, as guest of honour. This ran on Thursday (6-Jul-2023). It was an energising occasion and great success. It is reported on separately here. However, we were able to […]

ORS, Zinc and co-pack prices in Lusaka, Zambia

On our last full day in Zambia (10-Jul-2023) we decided to clear the last thing on the MUST DO list and investigate retail prices for ORS, Zinc and co-packaged ORS and Zinc. As time was short, we decided to conduct an informal ‘Mystery Shopper’ exercise: as we drove from one commitment to another, we stopped […]

Event: The Kit Yamoyo Story

A key objective of our final trip to Zambia was to use it make some noise around Kit Yamoyo, to celebrate its legacy and reaffirm the commitment of the government and private sector to the product. The planning for this began back in Mar-2023 when I asked James Thornton, who had been the British High […]

So how was the Kit Yamoyo Legacy achieved?

In a recent post I tried to quantify the Kit Yamoyo Legacy and indicated that I’d follow-up with a post on how we think this legacy was achieved. We think it boils down to eight principles and furthermore we think that if ‘foreign bodies’ (international NGOs and aid agencies) followed these principles, we would see […]

Final Visit to Zambia – Week 3

Sunday 25-Jun-2023 to Saturday 1-Jul-2023 This week we released ourselves from our self-imposed COVID lockdown. We started going out again and meetings were back on. The big event of the week was an all-day, hands-on workshop at BongoHive. BongoHive is a very exciting local organisation. A hub for technology, innovation and entrepreneurship. Current themes are […]

Final Visit to Zambia – Week 2

Sunday 18-Jun-2023 to Saturday 24-Jun-2023 We decided to go into self-imposed lockdown this week having tested positive for COVID on Saturday (17-Jun-2023). All the meetings we had lined up for the week, bar one, were one-to-one which we were able to rearrange. The exception was an invitation to speak to the nutrition Cooperating Partners (donors) […]

Quantifying the Kit Yamoyo Legacy

Donors fund many projects in less developed countries. This is a good thing. I am proud as a UK tax payer that some of the tax I pay goes to help support less developed countries. The problem is that many projects are established with the best intentions but fail to deliver long term benefits and […]