A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of being interviewed by one of my childhood heros; the Radio Caroline and BBC DJ Johnnie Walker MBE about ColaLife.

As a completely independent initiative from his work with the BBC and other broadcasters, Johnnie puts together The Alternative Johnnie Walker Podcasts which, and I quote, . . .

. . . open the door to an alternative view of the world featuring inspirational and radical thinkers dedicated to improving life on Planet Earth

The ColaLife interview was published on 14 May as Podcast #34 and you can listen to it here.

We regret that Grand Challenges Canada, a key funder, was not mentioned in this interview.

To do this proceed as follows:

1. Download the Kalomo Retailers (4 KB) and Katete Retailers (4 KB) KMZ files (right-click on these links and select Save As…)
   
2. Launch Google Earth
3. Select File>Open and open the KMZ files
4. Once opened they will appear in the left hand pane in Google Earth
   
5. Double-click on the filename and Google earth will zoom in on the area where our retailers are located
6. Click on the pointer next to the filename to display the names of the individual retailers
   
7. Double-click on the retailer name to zoom in on the retailer and display a picture of the shop keeper

If you don’t have Google Earth, you can download it here.

Enjoy!

[This virtual tour was compiled from original data and images by Rohit Ramchandani and Simon Berry and is published here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licence >>details]

Despite all of this there was no disguising the enthusiasm for the Kit Yamoyo product especially among the under 5s in the group who, despite the company, were behaving quite normally: crying, gurgling, needing to be fed, just as usual.

It was brilliant to see this little boy reach enthusiastically for the ORS (note the blur in the photo!) that he’d seen being mixed and wanted to try. He was then helped to drink some and when it was taken away wanted more. Then when it was hidden away he wanted to know where it had gone and wanted more.

Now this is behaviour very significant. ORS is pretty unpalatable stuff and in its raw form can even induce vomiting especially if it is not mixed correctly. The Kit Yamoyo ORS on the other hand is coloured and looks tasty and it is flavoured – so it much more palatable. Children see it mixed and want to try it – which is half the battle. I have to admit that the flavour doesn’t quite match up to what the colour promises but it is closer in taste to Fanta than salt water.

After Kagoro we drove on to Chindwale where things were a bit more relaxed – at this point we were down to 3 white faces(!) – and we spoke with a group of women who had all used Kit Yamoyo. There was universal approval of the kit and some moving stories – but bear in mind the white face effect. One woman said that she thought she’d lost her child and was she was crying at the prospect but Kit Yamoyo saved him.

There was universal concern that the distribution of vouchers had stopped, because at this time of the year, as they said, they have no cash and won’t have until they get paid for the crops that they are now harvesting. We pushed and pushed them to try to understand what they would do in this situation if their child got diarrhoea now. Some could generate cash, if they had to, by selling a chicken for example but these were a small minority. For the rest it seems that the local retailer, pictured below, would come under a lot a pressure to give credit.

I came away thinking that in many remote rural areas we will have to continue to subsidise the kit in one way or another – thanks to our Global Giving supporters we already have funds to subsidise nearly 10,000 kits.

For those of you worried about the white bias, please be reassured that the 6-month survey, which was carried out by Zambian enumerators, will soon be available and will shed a more objective light on these observations.

Regular readers will know Ali & Lizzie, the couple who are cycling from Cairo to Cape Town for ColaLife (and two other charities close to their hearts). Well here is some sad news about a very determined woman. This is a quoted straight from their blog. The original post is here.

Last Leg – Lost Leg
As a group of riders, we have all come here for different reasons, but there is one goal which nearly all riders aspire to at the start of the trip – the elusive E.F.I (Every F@*!ing Inch). Achieving E.F.I (and never seeing the inside of the truck) is said to be a matter of good health, a robust bike, a strong mind and, most importantly, luck. The tour is a machine which waits for nobody, the miles are already set, the camps picked, the water pick ups arranged. This preordained and unrelenting pace hovers over all of us and puts a pressure on riders who might otherwise flex their plans to listen to the needs of their body; typically just under 25% of any group achieve E.F.I.

After a serious bout of vomiting and diarrhoea Ali lost his E.F.I in Ethiopia, spending a day and a half in the truck. Other than one further day off in Botswana with a fever he has ridden on through all other ailments since that point. Until Windhoek, Lizzie was one of just four girls who retained the status pushing through each kilometre day after day. With one last stretch from Windhoek to Cape Town the end almost in touching distance. However, it was not to be.
Two days prior to Windhoek a bad saddle sore had developed and a fever was taking hold, with her temperature over 40 degrees. A group of fellow riders, knowing her commitment to the challenge, heroically formed a group around her, setting a steady slow pace and sheltering her from the wind, they pulled her the 160km in to the rest day. A trip to hospital and a malaria test later, it transpired that the saddle sore was the cause of the fever and a small abscess was removed under local anaesthetic. Having thought that her E.F.I was in tatters it was with pleasant surprise that Lizzie tentatively placed her battered behind on her saddle to ride out of Windhoek and in to the desert.

By lunch the bubble was burst. If we give Lizzie’s left thigh a value of 1, then after the 60km to lunch her right thigh was at least equal to, if not greater than 1.5 (and not due to a growth of heavily defined muscle as we joked about before we set off). The medic recommended it was time to get off her bike. We’ll spare you the in’s and out of all that followed, but a return to Windhoek, six days in hospital on an IV drip of antibiotics, an operation under general anaesthetic to remove a further abscess and a gathering of dead tissue and the insertion of some material in the leg to ‘drain’ it later, things are finally moving in the right direction.
Having missed out on the majority of Namibia, Lizzie rejoined the group at the border with South Africa. With two deep open wounds it looks unlikely that she’ll be able to ride the remaining miles to Cape Town. Testament to her commitment to the tour, her first words upon waking from the anaesthetic were ‘can I get back on my bike?’

Unsurprisingly, not being able to ride the bike changes the very nature of the trip. It’s hard being around camp and listening to people discussing the intricacies of a road which I haven’t ridden. Seeeing the sunrise bumping up and down out the window of the truck is nothing like pedalling along next to it and feeling the warmth increase on your skin as it thaws out your fingers. But there are also positives – not doing 6 – 8 hours of exercise everyday means that I am left with a substantially greater amount of brain power at the end of the day, enabling me to actually string a sentence together and admire and absorb what I am seeing. This is not the end of the trip as I envisaged, but it doesn’t in any way erode the satisfaction I have over what I have achieved.

Thanks Lizzie. And Ali . . . keep on pedalling!

The vouchers have done two things for us:

1. They ensured that there was a demand for the kits in the remote rural communities so that we could test our hypothesis: if you can generate a demand for a product and make it profitable to fulfil that demand the product will get there, through existing supply channels. With more than 20,000 Kit Yamoyo sales in six months, I think we can claim to have proved this hypothesis.

2. They enabled mothers and care-givers to try this new product for the first time at no cost.

Vouchers were a key part of the marketing done by community-based promoters during the first 6 months of our 12 month Kit Yamoyo distribution plan, but  we stopped releasing any more vouchers on 31 March. This means that our approach to marketing needed to change. We had thought long and hard about this: how would the promoters encourage our remote rural customers to buy, without the incentive of the vouchers? Our replacement ‘secret weapon’ is our existing customers: the mothers and carers who have used the Kit Yamoyo.

Now, when promoters speak with a group of mothers in our target communities, there will be at least 3 or 4 women who have used Kit Yamoyo. As far as we know, they have all had positive experiences. Word of mouth is the most positive marketing force in these rural communities, and these women are our product advocates. Our promoters will be identifying these women in the groups they meet and will be inviting them to tell their peers about Kit Yamoyo and what did for their child. We believe that this approach will be very effective – it chimes well with ‘Bottom of the Pyramid’ good practice. But as ever, we will be able to measure this as the trial progresses.

As well as a change of promotional strategy during face-to-face events, we are also improving advertising and branding at the retailer level. At the start of the trial we used paper posters. These looked very attractive but a lot of shopkeepers put them up outside their shop, and they did not stand up very well to the wind and rain. So, for Phase 2, we have gone to the expense of printing the posters onto ABS board. These were produced locally to a very high standard but the supplier forgot to drill the corners. So: it was back to the kitchen table, where so much ColaLife development has taken place over the last 5 years!

They started pedalling on 4 January 2013 and they are still pedalling. They are in Nambia as I type this. You can follow their progress on their blog: Blazing Saddles 2013.

It’s a very happy coincidence that their route through Zambia took them through both of our trial districts and also through Lusaka where Jane and I live. So we had 3 parties to arrange! The first one in Katete – designed to be ‘The Mother Of All Coke Stops’ – was scuppered when, rather uncharacteristically, a riot kicked off. I blogged about that here. The second was a sedate affair in our little house. The afternoon was spent around the communal pool, and hooked into the WiFi, followed by dinner with the Deputy High Commissioner and our great friend and ColaLife supporter William Hoyle who happened to be travelling through Lusaka at the time. Among other things, William helped support our participation in the making of The Cola Road, the ColaLife documentary.

The third ‘party’ took place in our second trial district: Kalomo. Lizzie and Ali start pedalling each day at first light (around 6:30am) and usually reach their night stop at around 2:30pm. Their night stop on 10 April was about 20km north of Kalomo town. So, my Zambian colleagues, Charlotte and Moses, and I went to pick them up to take them to see the work their efforts were helping to fund. We went to our nearest retailer – it took about an hour to get there! We met Eviness Kalyangile at her shop – and some mothers and promoters who had gathered to meet the cyclists and tell of their experiences with Kit Yamoyo. I think I will let this video that Lizzie and Ali put together tell the story:

View on YouTube

About the trip, Ali and Lizzie said:

Speaking with the women who had travelled to the store to meet with us and tell us their stories was one of the most powerful experiences which we have had on this trip. It was wonderful to observe the dynamic in the group as the women giggled and teased one another, at times humming their response to a question in unison with a communal ‘uh huh’ as they hitched their children up on their waists and wiped their faces. Their reports on the impact of Kit Yamoyo being available to them through the local retailers was nothing but positive.

Ali and Lizzie, thanks for choosing to support ColaLife.

This decision is going to save even more lives – people need to know that diarrhoea, a minor inconvenience in more developed countries, is the second biggest killer of under 5 children in sub-Saharan Africa – and this will help.

Jane has quickly put this press release together which covers the main points we’d like to say.

Onwards and upwards!

PRESS RELEASE
DATE: 10 April 2013
CONTACTS: Simon Berry, Jane Berry
jane@colalife.org
simon@colalife.org

ColaLife’s Kit Yamoyo

Wins Product Design of the Year 2013

A ‘kitchen table’ concept, now saving children’s lives in Africa, has been selected by The Design Museum as Product Design of the Year 2013, beating off competition such as the Olympic Cauldron. It must be the first time that an anti-diarrhoea kit takes centre stage as a design icon, standing alongside a renovated tower block in Paris, a film on fashion and a UK Government website.

The concept stems from a question that bothered UK Aid worker Simon Berry in Zambia, in 1988: Coca-Cola is available even in remote villages yet simple medicines to treat the second biggest childhood killer, diarrhoea, are not[1]. Why?

When Simon re-visited the idea in 2008, his wife Jane suggested making use of the unused space in a cola crate to carry an anti-diarrhoea kit. By 2009, Simon and Jane had set up the ColaLife charity[2], and, from their kitchen table – using Social Media – won the goodwill of Coca-Cola to explore the idea. Funded by an award from UnLtd[3] in 2010, they gave up their jobs to bring together some of the best minds from big business, academia and non-profits: supply chain experts, health experts, logistics and design[4]. These included Rohit Ramchandani, now ColaLife’s Public Health Advisor. Visits to Zambia were funded by Simon’s Boulogne-Biarritz Cycle ride[5] in September 2010.

After a chance meeting at a presentation, packaging expert PI Global[6] took the brief to design a robust pack to carry WHO recommended diarrhoea treatments[7], a clever plastic container which, vitally, helps illiterate mothers in rural Africa accurately measure water for the child-sized sachets of Oral Rehydration Salts it provides. Also containing Zinc to help prevent diarrhoea recurring and soap for hand-washing, the pack – dubbed ‘AidPod’ by the BBC[8] – acts as a cup and a re-sealable storage vessel[9]. Most important, ‘Kit Yamoyo’ was designed with input from African mothers and carers, most of whom live many hours’ walk from a health centre. In Zambia, where a trial is underway[10], independent rural retailers are buying it by the boxful[11], to carry out to their small shops in remote villages, because it’s designed to yield a profit – just like Coca-Cola does. These retailers, trained by the project, have, in the last 6 months, bought over 20,000 Kit Yamoyo, to sell at ZMK5 each (just under $1). The most promising retailers are not only serving their own community but making a gross profit on this new product of $25 to $60 per month. In rural Zambia, that feeds a family.

As Simon and Jane, who are now in Zambia managing the project, agree: “We started with the space in the crate, but much more important for the long term is the space in the market. The millions of the world’s poor want good, affordable design that meets their needs. They don’t have much to spend and want to spend it well, ideally close to where they live. Good design is not only for the rich: the poor of the world deserve the dignity of attention[12], from designers and from corporates as well as from the public sector and aid agencies.”

DfID is the trial’s majority funder and Justine Greening, the UK’s International Development Secretary, said: “I warmly congratulate ColaLife for this tremendous achievement.  Their innovative use of Coke’s distribution system to deliver vital supplies is helping to save countless lives. It is a fantastic example of how we can work hand in hand with business to help alleviate the suffering of the world’s poorest people.”

Further information

1. Images and instructions to download can be found here: www.colalife.org/gallery
2. Simon and Jane Berry will be at The Design Museum to collect their award on 16/04/13 and in London on 17/04/13.
3. Further information on the people involved in ColaLife at http://www.colalife.org/about/
4. Find us on Facebook http://facebook.com/colalife
5. Twitter address @colalife

Some of our Kit Yamoyo promoters had come into town to tell the cyclists about their work and a couple of mothers had come to tell them how Kit Yamoyo had helped them. Katete is a quiet place – a small rural town on the main road through to Lusaka. So no-one had trouble on their mind. And why should they? At any time in living memory, our plan would have worked a treat. But not on Thursday morning this week.

At 8am I rode out to meet the cyclists on their way in, and all was well. We met up about 8 km outside the town. An hour or so later the news reached us: there was full scale riot in the town, fires lit across the road and serious looting. Our wholesaler was one of the targets of the looting – which was ferocious. All the windows of his shop were smashed and the steel door torn off its hinges. His shop was completely looted – there was not a single item left on the shelves.

The Kit Yamoyo wholesaler in Katete, Yahya Collector, surveys the damage to his shop. Note the smashed windows and the door ripped off its hinges and the torn Kit Yamoyo poster

The riot was sparked by a particularly brutal murder of a 19 year old orphan girl. The people are unhappy about the lack of the progress in the investigation. Rumours spread, and they rounded on the businesses in the town, who are mostly of Indian heritage. When ‘mobocracy’ takes over in any culture there is always a tendency to blame minorities. This was no exception. This is a real injustice and particularly where Yahya is concerned. He is totally integrated into the community and speaks the local language. He is a mini development project in his own right supporting local causes including the local hospital and the sinking of wells in rural communities. He always responds to local appeals for help. He employs the guardian of the girl who was murdered and supported him with the funeral and in dealing with the aftermath of the murder. But none of this mattered when ‘mobocracy’ took over.

As soon as things calmed down, the cohort of 50 cyclists were ushered through town quickly and were on their way. But I was left feeling very disturbed; this goes totally against the Zambia and Zambians I have experienced.

As I drove out of Katete at 8am the next day all the mess around Yahya’s shop had been cleared away. The glass had been replaced and was sparkling in the sun like new glass does. The door was back on its hinges. Yahya was back in business. I have huge respect for this man.

As our Kits are currently only on sale to registered retailers, they were stored behind the shop in another room – and as far as we know the 1,800 Kits in stock are safe.

I really hope this was a one-off incident – feelings are obviously still running very high, and this is worrying.

Here is the welcoming ‘committee’ that our cyclists missed. Damn!

I love this picture. Note the woman, third from the right, with her orange t-shirt, orange detail in her chitenge and orange beads

Three hours into the drive I got a call from a number my phone didn’t recognise. It was Ali, as in Ali and Lizzie who are cycling from Cairo to Cape Town and raising money for ColaLife in the process. “Hi Simon, it’s Ali. We’ve arrived in Chipata and this is my Zambia number.”

Chipata is in Zambia on the border with Malawi. They will set out from there at 6:15am tomorrow (4/4/13) and so should arrive in Katete at about 9:00am. My plan is to ride out to meet them and accompany them back into Katete. From Ali & Lizzie’s excellent blog I have worked out that ‘Coke Stops’ are a bit of a feature of this mammoth ride so we are organising the Mother of all Coke Stops for them at the Coca-Cola wholesaler in Katete. They will be able to drink all the Coke they want!

Regular readers will know that the Kit Yamoyos are sold through the Coca-Cola wholesaler in both of the districts we are working in. So our fund raisers will be able to see the wholesaler part of the business. We are hoping that one or two of our promoters will pitch up to greet Ali & Lizzie and tell them about their work. The cyclists may be lucky and bump into one of our registered retailers too.

On my arrival in Katete this afternoon I was greeted by the lovely Keepers Zambia Foundation staff – Justina and Elias – and we caught up on the news. They then invited me to observe their fourth live radio broadcast from the local radio station across the road. Not very much to look at from the outside but very hi-tech inside.

Preparing for the broadcast | Queuing the Kit Yamoyo Song for broadcast

These broadcasts are a key part of the phase 2 marketing strategy now that there are no more vouchers being given out and care-givers will have to pay cash or use the 50% Special Offer contained in each kit.

The broadcast was in the local language so I didn’t get all of the detail – just the overview. The main points made were:

1. Make sure you take the Zinc tablets for 10 days*
2. Start taking the Zinc and the ORS at the same time. When the diarrhoea stops, stop the ORS but carry on with the Zinc*
3. No more vouchers will be distributed but you can:
   1. Get 50% off using the Special Offer
   2. Simply buy for cash
4. If you have a voucher you haven’t used yet, it is still valid until 31 August
5. And finally . . . the cyclists got a mention!

If you’d like to sponsor Ali & Lizzie you can do that here.

The broadcast was topped and tailed with the Kit Yamoyo Song done for us by the local reggae/dancehall sensation T-Boy

Listen on SoundCloud

* The midline survey which is just being completed now threw up two issues which need to be worked on in the coming months:

1. Many mothers and care-givers are not giving the full course of Zinc tablets. They stop giving the Zinc when the diarrhoea stops. This is a challenge rather than a concern – children just won’t get the full benefit of the Zinc if they don’t take it for 10 days
2. Some mothers are giving the ORS first and then, when the diarrhoea stops, starting on the Zinc. This is incorrect but not harmful. The Zinc and the ORS should be started at the same time.