Don Nutbeam
Professor of Public Health
University of Southampton

Professor Nutbeam said:

“ColaLife offers a creative solution to the distribution problems that prevent the delivery of proven solutions to enduring health problems among some of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable populations. For Coca-Cola it represents an outstanding example of corporate social responsibility.”

Professor Nutbeam has been a long term supporter of ColaLife. You will see from this video that he shares the ColaLife philosophy and our attitude to big business. When this was filmed (June 2009), Don was Honourary Professor at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Sydney. He talks about ColaLife in the context of ‘making the most of what is already there’ to improve public health, or ‘going with the grain’. He says:

“I’ve been working . . . with a campaign to try to persuade Coca-Cola who have frankly the best distribution network in Africa to use their distribution network to deliver essential medicines. They can deliver Coca-Cola to pretty much any corner of Africa and we in public health seem to be miserable at achieving the same goal so why not try to work with the grain.”

Brilliant.

Professor Nutbeam’s summary boigraphy reads like this:

DON NUTBEAM PhD FFPH

Don Nutbeam is currently Vice-Chancellor of the University of Southampton and a Professor of Public Health. His career has spanned positions in universities, government, health services and an independent research institute. From 2003-9 he was in senior academic roles in the University of Sydney, and prior to this he was Head of Public Health in the UK Department of Health. His research interests include public health intervention research in schools and communities as well as studies of health literacy, and adolescent health behaviour. He has published widely on these topics. He has substantial international experience in both developing and developed countries, working as an advisor and consultant for the World Health Organisation over a 20 year period, and as consultant and team leader in projects for the World Bank.

Onwards and upwards.

David and the students filmed the Q&A which will appear shortly on the ColaLife FAQ page.

This first slideshow shows the AidPod in the hands of our client group. Children!

And these are the first photos of the Mark III AidPod in a Coca-Cola crate in aremote part of Tanzania. OK, it’s only a model AidPod but it’s a step in the right direction.

We live in a global community. On Wednesday afternoon (24/2/10) I will pop into the CNN Studios near Oxford Circus in London to be interviewed live by Stan Grant who will be in Abu Dhabi delivering CNN’s Prism programme. Prism is the half-hour news programme, broadcast from Sunday to Thursday at 9pm to fall in line with the Middle Eastern working week. The interview will be around the question “Is business better at delivering aid?”

What an earth am I going to say?

TEDx comes to Warwick University for the second time on 6 March 2010 and will be held in the Maths and Stats Building. 400 people are expected and I will be telling the ColaLife story. You can book tickets here. Other speakers include:

This is very exciting. Watch the video to get the full story. Basically, a team at the Jenner Institute have come up with a way to store the active ingredients of a vaccine on a small square membrane which does not need to be stored in a fridge. Traditionally, vaccines need to be refrigerated from the time they are produced to the moment they are injected. This causes huge logistical problems as the whole of the distribution system needs to be kept cold. In practice this means that thousands and thousands of children do not get the vaccines they need.

At the moment the ColaLife idea can do nothing to address this problem because the AidPods would be exposed to the elements and could get very hot. So AidPods could not be used to distribute traditional vaccines. But they could be used to distribute these new ‘heat-stable vaccines’. In the video Dr Matt Jennings claims that vaccines produced in this way are stable for 6 months at temperatures of 45°C which is incredible.

‘Currently vaccines need to be stored in a fridge or freezer,’ explains lead author Dr Matt Cottingham of the Jenner Institute at the University of Oxford. ‘That means you need a clinic with a nurse, a fridge and an electricity supply, and refrigeration lorries for distribution.

‘If you could ship vaccines at normal temperatures, you would greatly reduce cost and hugely improve access to vaccines,’ he says. ‘You could even picture someone with a backpack taking vaccine doses on a bike into remote villages.’

‘We’ve shown that a very simple way of heat-stabilising vaccines works for two viruses that are being used as the basis for novel vaccines in development,’ says principal investigator Professor Adrian Hill of Oxford University. ‘This is so exciting scientifically because these viruses are fragile. If we are able to stabilise these, other vaccines are likely to be easier.’

They are now looking to put a commercial strategy in place for the development of the technology.

Although it’s a minority, it’s a very vocal and assertive minority, who would not work with Coca-Cola under any circumstances and are therefore totally against what we are trying to achieve here.

But ColaLife supporters don’t think like this. They are able to separate Coca-Cola’s  global brand and their image of the company, from the people who work for it and those who associate with it. You shouldn’t write off people and the skills they have just because you have issues with the company they work for. As Sarah says, there will be some Coca-Cola employees who will be very happy on hearing the news of ColaLife’s progress through the Buckminster Fuller Challenge.

If you’re part of that angry minority - and you’re still reading - consider another reason you shouldn’t disengage:  Coca-Cola’s employees and associates excel at many things, especially at distribution. These are skills that the non-Coca-Cola world desperately needs. NGOs and health authorities have been trying to distribute simple medicines for decades and have not cracked the problem. So why not work with other human beings who have?

And when people say they despise Coca-Cola, who are they talking about exactly?

Image credit: treehugger.com	Image credit: Tielman Nieuwoudt	Image credit: Simon Berry

Do they mean the marketing and strategy whizzes in Altanta or the man with the hand cart taking the Coca-Cola that last mile so that he can send his children to school and feed his family? Or the woman, like Grace, running her own Coca-Cola distribution business?

The human race has solved many problems but those that remain are going to need new approaches and unlikely partnerships. ColaLife aspires to be the glue that holds some of these unlikely partnerships together.

It was announced last night (17/2/10) that ColaLife is through to the semi-finals of the global Buckminster Fuller Challenge. This is brilliant news. It’s  exactly the sort of recognition we need and yet again raises the credibility of the ColaLife concept. It’s time to move on from the very positive campaigning stage to actually make trials of ColaLife  happen. Every single ColaLife supporter needs to take some of the credit for this. We would not have got anywhere without the huge numbers of supporters on the Facebook Page, the Facebook Group, Flickr, Twitter and . . . . It was ColaLife supporter, Maria Ana, who alerted us to the challenge - thanks Maria Ana.

The Buckminster Fuller website says:

The thirty semi-finalists currently under consideration have undergone a rigorous review including an interview with the individual or team behind the strategy. They were advanced from a pool of 215 entries that were submitted in Fall 2009. The titles, entrants names and a 50 word summary of their project is listed below.

Congratulations to all of the Semi-Finalists and everyone who entered this year’s Buckminster Fuller Challenge. Those who have opted to have their work published will be featured in the Idea Index in March.

The press release is here (PDF).

So what do you think of our chances?

In true ColaLife style we will now increase our expectations. We entered the Buckminster Fuller Challenge with the aim of getting this far. Now we want to win!

In May 2008 I shared the idea on Facebook and look what’s happened. Thousands of people have convened around the idea and discussed it and challenged it and the idea has got better and better. We have gone from this:

Removing one bottle from every 10 crates and replacing it with a cylinder full of Oral Rehydration Salts (ORS) to this:

A wedge-shaped container that uses the un-used space in a crate and carries whatever ’social products’ are needed in a local area, as determined by the local public health experts.

So openness has convened thousands of people around the idea. This has improved the idea, given us more and more confidence in the idea and got Coca-Cola’s attention. We just need some action now!