Colalife

Model AidPod in Coca-Cola crate

ColaLife
Formation	2009
Type	Company Limited by Guarantee (non-profit)
Headquarters	Rugby, Warwickshire
Official languages	English
Founder	Simon Berry
Staff	3
Website	www.colalife.org

ColaLife is a company limited by Guarantee (non-profit) which aims to leverage the distribution network of The Coca-Cola Company (TCCC) to get simple medicines, such as rehydration salts, and information on how to use them, to the most remote areas in developing countries. The ColaLife Company has its origin in the ColaLife movement, and is currently on the way to become a registered charity in the United Kingdom.

History

1988 - 2008

In 1988, Simon Berry was working on the British Aid Programme in NE Zambia, conscious that while he could buy a bottle of Coke anywhere, one in every five children under the age of five died in these areas through simple causes such as dehydration through diarrhea.^[1] So he had the idea that Coca-Cola’s distribution muscle could be used to distribute oral rehydration salts in developing countries. At that time, with only a telex machine available, he struggled to get any attention for his idea.

2008 until today

In 2008 Coca-Cola’s participation at the Business Call To Action event re-kindled the idea. The active work for ColaLife was started with a first blog post in the founder’s personal Blog. This Blog post did not attract Coca-Cola’s attention, so Berry decided to try to get the idea debated on the BBC Radio 4 programme, iPM.

In-parallel, first attempts to communicate with Coca-Cola failed, because it was not possible to get past the first line in Coca-Cola’s CSR department. Social media technologies such as Facebook, Flickr and Twitter, helped get more people behind the idea quickly.

On May 21, 2008, Berry was interviewed by Eddie Mair for the iPM Programme. The interview was featured on May 24. Three days before the broadcast, the iPM team received a written statement from Coca-Cola’s then Global Director for Stakeholder Relations, Salvatore Gabola, that he would be happy to have a chat on this subject with Simon in the near future.^[2] Eddie Mair coined the term Aidpod in his interview with Simon Berry broadcast on 27.12.2008.^[3]

This was the start of an ongoing relationship between the ColaLife campaign and TCCC. Since this first contact with TCCC and the first report about ColaLife on the BBC, the campaign has won supporters from all around the world. In 2010, Simon Berry and his wife Jane decided to work full-time for ColaLife to move it from a campaign into an implementation phase.

Virtual advisory board

ColaLife is recruiting high profile members to its Virtual Advisory Board, to lend expertise, credence and contacts. Current members are:

• Professor Don Nutbeam, Professor of Public Health and Vice Chancellor, Southampton University.
• Dr Ian Goldman, an African community development specialist, specialising in community-driven development, now working with South Africa's Presidency on improving the effectiveness of government.
• Dr Prashant Yadav, Director of Healthcare Research Initiative at the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan.

Concept

Model AidPod with Social Products

The ColaLife concept is based on three facts:

1. You can buy a bottle of Coca-Cola almost anywhere in the world, even in the most remote regions of developing countries.
2. In these same places one in five children die before their fifth birthday from preventable causes. Most die from dehydration from diarrhea.
3. The child mortality figures have not changed significantly for at least 3 decades which would indicate that current initiatives are not working as well as they should.^[1]

ColaLife aims to use Coca-Cola’s and other companies’ distribution channels, which offer deep, local penetration in developing countries, to save lives, particularly children’s, to improve supply chains for health products, especially for the so-called Last Mile. The AidPod concept proposes filling unused space between crated bottles, to carry social products such as oral rehydration salts, vitamin A, water purification tablets and other locally determined items to remote areas. An AidPod is a wedge-shaped container that fits inside the unused space between the necks of the bottles in a crate of Coca-Cola. To be sustainable, ColaLife proposes models where local micro-enterprises, which make money out of collecting, distributing and selling crates of Coca-Cola, can also make money by delivering Aidpods. In practice, an SMS-based system could be implemented to:

1. Confirm delivery
2. Trigger micro-payments to the person who confirms delivery and to the person who delivered the AidPod

Awards and funding

Year	Description	Comment
2008	The New Statesman’s New Media Awards	nominated [4]
2010	Buckminster Fuller Challenge	one of 30 semi-finalists[5] and selected for the Ideas Bank
2010	UnLtd Award for Social Entrepreneurs	Awarded £15,000 towards living expenses to work full-time to move ColaLife to the implementation phase[6]

References

1. ^ ^{a b} "Diarrhoea:Why children are still dying and what can be done" (PDF). World Health Organization. p. 1. http://whqlibdoc.who.int/publications/2009/9789241598415_eng.pdf. Retrieved 2010-08-11. 
2. ^ "Is Coca-Cola it?". BBC. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/ipm/2008/05/is_cocacola_it.shtml. 
3. ^ "On this week's iPM: coke, games and 'cell' phones". http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/ipm/2008/12/show_notes_cola_games_and_cell.shtml. 
4. ^ "New Media 2008 nominations". New Statesman. http://www.newstatesman.com/nma/nma2008/entry/200806010001. 
5. ^ "The 2010 Buckminster Fuller Challenge Semi-Finalists". The Buckminster Fuller Institute. http://challenge.bfi.org/30_Semi_Finalists. 
6. ^ "UnLtd Level 2 Award Winners" (PDF). http://unltd.org.uk/download/Level2_AW_Spring2010.pdf. 

External links

• ColaLife website
• ColaLife blog
• ColaLife - Facebook page
• ColaLife - Flickr
• ColaLife TV on YouTube
• Latest ColaLife Progress Report
• Brandeins Article March 2010 Only in German.
• Can Coca-Cola Save Children's Lives asks Simon Berry. By Kate Andrews. Inhabitat, 2008.
• Facebook, Coca-Cola and Medical Aid in Africa By Hesseltje S. van Goor, Worldchanging, 2008.
• Can Coke Save Lives? By Christine Lepisto. TreeHugger. 2008.
• ColaLife: la red social que nacio en Facebook y sensibilizo a Coca-Cola By Matías Infante. El Mercurio, 2008.
• The ColaLife Campaign Collectivelens.com, 2008.
• Medical Aid Via Coke & Facebook by Dan Gould. PSFK.com, 2008.
• Could Coke be a live saver in the Third World? By Chris Arnold. BrandRepublic.com, 2008.
• 'Maverick 101 By E.B. Boyd, Common Ground Magazine, 2008.