Editor's note: This post was written by Andrea Boston, freelance writer for Ashoka Changemakers.
ColaLife, the project that ingeniously piggybacks preventative medicines on deliveries of Coca-Cola, is using its Changemakers changeshop to show how it is gaining traction after emerging as one three winners of the Making More Health: Achieving Individual, Family and Community Well-Being competition.
ColaLife’s latest changeshop impact report states that Honda’s Dream Factory selected founder Simon Berry as one of nine “Cultural Engineers” who are spearheading gamechanging initiatives. Honda even donated a vehicle worth $40,000 to help ColaLife kick off its trial run in Zambia.
In the Making More Health Changemakers competition, ColaLife received a $10,000 prize for its imaginative idea of packing and shipping basic medicines to remote locations using the empty spaces left in Coca-Cola bottle crates. While Coca-Cola is delivered and available to virtually everyone in the world, preventative medicines can be hard to come by in developing countries, Berry notes.
ColaLife’s simple Anti-Diarrhea Kits (ADKs) are filled with supplements and soap that have the potential to reverse a tragic reality in many countries where one-in-five children die before the age of five, often from avoidable ailments such as dehydration and diarrhea. ColaLife began its initial work in Zambia this year, and soon residents in rural areas will receive their usual shipments of Coke, along with necessary doses of preventative medicines tucked neatly within the bottles’ crates.
News outlets and supporters have been contacting ColaLife to learn about, and help further, its mission. Partners Simon and Jane Berry are keeping the Changemakers community updated on the latest developments through their changeshop growth tracker. The design duo even uploaded a video interview that details the project’s beginnings and some of their most recent successes.
Although the Honda vehicle has not arrived yet, according to Berry, the ColaLife project has continued to scale-up its efforts since winning the Changemakers competition in December. It recently completed packaging prototypes, tentatively called “AidPods,” and a focus group is scheduled to test the packaging and branding with local mothers, the packets’ intended users, in April or May.
“We are in the set-up phase for a 12-month trial, which will begin in September 2012,” Simon Berry said. “Our objective is to generate data that others can have confidence in.
“This will lead, we hope, to others taking up the innovations within ColaLife and incorporating them into their own policies and programs. We want the ideas behind ColaLife to become mainstream.”
ColaLife is one of many initiatives that you can follow in real time on Changemakers.com. Visit the ColaLife changeshop to read more about this groundbreaking work, and find out how you can help bring ColaLife to communities around the world.
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