ColaLife Participation Ride 2011 | Call for expressions of interest
January 2, 2011 by Simon Berry
In September last year three of us cycled from Boulogne to Biarritz (B2B) to raise money for ColaLife. We raised nearly £6,000 and this money is being used to fund the trips to Zambia to work with partners there to develop the plan for a pilot of ColaLife. We will build on the fun and success of last year’s ride and are planning a second ride between 2-11 September 2011, this time from Calais to Copenhagen (C2C - there is a pattern here!). We will be cycling for 8 days and will cover about 700 miles. There will be places for five people and our fund-raising target will be £2,000 each. The plan will be to catch a ferry to Calais in the late afternoon on Friday 2 September and arrive in Copenhagen on Saturday, 10 September. We will then probably return by air. I will be leading the ride again. Nigel Bolding, of The World’s Best Hotels, will also be participating again and will be organising the accommodation. And again, Jane Berry will be leading on the planning of the route but will not be participating.
This is a call for expressions of interest in participating - no commitment at this stage. Full details will be issued over the next few weeks. If you’d like to receive more details please either comment on this post or email me: simon [at] colalife [dot] org
Top 10 achievements for 2010
December 30, 2010 by Simon Berry
1. Field trip to Zambia
We travelled to Zambia in October and met with 45 people and 15 organisations. We had a great reception and a workshop of key stakeholders produced the basis of the plan for a pilot of the ColaLife concept in 2011.
>> more on the plan
>> the Zambia audio diary on audioBoo
2. The Participation Ride: Boulogne to Biarritz
The trip to Zambia was funded by supporters who sponsored three of us to cycle to ride from Boulogne to Biarritz in September. Around £6,000 was donated and all of this went to ColaLife.
3. Hooking up with experts
Experts from all over the world have been very generous with their time and support in 2010. These include Dr Prashant Yadav, Dr Don Nutbeam, Dr Ian Goldman, Phillip Lee MP and Rohit Ramchandani. We also received a message of support from the Rt Hon Hilary Benn MP. These people and others have helped us refine the ColaLife concept over the year and make the idea even stronger.
4. TEDx presentations
I have given a dozen or so presentations on ColaLife during the year including three TEDx events: Warwick, Youth Berlin and Berlin. TEDx Berlin was the highlight. Coincidentally, it was the 1000th TEDx event and the event opened with ColaLife (see the video below). There was an audience of more that 400 people with 200 on the waiting list. The presentation has been viewed more than 775 times on YouTube:
A fellow speaker at TEDx Berlin was Dr Peter Lovatt, Psychologist & Dancer who gave a great presentation which had the whole audience on their feet and dancing on the spot. Peter kindly agreed to join us for our Christmas Reception (see below) where he gave us ‘The ColaLife Dance”.
5. UnLtd award
In October 2009 I committed to give up employment in June 2010 to focus on ColaLife full time to try and move ColaLife from a ‘cool campaign’ to the implementation of a pilot on the ground somewhere in Africa. This transition was made so much easier when Jane and I won a joint award of £15,000 to cover living expenses from UnLtd.
>> more on the UnLtd Award
6. Dennis Tretter our first intern
As Jane and I went full-time on ColaLife in June, we were joined by an ambitious, adventurous young man from Germany. We had been in contact with Dennis Tretter during the first part of the year and he arranged an Erasmus grant to cover his living expenses and joined us in June and stayed right through to October. Dennis was a great help as we worked to get the implementation phase of ColaLife underway. He helped with the early research including into the possible countries for a ColaLife pilot. He also got our DIY accounts system working and maintained this through to October. It was great that Dennis could come back for the ColaLife Christmas Reception on 1 December - see below. Thanks for your support Dennis!
7. The Christmas Reception and ColaLife Dance
I was fortunate to be invited by Steve Moore to his summer drinks reception and then to meet Tom Lee. Tom was really taken by the ColaLife idea and has became a great supporter and friend and he, and his wife Claire, have put in a lot effort spreading the ColaLife word through their extensive networks. Then, in late September, Tom offered to volunteer for ColaLife full time until the end of the year. The result was the ColaLife Christmas Reception which Tom master-minded and organised. Thanks Tom! The event was a great success in its own right but also generated a huge amount of associated interest and conversations which are still reverberating through the system. It also provided an opportunity for Coca-Cola and SABMiller to demonstrate their support in an appropriately low-key way. Coca-Cola provided, er, Coca-Cola and SABMiller provided Peroni beer. It was generally agreed that the highlight of the evening was “The ColaLife Dance” given to us by Peter Lovatt. We are grateful to Sand Box who allowed to use their space in the British Film Institute.
>> Full report on the Christmas 2010 Reception
>> Christmas Reception | Gandalf & the Hobbit discuss ColaLife
8. Honda’s Cultural Engineers
It was honour to be selected by Honda as a ‘Cultural Engineer‘ and participate with 19 others in an exhibition and appear in a book around the launch of the new Honda CR-Z Hybrid car. The Dream Factory exhibition was in Brick Lane and spanned several days. It attracted several hundred people on the opening night and was great publicity for ColaLife. Thank you Honda and to our friends at Amplify!
9. SODIS developments
In 2010 we were introduced to the Solar Water Disinfection technique (SODIS) which must be one of the best kept secrets in the developing world. It is a technique that uses 6 hours of sunshine to disinfect water in clear plastic bottles. We have partnered with the global SODIS experts in Switzerland (EAWAG) to look at the best way to incorporate SODIS into the AidPod Mother’s Kit. Options for this include: making the AidPod itself into a SODIS device or refining an existing prototype SODIS bag so that it can be put inside the AidPod. It may be that we use a bag for the proposed pilot and develop the SODIS AidPod for larger scale roll-out.
>> SODIS posts on the ColaLife blog
10. Radio interviews
Once again, ColaLife featured on the BBC in 2010. This time it was on the BBC World Service on the HealthCheck programme hosted by Claudia Hammond. Euan Wilmshurst from the Coca-Cola also participated in this interview.
BBC World Service ColaLife Interview | 11 Nov 2010 by colalife
>> More on this interview on the blog
However, the radio interview that had the biggest impact, in terms of subsequent visitors to the website, was the one that went out on World Vision Report on 11 December 2010:
World Vision Report ColaLife Interview | 11 Dec 2010 by colalife
>> More on this interview on the blog
A big thank you to everyone who has supported ColaLife throughout 2010. We are making great progress. We hope that we’ll be able to report that a pilot is underway by this time next year!
Onwards and upwards.
Does weight matter?
December 24, 2010 by Simon Berry
Our best guess of the gross weight of an AidPod Mother’s Kit is between 110-150g. So a crate with five AidPod kits in it would weigh an extra 550-750g. Is this extra weight an issue?
The research we have done indicates that the transport cost of the ‘last mile’ in the remote parts of developing countries is related more to volume than weight. If you want to put a box or crate on a bus you are charged for the box or crate not for its weight. If you’re on a bicycle you put as many crates on as you can. Again, it’s the number of crates that’s the crucial thing rather than how much they weigh.
But, in any case, five AidPods would add a maximum of 750g to the weight of the crate which already weighs around 16.5kg.
In Zambia, the 300ml bottles are being replaced by new ‘ultralight’ ones (the shorter one in the picture). The old bottles weigh 429g, the new one weighs much less at 303g. So a crate of new bottles weighs around 3kg less than a crate of the old bottles. A crate of new bottles with five AidPod Mother’s Kits in it will still be more than 2kg less than a crate with older bottles with no AidPods in it. The details of this are given below for the record.
A cap weighs approximately: 2g
In Zambia, the most common crate, with reinforced sides weighs approximately: 1800g
A crate full of the older 300ml bottles full of Coca-Cola would weigh:
Crate: 1,800g
Older bottles: 24 x 429 = 10,296g
Caps: 24 x 2 = 48g
Coca-Cola: 24 x 300 = 7,200g
TOTAL: 19,344g
A crate full of the newer 300ml bottles full of Coca-Cola would weigh:
Crate: 1,800g
New bottles: 24 x 303 = 7,272g
Caps: 24 x 2 = 48g
Coca-Cola: 24 x 300 = 7,200g
TOTAL: 16,320g
The DIFFERENCE between the old and new bottle formats: 19,344 - 16,320 = 3,024g
WEIGHT OF 5 AIDPOD MOTHER’S KITS = 750g (max)
How Coca-Cola’s distribution system works
December 19, 2010 by Simon Berry
We’ve learnt a lot over the last two years or so about how the Coca-Cola distribution systems work and we thought it would useful to summarise our current state of knowledge so that others can fill any gaps or correct any misconceptions. Please comment.
Coca-Cola headquarters, Atlanta. Image credit: Lee Coursey
The first thing to realise is that Coca-Cola is a sort of franchised operation. Most people refer to Cola-Cola as if it were a single entity and it is not. You have the people in Atlanta who take care of the brand and overall marketing, product development and so on, but then each country has its own bottler, or more likely, bottlers. Although Coca-Cola may have an interest in some of these bottling operations they are generally separate legal entities. Having said that, many, in their current form, are totally dependent on Coca-Cola as they do not bottle anything else. However, this is not always the case. In Zambia, for example, Zambian Breweries, a wholly owned subsidiary of SABMiller, is the sole bottler of Coca-Cola in the country, and also bottle beer.
Within each country, the same pattern of devolution is seen when it comes to distribution. In Africa, in our experience, we have seen two sorts of distribution model.
A delivery to the Kisima MDC, Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. Image credit: Simon Berry
There is the much trumpeted Manual Distribution Centre (MDC) model which operates within densely populated areas eg around large towns and cities. The MDCs are independent businesses with links to their local bottler who may provide technical support (eg sales training and general support) and credit to the MDCs. The owners of MDCs generally own the bottles and crates they use. They advertise a ‘liquid only’ wholesale price. First time customers (without crates and empty bottles to return) will have to pay for the bottles and crates they take away as well as the liquid they contain. MDCs can be solely dedicated to the sale of Coca-Cola but some are wholesalers of other products as well (eg bottled beer). MDCs are often run from shipping containers painted red. They receive a delivery of Coca-Cola once a week or thereabouts. Typically a Coca-Cola lorry leaving the bottler will visit one MDC which will take the entire load. Distribution from the MDCs is mostly ‘manual’ with crates being loaded on to handcarts, bicycles etc.
The relationship between the MDCs and the bottler is similar to that between the bottlers and Coca-Cola Altanta - although the MDCs are legally independent businesses, many depend on the local Coca-Cola bottler for their business to succeed.
The loading of handcarts in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. Image credit: Tielman Nieuwoudt
The MDC model works very well in densely populated areas where manual onward distribution is feasible due to the short distances involved.
The MDC model is not the system that gets Coca-Cola to very remote areas, as we’ve pointed out previously. So what does? It appears that it is ‘the pull of the Coca-Cola brand’ that is responsible for getting Coca-Cola to the most remote parts of developing countries. There seem to be two parts to this:
- People all over the world, even in the most remote parts of developing countries, demand Coca-Cola. This is a function of the marketing efforts which emanate from Atlanta and are then cascaded in each territory (eg in the UK);
- There is money to made by everyone who is involved in getting the product to these people.
Left: A lorry leaving the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. Image credit: Simon Berry
Right: Coca-Cola being transported by bicycle. Image credit: Owner unknown
The lorry leaving the Coca-Cola bottling plant only goes so far. Beyond the lorry’s reach, an army of entrepreneurs take over, to carry the product the last few miles to the most remote points on the planet. At a recent Business Action for Africa event William Asiko, President, Coca-Cola Africa Foundation and Chair, Business Action for Africa told a story of a recent trip he made to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Coca-Cola has no official presence in the DRC. Despite this when he touched down he was able to buy a cold can of Coca-Cola.
In Zambia, ColaLife wants to emulate this system for AidPod Mother’s Kits (Diarrhoea Treatment Kits packed in AidPods). The basis of our plan to try to do this is described here.
Meet Patrick Delaney and his ValuLamp
December 17, 2010 by Simon Berry
One of the brilliant things about my work at the moment is that I get contacted by people doing really innovative things which may or may not have anything to do with ColaLife. Patrick Delaney and his ValuLamp is a case in point. Patrick is now selling these in Nicaragua and this is how they work. The lamp is recharged using a mini solar panel and so it needs a rechargeable battery. When I think of rechargeable batteries I think of the AA or AAA variety. But the most ubiquitous rechargeable battery in developing countries is the one that goes into Nokia mobile phones so Patrick’s lamp uses one of those. To avoid high import duties and allow for local assembly the lamp has just three parts: the printed circuit board with the LEDs on it, the back and the front! These components clip together so there is no need for screws. For transportation the lamp (or components) fit in the space behind the cells in solar panel frame.
Brilliant. There are more details about the ValuLamp here.
I can’t wait until we have brought ColaLife ‘to market’.
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Go on! Do the ColaLife Dance!
What others are saying about ColaLife- SUCUPIRA. Semeando idéias.: Rede de distribuição da Coca-cola é usada para causas mais nobres
- TEDxBerlin 11/15/10 – Simon Berry – Colalife | VaryTV
- YouTube - TEDxWarwick - Simon Berry - ColaLife: An Idea Worth Spreading
- Look outside of what you know | Lucyinnovation's Blog
- Elisa's Green Scene: ColaLife: How big companies can help make big change...with a nudge
- ColaLife on Flickr
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