Improving Access to Life-saving Medicines: What We’ve Learned from Coca-Cola
Speaker: Simon Berry, Founder/CEO, ColaLife.
Over recent decades many have marveled at the ubiquity of Coca-Cola, which seems to be everywhere. A handful of people have linked this with the challenge we face getting simple, lifesaving medicines to children and mothers in remote rural areas in developing countries and have suggested what lessons might be learned. Two people, Simon and Jane Berry, made it their mission to see if they could actually deliver life-saving medicine through the Coca-Cola system – they called this mission “ColaLife.” In this speech, Simon will describe the 2-year project to design and deliver an anti-diarrhea kit to remote rural areas in Zambia which included a rigorous 12-month trial (designed by Rohit Ramchandani) that measured the use of ORS and Zinc for the treatment of diarrhea in the home. He described the transition to national scale-up in Zambia, which he and Jane now manage. The impacts of the trial were impressive and the implications are huge.