ARTICLE - COKE-AID SUPPLY CHAIN

GLOBAL VOICES: COKE'S SUPPLY CHAIN COULD DISTRIBUTE AID
(Toronto Star) - By Craig and Mark Kielburger

War-torn Sierra Leone, 2001, and our helicopter struggled to get airborne. Having begged a ride, we were squeezed in among hulking containers of precious cargo. The weight onboard made the Soviet-era military chopper fight for altitude like a limp-winged insect. The pilots debated the finer points of offloading us, human rights workers, versus the cargo: Coca-Cola.

We often travel to remote corners of the world, and without fail, the soft drink beats us to our destination.

Pack mules could carry us off of the map, and lo and behold, we’d dismount and find vendors selling Coke.

How does Coke, an indulgence, travel farther than the reaches of basic medical supply?

Simon Berry asked himself this very question in 1988 while working for the international development arm of the British government in northeast Zambia. Berry took photos of empty shelves in medical centres, and of vendor kiosks stacked with iconic bottles. His informal inventory led to a startling conclusion. Medical supplies were scarce; Coke was ubiquitous. The Coca-Cola Company was more resourceful than most governments and aid organizations.

As Berry watched crates of Coke travel on mules, bicycles and handcars, he noticed a potentially life-saving resource in the delivery cases: the empty space between bottles. If that space were filled with basic medicine, like oral rehydration salts, he believed treatment could reach mothers in remote regions of developing countries—where one in five children die preventable deaths before they turn five.

But his idea didn’t travel very far.

Living in Zambia, Berry had no telephone or postal service. You can’t spawn a ‘viral’ campaign with a telex machine. So ColaLife, as he’d christened it, was shelved for 20 years.

In 2008, Berry rekindled ColaLife when he got wind of Coke’s participation in Business Call to Action, an event hosted by Britain’s then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown, at which global corporations agreed to actively combat poverty.

Berry didn’t get further than customer service when he tried to reach Coke, so he penned a blog post about ColaLife, nabbing the attention of the BBC. Berry, the BBC and ColaLife’s Facebook group rallied public support, and Coke finally agreed to let Berry tag along on a research trip to East Africa, already in the works to assess local distribution methods. Berry quit his development job to work on ColaLife full-time.

He partnered with medical stakeholders, African governments and local mothers in Zambia to design an aid prototype.

AidPod was the result. It’s a wedge-shaped plastic container, kind of like a pencil case, containing medicine like rehydration salts for at-home diarrheal treatment. Designed to fit snugly into Coke’s delivery cases, AidPod can hitch a ride on its supply chain. Packaging is recycled as a measuring jug.

If the AidPod travelled everywhere Coke did, it might save some of those two million children who die from diarrheal diseases every year.

For now, ColaLife’s journey begins in Zambia, with a trial in Coke’s distribution centres set to start this month. The post-trial report will determine how the project might be scaled for other countries.

The trial is a kind of experiment, meant to reveal the unexpected implications of a brand new idea: piggybacking on private distribution channels to get aid supplies to remote regions.

But regardless of these trial results, it’s no secret that non-profits have much to learn from the private sector.

We’re reminded of what Melinda Gates, billionaire philanthropist, once said at TED, a lecture series for innovative ideas. In a talk titled “What non-profits can learn from Coca-Cola,” she pointed out that the soft drink company constantly re-evaluates strategies. But “non-profits don’t evaluate methods until it’s too late.”

Looking back on our visit to post-earthquake Haiti, droves of non-profit workers were armed with little more than good intentions. And it was chaos. Aid groups landed at the airport before realizing there was nowhere to refuel planes. Others shipped aid down the Atlantic coast from Miami even though Haiti’s ports were mostly destroyed.

Granted, this was an emergency response. Still, it highlights Gates’ concerns about private sector foresight: Haiti’s private enterprises continued to export goods through the Dominican Republic.

Disaster relief or not, aid distribution is normally set up in densely populated areas. It’s not cost effective for aid agencies to build infrastructure that will reach few people—money for roads, vehicles and fuel would eat up the budget, leaving nothing for aid supplies that, frankly, in rural areas would mean few lives saved.

The private sector, however, invests billions of dollars in supply chain management, streamlining to maximize profit. In an ideal world, corporations and non-profits would form partnerships that merge this incentive to make money with the incentive to save lives.

Back in Sierra Leone, our pilots had to choose: cola or the Kielburgers. Since they’d have made a tidy sum transporting the Coke cargo, we slipped them some extra cash to keep us onboard instead.

Marc and Craig Kielburger are children’s rights activists and co-founded Free The Children, which is active in the developing world. Their column appears Mondays online at thestar.com/globalvoices.