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A simple couple who saved several lifes


ColaLife kits in a crate and with young children

Diarrhoea is one of the biggest killers of children in Africa. Cheap and simple remedies can be effective, but only if they reach those in need. So one British couple came up with a way to solve this delivery dilemma - by using something that was already there.
It is not really a main street, just a wide dusty red track between a scatter of huts and little stores that make up the village of Kanchele in southern Zambia. At one end there is a cluster of lively market stalls. At the other end, the men are playing pool. Hens and tiny chickens scratch the red earth.
It is a long way off the main road from the Zambian capital Lusaka to Livingstone near the Victoria Falls, bumping down 30 miles (50km) of increasingly rough tracks across the bush.
Eventually reached, the village is pretty basic; no power supply, water fetched on foot from the river two kilometres or so away. No television, of course.
I came to this remote place in Africa with a British campaigner called Simon Berry, now in his fifties. I had met him for the first time in May, in rather different surroundings. It was a triumphant evening in London at the Design Museum, his small not-for-profit organisation called ColaLife had won one of the top awards.
Design Museum's Pete Collard on how ColaLife works
Simon Berry and his wife Jane had come up with a strikingly-simple idea - a package for medicine that slotted into the empty space at the top of a crate of soft drink bottles, fitting neatly in between the bottlenecks.
A dazzling idea, to piggyback the delivery of the diarrhoea medicine for babies onto one of the most efficient distribution systems in the world. Go anywhere and you will find a shop selling Coca-Cola. And the plastic packaging is ingenious - once opened it becomes a measuring device. Clever stuff.
The Berrys are not doctors, but they are people of conscience troubled by the stubborn incidence of child diarrhoea in Africa. It kills more children than HIV/Aids, Malaria and measles combined, largely because of bad water supplies. Most cases could be easily treated with a combination of zinc and rehydration salts costing pennies or cents.

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