Lifesaving AidPods for 65,000 African children

Great news this month!

Firstly, we have recieved a very generous donation from Packaging World and Healthcare Packaging, to help us co-fund 5,000 more Kit Yamoyo Aidpods! This means we can raise our target again - to help at least 20,000 children in our next phase - which we hope to begin this December.

Secondly, Claire Ward, Director of a documentary about our work The Cola Road, has won Best Director at the AOF film festival in California. The Cola Road was Claire's first documentary, made as part of her Masters project. Although ColaLife is very small, we do love to involve young people from across the world where we can, to support their career and help our cause. It's great to see a 'win-win' like this, and we have another one in the pipeline that we hope to announce next month!

Rohit Ramchandani, another of our fantastic young collaborators and doctoral candidate at Johns Hopkins University, is with us in Zambia at the moment. He's out in the field for 12-15 hours at a time in remote areas - a full day's travel from the capital, Lusaka - overseeing and supporting the evaluation team as they go from house to house collecting data for our endline survey. After our first year, what impact are we having?  We can't wait to see the results. Every evening he phones us - when he can get through - with stories and insights from distant communities who are using Kit Yamoyo to save their children's lives. It's early in the process, but things are looking good.

Finally, YOU can help us this month! Each new recurring donation pledged before 30th August will be matched for this month only, by an anonymous donor. You can double your impact, pledging as little as $10 or up to $200 - provided it recurrs for at least 4 months. Every little helps, and recurring donations, however small, help us to plan ahead and work even smarter!

With many thanks for your continued support!

Best wishes

Jane and Simon Berry

After only 8 months with Global Giving, YOU have helped us to raise nearly $10,000 - enough to co-fund Kit Yamoyo AidPods for 10,000 Zambian children. Thank you!

As the project in Zambia is going really well, our donor agencies* are now looking at supporting us in a scale-up across the country. And they are very impressed by the co-funding raised by you - across USA, UK and beyond. So, we are increasing our target of co-funding 10,000 AidPods to 15,000. We know that with your help we can acheive this.

Why is it so important for children in remote, rural areas to have easy access to one of our AidPods via a local shop?

In Zambia, diarrhoea in children is not just a nuisance. It's a killer - of around 11,000 children a year. It also steals a child's potential - those who are stunted by age 2 cannot reverse the damage, and will never meet their full potential of physical and mental development. Nearly half of all children in Zambia are stunted and diarrhoea is a big contributing factor.

So, what can a mother do? In the whole of Zambia (13 million people) there are fewer than 70 retail pharmacies - and nearly all are in the main towns. Nearly half of the rural population live more than 5km walk to a pubic health clinic. Even if a mother with a sick child walks that far, the chances are that she will find even basic medicines out of stock. So, we've trained over 80 shop keepers in remote rural areas to stock Kit Yamoyo and advise their customers on what to do. They have so far sold an amazing 23,000 Kits - containing Oral Rehydration Salts, an essential micronutrient - Zinc - and soap. This is bringing health as well as wealth into the local economy.

Our latest results show, that by supplying Kit Yamoyo AidPods in local village shops in Zambia, we have:

• increased children's use of the 'gold standard' for diarrhoea treatment. In our target districts, this has jumped from zero to over 40% in only 6 months
• reduced distance mothers/carers need to walk to get treatment, by more than half, as they can obtain Kit Yamoyo near their home
• shortened treatment delay for diarrhoea from ≈2 days (before we started) to ≈1 day (after our first 6 months). Quick treatment for a dehydrated child is vital, so this is a big win!
• improved the perception of ORS efficacy - through more accurate preparation of ORS solution, due to the pack's measuring function. We found that (conservatively) a third to a half of mothers using a traditional litre ORS sachet mixed it wrongly, whereas more than 90% of those using Kit Yamoyo mix it correctly.

 * Donor agencies for the first trial - reported here - include the UK's Department for International Development; Johnson & Johnson Corporate Citizenship Trust, Grand Challenges Canada, and COMESA/TMSA, with advice and support from a range of corporates and UNICEF. You can help us fund the next phase!