Lifesaving AidPods for 65,000 African children

Happy New Year from all at ColaLife and from all the families and their children who have been able to get an award-winning Kit Yamoyo AidPod from their local shop over the past two years.  Our aim is to help people help themselves, to combat the world's second biggest child-killer - diarrhoea - by making the very best essential medicines affordable, easy to use, and easy to find in communities all across Zambia - and hopefully beyond!

Our Year End Challenge on GlobalGiving raised an amazing $12,000 plus a $1,000 bonus from GlobalGiving, for qualifying in fifth place, so by the end of December, we'd reached our 2014 target of $40,000.

Thanks to your generosity, around 40% of all the Kit Yamoyo purchases so far have been supported by a discount voucher. For 2015, we plan to offer discount vouchers to at least another 15,000 mothers, so they can get our life-saving kits in a nearby shop to treat their children effectively in the home. To do this, we need raise our GlobalGiving target by another $25,000, helping us reach 65,000 children by the end of our third year in Zambia. We're also expecting to announce new grants very soon, that will support our local partner, Keepers Zambia Foundation, in their education work among communities and small-scale retailers. 

The vouchers are a great way you can help a mum or dad try Kit Yamoyo for the first time and learn to use it. Vouchers also give confidence to local small shop-keepers, so they are willing to invest in the new Kit Yamoyo product. We aim to train over 100 shop-keepers in 2015.

So far, most of our work has been in remote rural areas, but in 2015, we will be starting a new project in Zambia's capital, Lusaka, and other urban centres. Although public health services here are closer to people's homes than they are in the rural areas we have been serving so far, our research shows that many of the same problems still exist: over-stretched and poorly-stocked clinics, long queues for treatment, almost no suitable products in the many small shops people use daily, and poor awareness of how to treat children's diarrhoea quickly at home, with Oral Rehydration plus Zinc.

Our 2014 pilot showed that training local shop-keepers in Lusaka's urban 'compounds', to sell Kit Yamoyo and to pass on health messages to their communities, has real potential in urban settings.  As Mr Hamwemwe, a newly trained shop-keeper from Lusaka's George Compound told us: "I'm pushing this new product to the community. It will make a big difference, because diarrhoea is always a problem during this season." And these larger markets will provide more customers for our local manufacturing partner, Pharmanova, and help establish Kit Yamoyo as a self-sustaining independent product in Zambia.

Your donations carry on doing good - because for every ten kits Mr Hamwemwe sells, he will earn at least $2.50. That sounds a small amount, but can help send his child to school, or feed his family for a week. So, let's see if we can get to our new target of $65,000 for 65,000 Kit Yamoyo AidPods by the end of 2015!

Thanks again, and Happy New Year!