Cola Life is a series of three packaging designs for an anti-diarrhoea kit called Kit Yamoyo (meaning ‘Kit of Life’ in Nyanja and other local languages spoken in Zambia). This is an example of the final iteration of the kit, a ‘Flexi-pack’ containing oral rehydration salts (ORS) and zinc supplements.

Simon Berry is the founder of Cola Life and initially had the idea for these packaging designs whilst working on the British Aid programme in 1988. The first packaging design was a container which can fit inside the empty spaces of a fully-loaded Cola-Cola crate (CD.101-2016). The premise was that a bottle of Coca-Cola can be bought virtually anywhere in developing countries yet in these same places, one in nine children die before their fifth birthday from preventable and often neglected causes like dehydration from diarrhoea. Berry observed that these communities did not have the same kind of access to medicine as they do to other goods such as soft drinks. The Cola Life idea was to piggy-back on pre-existing distribution networks such as Coca-Cola, in order to adequately deliver affordable anti-diarrhoea kits to remote villages. As compelling as this was, Berry’s proposal gained no real traction until he posted the idea on Facebook, twenty years later, in 2008.

Although the innovation produced great publicity for the project, Berry discovered that the subsidised price was still considered expensive for around 40% of those surveyed in the Zambian communities where it was deployed and surprisingly that only 8% of retailers had even put the kits in a Coca-Cola crate to transport them. These revelations led to this cheaper and simpler package design which was originally intended as a refill for the second design - the screw-top pack (CD.155-2016). Despite the apparent simplicity of the sachet packaging it still retains the key functionality of measuring, as the gusseted bag stands up well when filled with water and accurately measures the make-up of the ORS sachets. As price is crucial in the markets, this sachet ‘Flexi-pack’ has now become the primary packaging approach for Cola Life.

Cola Life is a good example of how design thinking can be applied as a tool for problem solving to address fundamental questions of human well-being, in particular problems of poverty, health and education in developing countries.

This Kit Yamoyo was acquired as part of the Shekou Project, an international partnership between the V&A and China Merchant Shekou Holdings (CMSK) to open a new cultural platform called Design Society in Shekou. The Kit Yamoyo was included in the inaugural exhibition, ‘Values of Design’, in the V&A Gallery at Design Society in a section exploring design for cost and distribution.