What nonprofits can learn from CocaCola Melinda French Gates

one of my favorite parts about my job at

the Gates Foundation is that I get to

travel to the developing world and I do

that quite regularly and when I need the

mothers in so many of these remote

places I’m really struck by the things

that we have in common they want what we

want for our children and that is for

their children to grow up successful to

be healthy and have a successful life

but I also see lots of poverty and it’s

quite jarring both in the scale and the

scope of it

my first trip in India I was in a

person’s home where they had dirt floors

no running water no electricity and

that’s really what I see all over the

world so in short I’m startled by all

the things that they don’t have but I am

surprised by one thing that they do have

coca-cola coke is everywhere in fact

when I travel the developing world coke

feels ubiquitous and so when I come back

from these trips and I’m thinking about

development and I’m flying home I’m

thinking well we’re trying to deliver

condoms to people or vaccinations you

know coke success kind of stops and

makes you wonder how is it that they can

get coke to these far-flung places and

if they can do that why can’t

governments and NGOs do the same thing

and I’m not the first person to ask this

question but I think as a community we

still have a lot to learn it’s

staggering if you think about coca-cola

they sell 1.5 billion servings every

single day that’s like every man woman

and child on the planet having a serving

of coke every week so why does this

matter well if we’re gonna speed up the

progress and go even faster on the set

of Millennium Development Goals that

we’ve said as a world we need to learn

from the innovators and those innovators

come from every single sector I feel

that if we can understand what makes

something like coca-cola ubiquitous

we can apply those lessons then for the

public good

coke success is relevant because if we

can analyze it learn from it then we can

save lives so that’s why I took a bit of

time to study coke and I think there are

really three things we can take away

from coca-cola they take real-time data

and immediately feed it back into the

product they tap into local

entrepreneurial talent and they do

incredible marketing so let’s start with

the data now coke has a very clear

bottom line they report to a set of

shareholders they have to turn a profit

so they take the data and they use it to

measure progress they have this very

continuous feedback loop they learn

something they put it back in the

product they put it back into the market

they have a whole team called knowledge

and insight it’s a lot like other

consumer companies so if you’re running

Namibia for coca-cola and you have a

hundred and seven constituencies you

know where every can versus bottle of

sprite Fanta or Coke was sold whether it

was a corner store a supermarket or a

push cart so if sales start to drop then

the person can identify the problem and

address the issue

well let’s contrast that for a minute to

development in development the

evaluation comes at the very end of the

project I’ve sat in a lot of those

meetings and by then it is way too late

to use the data I had somebody from an

NGO once described it to me as bowling

in the dark they said you know you roll

the ball you hear some pins go down it’s

dark you can’t see which one goes down

until the lights come on and then you

can see your impact real-time data

turns on the lights so what’s the second

thing that cokes good at well they’re

good at tapping into that local

entrepreneurial talent cokes been in

Africa since 1928 but most of the time

they couldn’t reach the distant markets

because they had a system that was a lot

like in the developed world which was a

large truck rolling down a street in

Africa the remote places it’s hard to

find a good road but coke noticed

something they noticed that local

people were taking the product buying it

in bulk and then reselling it and he’s

hard-to-reach places and so they took a

bit of time to learn about that and they

decided in 1990 that they wanted to

start training these local entrepreneurs

giving them small loans they set them up

is what they called micro distribution

centers and those local entrepreneurs

then hire salespeople who go out with

bicycles and push carts and wheelbarrows

to sell the product so they’re now some

3,000 of these centers employing about

15,000 people in Africa in Tanzania and

Uganda they represent 90% of coke sales

so let’s look at the development side

what is it the government’s and NGOs can

learn from coke well governments and

NGOs need to tap into that local

entrepreneur talent as well because the

locals know how to reach the very hard

to serve places their neighbors and they

know what motivates them to make change

I think a great example of this is

Ethiopia’s new health extension program

the government noticed in Ethiopia that

many of the people were so far away from

a health clinic they were over a day’s

travel way to health clinics so if

you’re an emergency situation or your

mom about to deliver a baby forget it

to get to the health care centre they

decided that wasn’t good enough so they

went to Indian studied the Indian state

of Kerala that also had a system like

this and they adapted it for Ethiopia

and in 2003 the government Ethiopia

started this new system in their own

country they trained 35,000 health

extension workers to deliver care

directly to the people so in just five

years their ratio went from one worker

for every 30,000 people to one worker

for every 2,500 people now think about

how this can change people’s lives

health extension workers can help with

so many things whether it’s family

planning prenatal care immunizations for

the children or advising the woman to

get to the facility on time for it

on-time delivery that is having real

impact in a country like Ethiopia and

it’s why you see there child mortality

members coming down 25% from 2000 to

2008 in Ethiopia there are hundreds of

thousands of children living because of

this health extension worker program so

what’s the next step for Ethiopia well

they’re already starting to talk about

this they’re starting to talk about how

do you have the health community workers

generate their own ideas how do you

incent them based on the impact that

they’re getting out in those remote

villages that’s how you tap into local

entrepreneurial talent and you unlock

people’s potential now the third

component of Koch’s success is marketing

ultimately coke success depends on one

crucial fact and that is that people

want a Coca Cola now the reason these

micro entrepreneurs can sell or make a

profit is they have to sell every single

bottle in their push cart or their

wheelbarrow so they rely on Coca Cola in

terms of its marketing and what’s the

secret to their marketing well it’s

aspirational it associates that product

with a kind of life that people want to

live so even though it’s a global

company they take a very local approach

Coke’s global campaign slogan is open

happiness but they localize it and they

don’t just guess what makes people happy

they go to places like Latin America and

they realize that happiness there is

associated with family life and in South

Africa they associate happiness with

siree tea or community respect now that

played itself out in the World Cup

campaign let’s listen to this song that

Coke created for it wavin flag' by a

Somali hip-hop artist

Briona give you fire

I see the champion team to fill down you

would have

industries are made the list

it feels pretty good right well they

didn’t stop there

they localized it into 18 different

languages and it went number one on the

pop chart in 17 countries yeah it

reminds me of a song that I remember

from my childhood I’d like to teach the

world to sing but also went number one

on the pop charts both songs have

something in common that same appeal of

celebration and unity so how does health

and development mark it well it’s based

on avoidance not aspirations sure you’ve

heard some of these messages use a

condom don’t get AIDS wash your hands

you might not get diarrhea

it doesn’t sound anything like wave and

flag to me and I think we make a

fundamental mistake we make an

assumption that we think that if people

need something we don’t have to make

them want that and I think that’s a

mistake and there’s some indications

around the world that this is starting

to change

one example is sanitation we know that a

million half children die a year from

diarrhea and a lot of it is because of

open defecation but there’s a solution

you build a toilet but what we’re

finding around the world over and over

again is if you build a toilet and you

leave it there it doesn’t get used

people reuse it for a slab for their

home they sometimes store grain in it

I’ve even seen it used for a chicken

coop but what does marking really entail

that would make a sanitation solution

get a result in diarrhea will you work

with the community you start to talk to

them about why open defecation is

something that shouldn’t be done in the

village and they agree to that but then

you take the toilet and you position it

as a modern trendy convenience one state

in northern India has gone so far as to

link toilets to courtship and it works

look at these headlines

I’m not kidding women are refusing to

marry men without toilets no loo no I do

now it’s not just a funny headline its

innovative it’s an innovative marketing

campaign but more importantly it saves

lives take a look at this this is a room

full of young man and my husband bill

and can you guess what the young men are

waiting for they’re waiting to be

circumcised

can you believe that we know that

circumcision reduces HIV infection by

60% in men and we first heard this

result inside the foundation I have to

admit bill and I were scratching our

heads a little bit we’re saying but

who’s gonna volunteer for this procedure

but it turns out the men do because

they’re hearing from their girlfriends

that they prefer it and the men also

believe it improves their sex life so if

we can start to understand what people

really want in health and development we

can change communities and we can change

whole nations so why is all of this so

important well let’s talk about what

happens when this all comes together

when you tie the three things together

and polio I think is one of the most

powerful examples we’ve seen a 99

percent reduction in polio in 20 years

so if you look back to 1988 there about

350,000 cases of polio on the planet

that year in 2009 we’re down to 1600

cases well how did that happen let’s

look at a country like India they have

over a billion people in this country

but they have 35,000 local doctors who

report paralysis and clinicians a huge

reporting system and chemists they have

two and a half million vaccinators but

let me make the story a little bit more

concrete for you let me tell you the

story of sri rama an 18 month boy in

bihar northern state in india this year

on august 8th he felt paralysis and on

the 13th his parents took him to the

doctor

on August 14th and 15th they took a

stool sample and by the 25th of August

it was confirmed he had type 1 polio by

August 30th a genetic test was done and

we knew what strain of polio Shriram had

now it could have come from one of two

places it could have come from Nepal

just to the north across the border or

from sharkon de state just to the south

luckily the genetic testing proved that

in fact this strand came north because

had it come from the south it would have

had a much wider impact in terms of

transmission so many more people would

have been affected so what’s the endgame

well on September 4th there was a huge

mop-up campaign which is what you do in

polio they went out and where Shriram

lives they vaccinated 2 million people

so in less than a month we went from one

case of paralysis to a targeted

vaccination program and I’m happy to say

only one other person in that area got

polio that’s how you keep a huge

outbreak from spreading and it shows

what can happen when local people have

the data in their hands they can save

lives now one of the challenges in polio

still is marketing but it might not be

what you think it’s not the marketing on

the ground it’s not telling the parents

if you see paralysis take your child to

the doctor or get your child vaccinated

we have a problem with marketing in the

donor community the g8 nations have been

incredibly generous on polio over the

last 20 years but we’re starting to have

something called polio fatigue and that

is that the donor nations aren’t wanting

to fund polio any longer so by next

summer we’re excited to run out of money

on polio so we are 99 percent of the way

there on this goal and we’re about to

run short of money and I think that if

the marketing were more aspirational if

we could focus as a community on how far

we’ve come and how amazing it would be

to eradicate this disease we could put

polio fatigue and polio behind us and if

we could do that we could stop

vaccinating everybody worldwide in all

of our countries for polio and it would

only be the second disease ever wiped

off the face of the planet

and we are so close

this victory is so possible so if coax

marketers came to me and asked me to

define happiness

I’d say my vision of happiness is a

mother holding a healthy baby in her

arms to me that is deep happiness and so

if we can learn lessons from the

innovators in every sector then in the

future we make together that happiness

can be just as ubiquitous as coca-cola

thank you