Melinda French Gates: What nonprofits can learn from Coca-Cola

SUMMARY:

In this video, the speaker Melinda French Gates, cofounder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, gives us information about how we take lesson from Coca Cola strategy and apply for this in health sector for public welfare.  She travelled to India and she noticed that in villages, villagers had no running water and electricity in their houses but they had Coca Cola in their hands, this surprised her.  Then, she studied and analyzed the Coca Cola strategy and she found that Coca Cola follows three main things, which are real-time data, entrepreneurial talent, and marketing.  Firstly, they collect immediate data, and then according to feedback/data, they manufacture the product, and then sent it to the market.  Secondly, they search local entrepreneurial talent, trained them, and sell their product because these local people know how to reach in the far distant places.  Thirdly, Coca Cola localize the feeling of happiness according to different countries, for example in South Africa, Coca Cola relates happiness with community respect.  Similarly, if NGOs and governments follow these three things, they can easily provide the health services in far distant areas because local people know how to reach at hard places, their neighbourhood, and contribute in campaign of awareness regarding health issues, health services, do’s and don’ts.  Moreover, this action leads to eradicate many diseases like polio from our planet.  In conclusion, governments collect data, search local talent, train them, and provide health services in distant places. (Word count: 242)

RESPONSE:

I strongly agree with the speaker’s view that if NGOs and government follow the above-mentioned strategies then we easily eradicate disease from our planet.  As we know, health is also very important aspect of human life.  In developing countries, health is very crucial issue because these countries do not have enough health services.  For example, most of the population in India lives in villages and small towns and they do not have enough health services available.  Melinda Gates gives us an example of Indian Health Extension Program.  In this program, government trains the local people for health services.  Actually, this is a local network of communication because local people know each other and even the area.  They aware people regarding health programs, facilities, do’s and don’ts, and even they help in different vaccination programs to eradicate the disease.  In every part of India, government starts pulse polio program every year.  In this program, these health entrepreneurial workers go door to door and give two drops of polio medicine to every child who is 5 years old or under the age of 5 years and help the government to eradicate the polio from our country.(Word count: 192)