Amcor’s flexible packaging expertise helps medicine reach African villages

Amcor has shared its specialist packaging expertise with UK-charity, ColaLife, to create a packaging solution that enables life-saving medicine to reach remote villages in Africa.

The company developed the new Kit Yamoyo Flexi-pack (or ‘Kit of Life’ in many African languages), which provides essential medicine and doubles as a clean measuring vessel for water in the treatment of diarrhoea.

“One in ten children die before their fifth birthday from simple preventable causes like dehydration from diarrhoea.* Until now, relatively basic life-saving re-hydration medicines have not been readily available or affordable in Africa’s remotest villages,” explained ColaLife co-founder, Simon Berry.

The team at ColaLife recognised that consumer goods were reaching these remote villages but basic medicines were not. To tap into the existing consumer goods supply chain required a package solution that was simple to use, affordable and robust enough to endure transportation.

“The new pack had to be low cost and manually fillable, while being able to survive extreme environments and unconventional supply chains, retaining the hygiene of the product. For the consumer, the pack had to be intuitive, easy to open and operate as a measuring device,” Keith Gater of Amcor Flexibles’ Home and Personal Care Sales Team commented.

The team at ColaLife explained that the medicine needed be affordable to those communities who need it, retailing at less than $1.00 US per pack with no subsidy, ensuring that the medicine will continue to be available to communities into the future as a sustainable solution.

Amcor Lead Product Developer, Peter Ettridge, who proposed to use Amcor Flexibles’ ‘PushPop’ technology to make the Kit Yamoyo Flexi-pack, said:

“Packaging plays a crucial role in tackling global challenges such as ensuring access to safe, effective health care. At Amcor we invest millions into research and development to find new packaging solutions that deliver positive social and environmental outcomes. It is fantastic that we have been able to share this knowledge with ColaLife to create Kit Yamoyo Flexi-pack.”

PushPop is an innovative, patented stand-up pack with an easy opening system, which does not affect barrier integrity. Consumers simply push in the special perforation on the topside and pop the pack wide open.

To help keep production costs down while the product is being established, Amcor Flexibles manufacturing sites in Ledbury, UK and Palmela, Portugal donated over 870,000 Kit Yamoyo Flexi-packs to ColaLife.

Since then the Zambian Government has ordered 452,000 Kit Yamoyo Flexi-packs that are currently being distributed to rural communities through their public health system.