Last year, in a talk I gave a talk at TEDxChange, I argued that we could learn a lot in global health and development by studying Coca-Cola’s success in poor countries around the world. This week, I saw Coke’s operations in Nairobi for myself. I visited in order to understand how we could adapt their methods to make us more effective in delivering health care. 

The three main points of my TEDxChange talk were that Coke constantly uses real-time data to maximize its operations; it leverages the talent of local entrepreneurs; and it markets its product effectively. (You can watch my entire TEDxChange talk below.)

I got to see all this up close when I visited a Coca-Cola micro distribution center in Nairobi, Kenya. I talked to the owner, an amazing woman named Rosemary, who’s been selling Coke in and around Nairobi for 19 years.

The thing that really blew me away about Rosemary’s operation was the mountain of data she had at her fingertips. On the wall right in front of her desk, she’d posted a detailed map of her territory (one square kilometer) with 281 pins in it, representing her customers. Next to the map was a chart with all 281 customers divided up by channel—kiosks, restaurants, bars, and non-traditional outlets (such as office buildings and barber shops).

Every day, her salespeople make deliveries and take new orders. They send the orders back to Rosemary via text message, and they’re fed into a database. So she knows what every product is doing in every channel, and she can pinpoint problems and fix them. She knows, for example, if barber shops are buying fewer two-liter bottles of Fanta, and she can find out why. She told me that one of her biggest growth areas is selling fruit juice to bars, because it’s now trendy to mix alcohol with mango juice.

What lessons from this incredible data gathering could we apply to health care?

I found out at the Tabitha Health Clinic in Kibera, the city’s largest informal settlement, meeting with a health worker named Emma who uses data to save lives.

In a project with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and an organization called Carolina for Kibera, the Tabitha Clinic is working closely with the population in one neighborhood in Kibera. Health workers go house to house, collecting data from every resident every two weeks. The data is fired back to a central system via palm held devices.

When the staff saw a spike in the number of cases of diarrhea last year, they got worried about the possibility of a cholera outbreak. But as soon as the lab confirmed a cholera case, they visited the home of the infected individual, treated the members of the household, and conducted counseling sessions in the surrounding area. In the end, there were only four cases of cholera in the neighborhood.

It’s impossible to say how many people would have gotten cholera without that immediate intervention, but other slum areas have had cholera outbreaks of 1,000 cases, so it’s logical to assume that the use of real-time data saved lives and prevented a significant amount of misery.

Seeing Coke and the Tabitha Clinic side by side reinforced what I was thinking when I gave that talk six months ago: There are lessons to be learned from every sector, and we need to be willing to look far and wide for solutions to the challenges we face in health and development.

Watch my 2010 TEDxChange talk: