Entertainment Summit West - Los Angeles

Entertainment Summit West - Robert Ahomka-Lindsay Transcript

Robert Ahomka-Lindsay, Vice President of Public Affairs and Communications of Coca-Cola Africa

It really is an honor to be here. I'm sitting here with all the people that are clearly in the entertainment business and I just sell, you know, sugared water, basically, in one form or other. I guess it's all part of the fact that this fight against AIDS is not something the one industry or one people or one particular segment of the population has a right to. It's about everybody getting involved.

I'm not going to go through over all the stats, but the realities are, are stark, particularly from where I come from, which is in Africa. 70% of all those people living with HIV and AIDS are in Africa. You know, I wish we had 40,000 new infections last year as you did in the United States.
In Africa, it's closer to a couple of million. It's just the reality, what we deal with. We have a huge problem. So, you can ask yourself, why would a beverage industry like a Coca Cola Company care or should be engaged in this? What's the point? We're not a media company and we're here to talk about entertainment. I think the issue is quite simple. We are the largest private sector employer in Africa. We have an ability to influence. Let me be quite frank, we have an ability to influence, as the largest brand not only in Africa but anywhere in the world. Therefore, we have an obligation to do something about it. The Coca Cola Company in Africa is run 99% by Africans. And guess what? We care what is important in Africa. And you can't be in a company in Africa to try to sell and build your business if you don’t engage in what's the most critical crisis facing our continent today. So, we have to be part of that.

What we tend to do when we're looking at entertainment is ask what it is that we can do as an actor, if you will, in the HIV and AIDS fights on the continent. We see media as a huge area for influence on this issue, where you probably see us more as a buyer of media space. But in this situation, frankly, we use some of our influence with both government NGOs and people and media houses, to persuade where we need to, for them to engage in what we think is important, and, what many times, they also think are important.

It's been said we're in every community in Africa. That's true. We are in every one of the 56 countries. The last country was Somalia about a month ago. Most people don't think of doing business in Somalia, but we put a four million dollar plant in Somalia, in Mogadishu. It's interesting.

I'm really keen to engage in a dialogue and I hope we'll have some questions tonight to really get into this. It's around what it is that we can do and what we try to do with others in this industry to help drive the message home. You know Africa has the worst problems, Sub-Sahara Africa. The reality also is that we believe in a three-pronged approach, A, B, and C. We also know Africa has some of the greatest challenges. I wish I could say everybody had TV, they don't. Less than 3% have TV. So we have to really find innovative ways of getting messages to people and we do som of it through radio. We have outdoor campaigns that go through every village you can think of. And we try and take it to people on the ground to help educate them, to try and stop the 80% never becoming part of the 20, but at the same time, trying to find a way to care for the 20% that on average are positive or living with AIDS.

We are going to run through the tapes now. The first one is a documentary and has really been talked about the, the impact of AIDS. We know the people that are dying. That’s horrific and very clear. We also know about the impact on businesses and economic development. You know, some of the stats indicate that for Africa to maintain its same level of underdevelopment -- forget about going forward, which is a growth rate of GDP about three to four percent, Africa needs to grow three to four percent a year. Currently, we're growing about two and a half to three. HIV and AIDS will take a percentage off that. So do the numbers yourself. It's not hard to imagine. But we've just forgotten about the orphans, the millions of children that are being brought up today that have no family, I think, it was well illustrated by Sesame Street. Those children are forgotten. And we helped work with an organization to try and bring that message out to more people.

The second clip will look at Egypt where we worked with the Ministry Of Education, the Ministry Of Health, and with UNICEF and a number of organizations, to try and create, a logo for a Muslim country where sex is not something you talk about very freely. We went at it over a nine-month period. We worked through the system to create a targeted program that went out on Egypt TV that talked about HIV and AIDS where we actually show condoms on TV. What a challenge that can be! We talk about AIDS, we work proactively, and we used our advertising agencies. We work very closely with the agencies, using the same testing process as we would for a new brand. We have focus groups. We talked about messaging. The biggest challenge we had was try to work with the Ministry Of Health to listen to what people were telling them about messages, rather than what they wanted to tell people.

So, we We had a long process of trying to verify messages and making sure we were saying the right thing. The third area and the fourth are soap operas. Africa's no different, everybody loves the soap opera. We worked to create two specific series, one in Kenya, looking at East Africa, and the other one in French West Africa, “Heart And Soul” and “SIDA Dans La Cité”. SIDA is AIDS in French. While the Kenya one focused on a number of areas like poverty, health, social challenges facing most of us in the continent, The SIDA Dans La Cité was clearly targeted at AIDS, trying to describe how people live, the challenges people have today and looking at the plight of the orphans. In Africa, as you probably know, our transmission is about 80% through heterosexual, man to wife, man to woman transmission, not same sex.

That creates a bit of a problem for us because we have a stigma. The biggest issue we have today on our continent is stigma. In our own employee base, where we have a program for 300,000 people spread out in every country in Africa, the biggest challenge we have is stigma. Even though we provide free drugs for people, provide free treatment, is getting them to get tested because none of their friends want them They don't even want to talk about it. They would rather go to a different town than be tested anywhere near it.

These are some of the challenges we're trying to deal with.

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