Delivering in a moving world…looking to our supply chains to meet the increasing scale, cost and complexity of humanitarian needs

“Better, safer and more efficient aid” was the stated purpose of the first World Humanitarian Summit (a glossary of all acronyms can be found in  Appendix). Aiming to improve humanitarian assistance for nearly 88m people in need (UN, 2016), the summit focused on three goals: “to re-inspire and reinvigorate a commitment to humanity and to the universality of humanitarian principles; to initiate a set of concrete actions and commitments aimed at enabling countries and communities to better prepare for and respond to crises, and be resilient to shocks; and finally, to share best practices which can help save lives around the world, put affected people at the center of humanitarian action, and alleviate suffering” (WHS, 2016).

Humanitarian stakeholders like donors, humanitarian organizations (HOs), the private sector, national governments and their civil protection and military bodies play a crucial role in achieving these goals. To do so, they collaborate closely to efficiently and effectively bring the necessary items and services to the people in need. With 60 to 80 percent of humanitarian funding utilized by the humanitarian supply chain^[1] (HSC) (Van Wassenhove, 2006), efficiencies must be found here, if we, the humanitarian community, are to effectively meet ever increasing need. We define HSC as “the process of planning, implementing and controlling the efficient, cost-effective flow and storage of goods and materials, as well as related information, from point of origin to point of consumption for the purpose of meeting the end beneficiary’s requirements” (Thomas and Mizushima, 2005). The HSC has always been part of disaster response programs; however, awareness of its criticality grew significantly when it was strained after the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004. Like many other processes behind the scenes, the HSC was suddenly brought to front of stage as it struggled and fractured under the strain of responding to this scale of emergency. The response to the tsunami became characterized by images of congested airports, blocked access to ports, warehouses clogged with costly materials, inappropriate supplies and limited human resources (Argollo da Costa et al., 2014). The lack of preparedness and coordination was criticized by the World Disaster report (The Guardian, 2005). This, more than any previous emergency, showed how critically the success or failure of a response hinges on the HSC.

The advent of the UN Cluster System in 2005 framed the international community’s commitment to learn and improve from the shortcomings of the Tsunami response. For the HSC, the Global Logistics Cluster and the wider logistics community have made significant progress in improving the coordination and efficiency of aid delivery in the last decade. Strong coordination and optimization of operations has been and remains the core focus of logistics practitioners during emergency response, complemented by efforts to be better prepared and strengthen the local capacity for response. At the same time humanitarian logisticians are also building partnerships with private companies to improve disaster response (Van Wassenhove, 2006).

Having said that, as the paper discusses it is still hard to truly localize response capacity, maintain the right complement of international support, and to leverage greater investments in preparedness. In doing so, the humanitarian sector would not only improve the quality of response but critically reduce its cost and duration. The goal of this paper is to highlight tangible changes that will make a real difference in humanitarian operations, specifically within the HSC. Following the setting of the scene of the paper in Section 1, Section 2 describes the methodology used to determine the main challenges of the HSC that have arisen during specific complex emergencies and natural disasters of the last eight years. Section 3 elaborates on these challenges and discusses best practices and approaches. Finally, Section 4 presents the conclusions.

Data were collected through semi-structured interviews conducted between February 2015 and April 2016 with nearly 40 experts working for 11 HOs (UNOCHA, WFP, MSF, Handicap International, British Red Cross, UNHCR, THW, IFRC, Action Against Hunger (ACF), Plan International and Welthungerhilfe), six companies (Bioport, Amazon, GS1, Silve Conseil, Trade Team and Deutsche Post DHL), one donor (ECHO), two universities (Griffith University and University of Muenster) and two foundations (Foundation Mérieux and HELP Logistics, part of the Kuehne Foundation). The interviews were used to identify the five most important challenges that the HSC faces, along with their critical solutions. All the organizations participating in the interviews are either members of, or have collaborated with, the Global Logistics Cluster and they were willing to support this report. The target participants were stakeholders’ representatives of the HSC; senior managers and directors of HOs, companies, donors and foundations, as well as researchers with a background in humanitarian operations.

The interviews were conducted via phone or Skype call with an average duration of 60 min. The participants were asked open-ended questions to provide the research team with detailed answers. At the beginning of the interview the goal of the study was explained to the participant. Then the interviewee was asked to discuss the improvements achieved in the HSC since the response to the Indonesian Tsunami in 2004. The next questions were around the challenges that the HSC still faces and ways to overcome them in the future. The goal of the research team was not only to identify challenges but also to offer tangible solutions. Therefore, the interviewees were asked to substantiate the challenges and the solutions raised with specific examples from disaster responses.

The challenges identified by the responders were listed, and five of them were chosen unanimously by the authors after consulting different stakeholders of the Global Logistics Cluster to ensure that the final report would represent the community’s main challenges. The examples of the disaster responses and the solutions used in the report also arose through the same consultation process. The next section presents these challenges and the proposed ways to overcome them. The discussion in Sections 3 and 4 arose from the interviews. Whenever we use literature review to support an argument, the literature source is provided.

Section 3 is divided in five subsections, each elaborates on the case studies of disaster responses agreed by the Global Logistics Cluster stakeholders. Each subsection also raises a topic-related question and discusses a recommendation. The challenges described in the five subsections represent more of the “present” of the HSC, while the recommendations are the ones leading the humanitarian sector to the future. Specifically, Subsection 3.1 describes several activities that strengthened HSC preparedness before the earthquake in Nepal in 2015. It also explains how the humanitarian community can help disaster-prone countries to strengthen infrastructure and local capacity preparedness including their local logistics networks. Subsection 3.2 discusses the implementation of Cash Transfer Programming in the Philippines before and after Super Typhoon Haiyan, explaining how the HOs can have a seamless transition between in-kind and cash modalities. Subsection 3.3 raises awareness of the importance of having access to the victims of complex emergencies. It also elaborates on how the humanitarian stakeholders can collaborate to ensure that the HSC remains neutral during armed conflicts. Subsection 3.4 explains the importance of the private sector as an enabler of humanitarian work. Subsection 3.5 illustrates how shared services can reduce the cost of humanitarian action and discusses how the humanitarian sector can expand collaboration to meet the growing scale of needs.

Nepal is located on a significant fault line and seismologists had long anticipated that a major earthquake would hit the country. In April 2015, this prediction was realized and an earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale occurred, killing approximately 9,000 people and leaving an estimated 5m people needing assistance (EM-DAT, 2015).

Since the humanitarian community was aware of this risk, preparedness activities had been taking place for several years prior to the earthquake. For example, beginning in 2012, the Nepal Red Cross developed plans for community disaster response, trained communities to identify hazards and risks, and trained emergency responders in first aid (British Red Cross, 2016). The World Food Program (WFP) worked with the government of Nepal and the Logistics Cluster for two years on an earthquake response scenario in the Kathmandu Valley, delivering HSC trainings and simulation exercises to government staff to establish a more predictable emergency response structure. It also established a humanitarian staging area in the airport of Kathmandu that acted as a central hub for airlifted and overland assistance during the response (WFP, 2015). The investment on infrastructure preparedness prior to the earthquake proved to be a good strategy to improve the effectiveness of the operation. According to the Regional Logistics Advisor of WFP supporting the preparedness project in Nepal, the International Humanitarian Organizations (IHOs) were able to respond faster and the project saved a great amount of time and resources for national and international responders alike, contributing to the alleviation of the suffering of the victims. He highlighted the importance to continue investing in local capacity and infrastructure preparedness to mitigate the impact of future natural disasters. The stronger the country, capacity and infrastructure the less the need for international humanitarian actors to respond, as elegantly stated also by a senior director at World Vision International, “aid must be as local as possible and, as international as necessary” (Wall, 2015). Moreover, the stronger the country, the greater the effectiveness of the response, as preparedness interventions could speed up response time by anything from 2 to 50 days; according to a study on return on investment (ROI) of emergency preparedness conducted in Chad, Madagascar and Pakistan (BCG, 2015).

Cases such as the Nepal earthquake response raise an important question: how should the international community invest to reduce the cost, and increase the localization of humanitarian response?

Preparedness is not new; many international humanitarian actors have been working on preparedness and capacity building for much of the last decade. There is an increasing evidence base for the benefits of investing in preparedness to reduce the cost of future response. In fact, it is estimated that the benefits of investing in resilience consistently outweigh the costs, yielding gains ranging from $2.3 to $13.2 for every $1 invested (DFID, 2013). In the report “Putting Resilience at the Heart of Development (UNDP, 2012),” a United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Administrator states, “Every dollar spent reducing people’s vulnerability to disaster saves around seven dollars in economic losses. Investing in preparedness not only increases the resilience of countries towards future disasters but protects economic growth and other development achievements from being lost in a single catastrophic event.” So investing today in preparedness activities alleviates, to a great extent, the potential financial toll tomorrow.

It is well acknowledged that increasing local leadership of humanitarian response is a critical aspect of local resilience and preparedness. Surprisingly, between 2012 and 2014 the share of finance going directly to national and local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) dropped by half, from 0.4 percent in 2012 to 0.2 percent in 2014 (Development Initiatives, 2015).

The case study and short examples discussed show clearly that investing in local supply chain preparedness and infrastructure saves money and time in future response. The case for spend now to save later is clear, but we now should also stop considering disaster response (humanitarian) and development programs as activities and events which do not affect each other. Many humanitarian stakeholders still consider development programs as completely separate from humanitarian ones and vice versa (this is what we shall refer to henceforth as humanitarian and development “silos”). However, in reality, investing during development can save money and lives during disaster response, equally investing in the local markets during humanitarian programs can facilitate development afterwards. Hence preparedness investments need to be a much larger proportion of both humanitarian and development budgets if the humanitarian sector is to successfully reduce the cost of, and improve the efficiency of, future humanitarian actions.

In November 2013, Super Typhoon Haiyan left 16m affected people in the Philippines (EM-DAT, 2015). To alleviate the suffering of the affected population, an estimated $338m was delivered to beneficiaries via cash transfer programs (CTP) (Pelly et al., 2015). CTP can be shown to be up to 25–30 percent cheaper to deliver than in-kind aid, according to a WFP pilot program in Ethiopia (Cabot Venton et al., 2015). Furthermore, cash-based modalities empower the affected people and align the humanitarian system to what people need (WHS, 2015). However, the level and stability of market and infrastructure functionality is fundamental for the execution of CTP, a key characteristic of this modality.

Nowadays, the trend of increasingly utilizing cash and market-based modalities is clearly on the rise in humanitarian response. But, what is then the role of the HSC?

As a humanitarian delivery modality, in the Philippines example, CTP had been used for years in a development setting by the government and other actors. Indeed, since 2008, the Filipino government has offered a conditional cash program, the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps) to poor households (Pelly et al., 2015). Cash was also widely used as a response modality by a large number of humanitarian actors during the Super Typhoon Haiyan response. For example, WFP partnered with Pantawid Pamilyang to offer the Emergency Cash Transfer Top-Up Project, which reached approximately 500,000 beneficiaries offering “assistance more quickly than either institution could have done on its own” (WFP and BFA, 2015, p. 11). To illustrate only a few other examples, in 2011, ACF provided conditional grants^[2] through paper commodity vouchers in the aftermath of the floods in Cotabato, and Oxfam intervened with unconditional^[3] and conditional cash transfers for emergency food security and livelihoods rehabilitation during the response to Typhoon Ketsana (Poisson, 2011).

Despite the common usage of CTP, practitioners report that the modality decision making does not sufficiently consider the status of the market before the crisis, nor the continued and changing functionality of the market as well as upstream pipeline and feeder markets after the shock. Furthermore, there is no real ownership within the IHOs for continuous market monitoring in an emergency response in order to, when necessary, switch back to in-kind assistance when markets’ capacity does not meet ongoing demand. Moreover, there is still considerable pressure on IHOs to make a modality decision before having a thorough understanding of the market.

Cases such as the one in the Philippines raise the following question: How can HOs ensure seamless transitions between in-kind and cash modalities?

To do so, HOs must cultivate a thorough understanding of the entire local supply chain and market, including producers and suppliers, wholesalers, transporters, distributors and local shops. This will require close interaction with the local private sector, civil society organizations and HOs on the ground as they will know the local markets best. Humanitarian actors need to continuously monitor the market and fully understand their upstream supply chain in order to ensure suppliers are ready to provide their services or deliver the requested number of items during a response. During the preparedness phase, HOs can support market strengthening activities, such as enhancing storage, transport, distribution, equipment, access to credit and business skills trainings for small business owners, so that local supply chains are more resilient for future emergencies and in a position to enable cash-based programs.

When CTPs are used in emergency response, HOs still have an important role to play in the supply chain. Support to supply chains can include repairs to roads and bridges along vital supply routes and assisting transporters and distributors with access to fuel so that goods can be delivered. Additionally, local producers can be supported with financial grants or equipment to increase production. It can take time for markets to feel the full impact of an emergency, which can lead to either a false positive or negative market reading during initial, rapid assessments. Even when organizations provide assistance via cash-based programming, they must still monitor supply chains and markets to ensure CTP activities are appropriate (as they depend on functioning local markets) as well as maintain their own supply chains for relief items. In some instances, HOs may need to quickly transition back to in-kind modalities if the local market fails to ensure that beneficiaries receive assistance. However, it will become more and more likely that IHOs will need to switch back and forth between in-kind and cash assistance, especially in the aftermath of natural disasters. Investments need to be made in agility, not just cash or in-kind – and the sector should recognize that both will continue to have a place in humanitarian response. The HSC is an integral component in a program delivery structure and encourages better use of market monitoring and analysis to inform agile modality change.

The armed conflict that started in March 2011 has left 4.8m refugees (UNHCR, 2016) and 13.5m people requiring humanitarian assistance within Syria (data reported up to March 16, 2016) (OCHA, 2016). There are several parties to the conflict and one of the methods of war adopted has been for opposing forces to besiege areas, making it impossible for HOs to deliver uninterrupted assistance to these locations. Indeed, in 2016, the regional director of the Near and Middle East of the International Committee of the Red Cross, called for rapid and regular access to these communities as people’s conditions under siege are dreadful, with the elderly, women and children suffering from severe malnourishment (ICRC, 2016).

Sadly, it is not just the war in Syria that is an example of such a situation; Yemen is also facing similar conditions. The humanitarian operation in the country has been jeopardized because there is no longer a functioning or continuous supply corridor^[4]. Aid has been restricted by intense fighting, the proliferation of checkpoints, communication gaps in the lines of command and control within armed groups and bureaucratic requirements imposed by the Yemeni authorities (UN News Centre, 2016). These conditions have caused delays and unpredictability of the supply chain, which is reflected in the cost of the operation. For example, the security situation thwarted several attempts to reach the city of Aden by sea, forcing ships to turn back, causing unexpected costs. This could have been avoided by ensuring a safer and neutral corridor (Schlein, 2015).

According to the interviewees, in a complex emergency, such as the Syria conflict, there are always multiple regional factors that directly affect the situation in-country. These factors are often outside the control of humanitarian actors and even governments. However, one way of achieving a level of control over the response is to have an agile and flexible supply chain that can adapt “on the fly” to changing security situations. For example, the delivery of emergency items was not affected in Syria when specific border crossings were closed due to clashes between different groups thanks to supplier agreements created in different countries in the region in addition to the transport and customs provider lists compiled for each potential entry point. This information made it easier to switch to different border crossing/ports as required by the situation and allowed operations to continue unimpeded, with certain ports being used more frequently (e.g. Beirut Port, when Tartous Port was temporarily closed down). The ability to implement quick scaling down and scaling up of corridors and hubs according to need was a key element of the continuity of the supply chain.

These examples where political and insecure environments affect the entire HSC and hinder humanitarian operations raise an important question: How can the humanitarian sector ensure uninterrupted supply access to beneficiaries in a complex emergency?

“A strong determination at the highest level of global political leadership is necessary to prevent and resolve conflicts” (High-Level Panel on Humanitarian Financing, 2016). Our recommendation is for governments, as the stakeholder with the highest political influence, to guarantee that affected populations receive necessary assistance by ensuring that the HSC remains neutral and is respected accordingly.

One key factor facilitating the aid delivery in the Syria Emergency Response was the UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 2165 of 2014 which authorized UN agencies to utilize additional border crossings from Turkey to Syria (UNSCR, 2014). This allowed additional humanitarian aid to reach people in need, irrespective of their affiliation in the broader conflict. This was one example of high-level advocacy and decision making directly affecting access on the ground, which can be taken as a precedent for similar complex emergencies in the future. In addition, the enforcement of ceasefires in late 2015 and early 2016, which were brokered at the highest levels of the United Nations between sovereign regional nations and groups within Syria, also changed ground realities and allowed access to previously inaccessible and hard-to-reach areas. While some progress has been made, much can still be done by the international community to ensure all civilian populations are reached and humanitarian activities are protected within Syria.

Another challenge during recent emergencies is that security is not always considered when planning the supply chain. Currently, security is not discussed consistently, and at a detailed enough level within the existing Clusters, and there is potential for security-focused forums (such as the United Nations Security Management Team) to coordinate more closely with the Clusters in order to better inform their supply chain planning. This increased coordination and information sharing should not be limited to the UN and must also include other existing security networks including NGOs security forums. The time and financial costs of assuring safe access cannot be understated and, with complex crises increasing, there is a need for states as duty bearers to recommit to ensuring safe access to affected populations. Furthermore, we call on the humanitarian community to provide a seat at the table for the HSC during security discussions as access constraints have cost implications for supply chains as well as beneficiaries.

The role of international and national private sector actors in humanitarian delivery is not a new one. The evolution of roles has moved beyond simply suppliers (the private sector) and buyers (IHOs), to increasingly recognizing the interdependencies that exist and the potential to collaborate towards mutually beneficial outcomes. For example, a problem or delay in the private sector’s upstream supply chain can dramatically jeopardize humanitarian assistance, as has already been seen during the response to the Ebola outbreak in 2014. The shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) components directly affected the scale and speed of response with some HOs unable to open new clinics or expand their field operations. Furthermore, this interdependency also affected the manufacturer side. For instance, during the outbreak, the demand of the PPE components was perhaps understandably uncertain, the number of items requested to the suppliers was exaggerated and so was the quantity produced by the manufacturers. For that reason, DuPont – a PPE producer (http://www.dupont.com/) – tripled its production and, Lakeland Industries Inc. – another PPE producer http://www.lakeland.com/ – acquired new machines after receiving orders exceeding a million units (Mcavoy and Kase, 2014). Demand information was not shared among suppliers and manufacturers creating thus the bullwhip effect.

Interdependencies were also observed in the partnership between the Logistics Cluster, UPS – a logistics company (https://www.ups.com/us/en/global.page) – and Cologne-Bonn Airport. The three organizations established a humanitarian staging area in Cologne, for the consolidation of air shipments providing frequent air transport opportunities to Ebola-affected countries, reducing delivery times of life-saving supplies, and facilitating critical cost-saving (Global Logistics Cluster, 2015).

Circumstances such as the ones observed during the Ebola response raise the following question: How can the humanitarian and private sectors leverage and benefit from their inherent interdependencies, towards improved humanitarian outcomes?

The humanitarian sector should leverage both sectors’ capacities by establishing long-term collaborations with the private sector recognizing its role as an enabler of humanitarian work at local, regional and international levels. This collaboration can be improved by establishing integrated partnerships based on cross-sectoral planning. A better reaction to a crisis can be ensured by having the private sector involved in the preparedness phase, according to the interviewees. These partnerships could also help the humanitarian sector get more access to innovative technologies like 3D printing (OCHA, 2015). Furthermore, the integrated partnerships could be manifested in pre-agreements on virtual stocks, priority access to production information, stockpiles and service capacity, for instance in future health pandemics. In order to meet large-scale response needs, in particular pandemic health crises, the humanitarian sector will also need to improve the management of upstream supply chains which will call for a better coordination, transparency and integrated data sharing and, of course, significant steps forward in the harmonization of data and move standardized terms.

As previously mentioned, considerable efforts have been made since the Indian Ocean tsunami to increase the coordination of HSC actors. However, it is evident in recent crises that the number of actors is dramatically increasing, both in the international community and, perhaps more positively, in the national community. The diversity of actors is also changing, as we observe an increasing military presence in humanitarian response, as well as smaller civil society actors and the local private sector. This puts a strain on the coordination system and mechanisms that have so far been developed.

Nowhere was this more evident than in the Haiti 2010 earthquake response, where more than 200 organizations deployed simultaneously. The core aims for coordination (including the elimination of duplication, the maintaining of standards, strategic information driven decision making, and prioritization), were greatly impaired by the scale of response but, more so, by the sheer number of actors involved and the inconsistent familiarity amongst actors with the humanitarian coordination systems and ways of working. This could also be seen, albeit on a smaller scale, in the Nepal 2015 earthquake response where from one day to the next the fluctuations in the composition and number of actors in the Logistics Cluster meetings significantly challenged the coordination efforts.

We have illustrated the supply chain’s bullwhip effect during the Ebola outbreak response as one of the logistical challenges faced during emergencies. However, the Ebola outbreak that began in Guinea on March 22, 2014, brought up many other logistical challenges. For example, the lack of air capacity to transport relief items to the affected countries pushed humanitarian stakeholders to come up with innovative solutions to solve the problem. An Air Coordination Cell (ACC) was organized by the Logistics Cluster and hosted by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Supply Division. The ACC promoted air consolidation through information sharing on available air capacity by circulating daily updates to 42 agencies.

Common or collaborative services are often utilized depending on the place and type of the emergency. For example, at national level, inter-coordination processes among NGOs can often optimize the operation’s expenses by sharing local warehouses and offices. Furthermore, the Emergency Telecommunications Cluster (etc.) provides inter-agency basic security communications services and, voice and data connectivity to all organizations in the aftermath of a disaster (ETC, 2016). At international level, the United Nations Humanitarian Response Depots (UNHRD) offers the stockpile of relief items in six different warehouses around the world. It also acts as “one-stop-shop” where other organizations can find logistical services such as storage, procurement, transport, handling, customs clearance, cargo consolidation and technical assistance (UNHRD, 2016). At international level, the Humanitarian Procurement Centres (HPCs), as not-for-profit organizations accredited by ECHO, offer standardized items and services necessary for the response to a catastrophe. The HOs can procure from them without the requirement for competitive tendering and ECHO funded actions, (ECHO, 2016). They are hence enabled to get goods on the ground quickly and efficiently, whilst ensuring the reliability and quality of the goods supplied. In addition to the ones already mentioned, many different models of shared and common services have evolved in recent years with a wide range of actors involved, including, but by no means limited to (Table I).

These, and other collaborative models, lead to the following two questions: How can the humanitarian sector evolve their coordination with increasing numbers of actors, to maintain humanitarian standards and effectiveness? And how can the humanitarian sector rationalize our supply chains to meet increasing needs?

Coordination is greatly facilitated by knowing the response actors before a crisis. The need to know the actors on this increasing scale will drive the humanitarian sector to improve coordination and to enhance the preparedness of coordination at the local level. Expanding the establishment of local networks and aligning these to both long-term and short-term humanitarian preparedness scenarios, could greatly contribute to future response. The continued investment in strategic coordination and information management efforts is vital to achieve this as well as broader coordination outcomes.

As international organizations evolve to meet a different humanitarian future, there are opportunities to further share, consolidate and rationalize their operations. One size does not fit all, and the success of shared services will almost certainly lie in more examples rather than fewer, but to reduce the costs of operations and be able to meet increasing demands, the international organizations will need to radically rethink their supply chains to survive and to thrive. One article which challenges us on this suggests: “Whatever the future holds, the idea that each INGO needs to have their own separate office and logistics to deliver missions that are increasingly seen as overlapping is implausible” (Porter, 2016).

Even if many organizations explore shared services models as a way to rationalize their operational and back office costs, there is a need to draw from examples of good practice demonstrating strong proof of concept models for the sector. This paper recommends the donors to support big and small, national and international organizations to experiment in the future with new ways of working and learning from other sectors and to sustainably cut their costs, including funding efforts with a tolerance of failure.

We have examined very different case studies to highlight a number of critical issues affecting the future of humanitarian operations and the supply chain:

• strengthening local response;

• markets and cash-based programming;

• access to beneficiaries during complex emergencies;

• engagement of the private sector in humanitarian operations; and

• common services and coordination among humanitarian stakeholders.

The questions posed to us by each case study have stimulated a range of recommendations to address the needs of the global humanitarian future. However, in addition to the recommendations already made, there are a number of other areas which are critical to enabling these actions to progress to meet the future humanitarian needs. The first area relates more to advocacy both towards donors and inside the HOs regarding the important role that the HSC plays. The second area acts as a condition for the first since the humanitarian sector cannot expect other stakeholders to change their approaches if they first do not change theirs. The last one goes deeper into how partnerships can help strengthening local networks.

Changing how the sector funds: this paper recommends new and innovative investments in deliberate and strategic preparedness for future response. The humanitarian sector’s current funding model, distinguishing “Development” and “Humanitarian” activities (thinking in silos) is no longer fit for purpose. To make strategic and sustainable investments in preparedness, the sector needs to rethink this funding paradigm and enable more creative activities which do not naturally fit in the current boxes as well as increasing humanitarian spending on preparedness; it also needs to tap the potential in other funding including aligning infrastructure development work towards achieving resilience goals and leveraging private sector spend towards humanitarian outcomes. Since a significant proportion of humanitarian financing currently is from institutional donors, and 60 to 80 percent of costs lie in the supply chain, it is perhaps notable that the most senior practitioners in the HSC are often still not represented at the strategic level within their organizations, and further have little direct dialogue with the institutional donor community. Hence it is the recommendation of this study that the executive management teams of HOs have HSC represented and that a cross-sector think tank on humanitarian financing be established. This forum would create a new dialogue between the institutional donor community, supply chain implementers and the private sector.

Changing our own silos: further to the funding separation, many international organizations still maintain an inherent structural separation of humanitarian and development programs and operations, which can inhibit the extent to which our thinking, design and implementation considers the continuous as a whole. If the humanitarian sector wants to help vulnerable countries to achieve a better future though development programs but also helping them to respond to disasters, the sector must also change their internal structures and strategies around this and look how to best integrate humanitarian and development programs, leveraging their investments to achieve the greatest impact.

Strengthening local networks: the paper also touches on the challenges ahead to maintain and improve coordination and collaboration in an increasingly populous and complex aid community as well as the recommendations made above, there is a need to further expand multi-sector local logistics networks, which would bring together the private, public, local civil society and other logistics practitioners. These networks would need support to bring preparedness onto their agenda and scenario-based operational planning for future responses. These networks should not be explicitly “humanitarian” networks, but, as resonated earlier in the paper, break down those silos of humanitarian and non-humanitarian and private sector groups to form a function-oriented community of practice. These networks will also be crucial in expanding the national human resource pool of logisticians available to respond. It needs to be recognized that, in addition to the points raised in this paper, there remains a critical human resource gap in the humanitarian logistics community, whereby demand is significantly exceeding the available professional resources. It is a recommendation of this article that the international humanitarian actors build and expand partnerships with practitioners from different sectors in an effort to increase global, agile capacity (there are of course strong examples already existing of organizations that invest in building local capacity for example through investing in local manufacturing like Meds and Food for kids or Field Ready). This approach would contribute in forecasting future demands and considering creative solutions to build national, regional and global responders. Bridging sector and organizational boundaries, this approach will ensure that future national response is effectively, professionally and consistently augmented and complemented by international logistics support.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of issues facing the HSC; examples of important elements which are key to the HSC system but did not arise from the interviews include, but are not limited to data availability and data use to inform decision making, professionalization of the HSC and accountability and transparency in operations. While much depends on individual emergency contexts and external factors, we feel that a lot can be undertaken to improve HSCs. Hence a noted limitation of this paper is that it focuses more on the preparedness phase. An analysis based on the response and recovery phases of humanitarian crisis could bring further insights opening new research avenues.

This paper is intended to open the debate, stimulate further discussions and generate ideas for improvements, future research and strategic investments in humanitarian operations and their supply chains. Most importantly, we hope that the paper will inspire commitment from all humanitarian stakeholders to assist with improving the efficiency, cost effectiveness and agility of HSCs, to the benefit of affected populations.

ACC

Air Coordination Cell

ACF

Action Against Hunger

BCG

Boston Consulting Group

CTP

Cash Transfer Program

DFID

Department for International Development

ECHO

European Commission’s Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection Department

ETC

Emergency Telecommunications Cluster

GS1

Global Standards One

HOs

Humanitarian Organizations

HPCs

Humanitarian Procurement Centers

HSC

Humanitarian Supply Chain

ICRC

International Committee of the Red Cross

IFRC

International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies

IHOs

International Humanitarian Organizations

INGOs

International Non-Governmental Organizations

IOM

International Organization for Migration

MAF

Mission Aviation Fellowship

MSF

Doctors without Borders

NGOs

Non-Governmental Organizations

OCHA

Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

PPE

Personal Protective Equipment

ROI

Return on Investment

THW

Technisches Hilfswerk (German government disaster relief organization)

UN

United Nations

UNDP

United Nations Development Program

UNHAS

United Nations Humanitarian Air Service

UNHCR

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

UNHRD

United Nations Humanitarian Response Depot

UNICEF

United Nations Children’s Fund

UNSCR

United Nations Security Council

UPS

United Parcel Service

WFP

World Food Program

WHS

World Humanitarian Summit