Delivering in a Moving World: Looking to our supply chains to meet the increasing scale, cost and complexity of humanitarian needs was developed by Sara Guerrero-Garcia (Kuehne Logistics University), Jean-Baptiste Lamarche (ACF), Rebecca Vince (Plan International), Stephen Cahill (WFP) and Maria Besiou (Kuehne Logistics University).
According to the report, sixty to eighty percent of humanitarian response budgets are consumed by supply chain costs. How to ensure both efficiency and effectiveness of supply chains is obviously a fundamental issue. The authors have attempted to frame the issue around sometimes neglected ground truths.
A couple of long quotes from the report on the role of private supply chains in civic and public crisis response:
The humanitarian sector should leverage both sectors’ capacities by establishing long-term collaborations with the private sector that recognises the role of the private sector as an enabler of humanitarian work at local, regional and international levels. This collaboration can be improved by establishing integrated partnerships based on cross-functional planning as a better reaction to a crisis can be ensured by having the private sector involved in the preparedness phase. These integrated partnerships could manifest in pre-agreements on virtual stocks, priority access to production information, stockpiles and service capacity, for instance in future health pandemics. They may also include the development of virtual supply chains, innovative technological tools to improve the accuracy of the demand forecast and the establishment of local partnerships. In order to meet large scale response needs, in particular pandemic health crises, we will also need to improve the management of upstream supply chains which will call for a better coordination, transparency and integrated data sharing.Later in the document is this recommendation:
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 plan 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.There is also attention to using cash distribution to stimulate and restore market-based channels. The authors affirmatively quote Ian Ridley, senior director of World Vision, who advocates for a humanitarian response which is “as local as possible, and as international as necessary”.
All good. All helpful. And it is worth some further attention to differences between private, civic, and public sectors in terms of purposes, worldview, command-and-control, and alternative attitudes toward different facets of risk.
For example, what is a meaningful operational definition of "integrated partnerships" as used above? Given the differences between sectors is this a realistic goal? Might "agile" or "adaptive" or even "pre-planned" partnerships be more realistic?
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