A Humourless Lot» Logistics, health and aid: A Humourless Lot -

Humourless links for April 28, 2010

Michael Keizer — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 07:11:43 +0000

Regular readers know about my preoccupation with duct tape. I am happy to say that I am not alone.
Dilbert’s view of pandemic contingency planning. I wish.
I recently have become a member of the International Association of Public Health Logisticians (IAPHL). Highly recommended for the very interesting discussions going on in their (closed) forums.
Emerald will start publishing the Journal of Humanitarian Logistics and Supply Chain Management next year. The blurb looks highly promising. The editors have issued a call for papers.
Analytics Magazine published a short article with ten recommendations to improve humanitarian logistics. Sadly, they are so thin on how to implement their recommendations that they could just as well have given only one: ‘improve humanitarian logistics’.
A guide to NGOs for the military. I wonder how many NGOs for the military need a guide. (H/T Chris Albon.)
An interesting application of standard logistics risk management on very large systems – like whole societies. (H/T Chris Watkins a.k.a. @chriswaterguy – there seems to be a Chris-thing going on here).
FAILfare: learning from failure. A great idea – anybody in to organise something similar for health/aid logistics? (H/T Suzanne Rainey)
Stop Stockouts seemed a great idea, but is now totally abandoned. Too bad.
WHO finally published a procurement guideline for antimalarials. Let’s hope they will do something similar for other health commodities.
After my earlier negativity on gifts in kind, now a story about an organisation that seems to do it right. Any reader who has first-hand experience with this outfit?
I have been on Twitter for some time now (you can follow @Michael_Keizer for regular updates), but more recently I started a Facebook page. It’s a great place for discussions with like-minded people and allows for a bit more two-way communication than the blog.
I have also been working on a bibliography on logistics for global health and aid, using a Zotero group. The bibliography is open for everyone, but Zotero users can import and use it directly into their own libraries. I would appreciate any additions: it is a living document and suggestions for additions and improvements are more than welcome.

[Image: Liquid Links by Desirae; some rights reserved.]

Humourless links for March 1, 2010

Michael Keizer — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 02:28:00 +0000

Yet another scholarship from the awesome Zaragoza Logistics Center.
The British Red Cross combines fundraising and teaching people about the logistics realities of a disaster in a hands-on, weekend-long exercise. Looks very appealing. The BRC has been raising its logistics profile over the last year or so in some very interesting ways.
Forward Accountability: the best new development in development since the air-conditioned Landcruiser.
Well, well, well. The UN waking up to the importance of logistics for peacekeeping.
Sigh. Condoms costing lives? Hardly.
I have said it before and I will say it again: aid is complex and trying to simplify it does not help. Luckily I am not the only one to say so.

[Image: Liquid Links by Desirae; some rights reserved.]

Not a fairy tale: when the five rights of logistics are not enough

Michael Keizer — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:54:58 +0000

Warning: serious business in a very silly disguise ahead.

You will of course remember that logistics is all about the five rights: getting the right goods, in the right quantity, to the right location, at the right time, at the right price. (And if you don’t, you could read all about it in my March article on the five rights.)

But now imagine the following scenario (perhaps a bit too literally a scenario, but please humour me).

You are the logistics coordinator for a nutritional NGO in the Kingdom of Far Far Away. After a rather nasty little conflict about a swamp, large groups of displaced people have moved to the edges of the disputed area, where spontaneous IDP camps have appeared. As there is hardly any food available there, levels of malnutrition rise alarmingly (and there there have even been some unconfirmed cases of cannibalism amongst one of the tribes, the Jinjabredmen). Your NGO has decided to intervene and you are tasked with finding sufficient amounts of the local staple, faerivloss.

You have two possible sources for the faerivloss:

You can buy it in the capital for about 200,000 shrec/MT (about $800/MT). Transport by local truck (affectionately called ‘donkeys’ because of their usually greyish colour, their ability to where even stallions can’t, and their drivers’ propensity for Eddie Murphy impersonations) will cost you an additional 30,000 shrec/MT.
You can get the faerivloss for free from the local sub-office of WFG (the World’s Fairy Godmother) who just received an enormous donation of the food from the Republic of Dizneeland (halfway across the globe). The donation is sitting in warehouses in the main harbour, but the government of Dizneeland offers to transport it for free to the IDP camps using a number of MH-53E Sea Dragon helicopters, stationed on a carrier just of the coast.

Not a difficult choice, isn’t it? Both options give you the right goods, in the right quantity, at the right location, at the right time; but the donation gives it to you for a price that is much righter than the locally bought goods. So you quickly fill in the WFG requisition forms and go off for a beer.

A couple of years later, you return to Far Far Away as part of your organisation’s emergency team. Although the IDP’s have all returned home after the resolution of the conflict and the accession of the new king (as the result of the unfortunate anuration of the old one), the region again is in the grip of a famine, and you quickly find out why: after the importation of massive amount of free faerivloss, the price on the local markets collapsed and the local farmers were forced of their land (and have moved to giant slums in the capital, where they joined the former donkey drivers, who now try to make a precarious living by driving taxis or, if they are lucky, work as drivers for the numerous NGOs that have made their base there). Most of the land lies fallow, and there will be no faerivloss harvested for the second year in a row. Complicating matters is that the local harbour is rendered largely unusable due to a number of very destructive hurricanes – probably the result of global warming.

Suddenly you get a sinking feeling in your stomach; similar to what you felt when, as a five-year-old, you pulled the tail of what you thought was the neighbour’s cat, but turned out to be some strange feline wearing boots and a rapier, speaking Spanish-accented English.

Of course, in reality our decisions will normally not have such dramatic consequences – but each of our decisions could have smaller but still noticeable negative consequences. When you import goods from overseas, you will have an impact on the local economy, and transport will have an impact on the global environment. And, of course, the fact that your NGO does not need to pay for the donated goods or their transport, does not mean that those costs have not been incurred.

Normally it is not up to us logisticians to make the decision whether we would forego a possible advantage for our organisation, based on wider-ranging considerations like climate change or economic consequences. However, it is up to us to make the people who do take these decisions aware of the possible consequences of our logistical choices, and ensure that they know that there is more than just the one option.

The aid logistics drinking game

Michael Keizer — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 13:18:26 +0000

Michael Kleinman, you are dangerous.

Over at his blog at change.org, Michael started a new trend: humanitarian drinking games. After Michael himself put up the first of those, TransitionLand and Harry Rud soon followed. Time for a logistics version, methinks — after all, loggies need to keep up their reputation as the hardest-drinking, loudest-talking hardasses of humanitarian work.

Every time somebody talks about “the logistics of this-or-that” when they are just thinking of normal organisational tasks, take a drink.
Every time somebody changes a protocol without thinking of the consequences of the supply line, take a drink.
Every time your organisation starts a new program without thinking of logistics, empty your bottle.
Every time somebody complains about not receiving the wine and cheese that they ordered, take another glass from the bottle that you confiscated from their care package.
Every time somebody asks how many logisticians it takes to screw in a light bulb (none — the bulb is stil in transit, haw, haw, haw), empty your bottle over their head.

Remember: if you see a bunch of drunk aid workers weaving across the streets of Monrovia, Yangon, or Medellin, don’t blame me — blame Michael Kleinman.

The new pirate threat: germs

Michael Keizer — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 11:01:56 +0000

If you are interested in logistics, health, and aid, the United States Naval Institute (USNI) blog is a wonder. Really.

The more-or-less recent attention in military circles for soft power means that the USNI is also more and more interested in how the Navy can be involved in aid, in order to win hearts and minds (force multipliers^[1], anyone?). Of course, the US Navy is also one of the biggest logistics operations in the world (hey, logistics originally is a military science). So of course the USNI can be a source of fascinating stuff about the two.

One of those little gems was published a couple of weeks back. As the Navy is actively involved in catching those elusive Somalian pirates, some people are getting worried what an outbreak of e.g. MDR-TB, brought across by captured pirates, could do on a closely-packed military vessel. The stuff of nightmares, apparently, and they even quote MSF to support that. Luckily a commenter makes clear that TB is not that easy to transmit, but still…

My first posting ever on this blog was about the threat to aid (and hence to population health) posed by Somalian pirates. Apparently that threat goes further than that, and Navy sailors can be threatened by more than bullets.

(Picture: Arrrgh! | Pirates by Joriel “Joz” Jimenez. Some rights reserved.)

Footnote

[1] I find it curious that nobody noticed that Powell used the term ‘force multipliers’ routinely — he even had a personal rule: “[p]erpetual optimism is a force multiplier.” So his description of aid organisations as force multipliers might actually have been a lot less meaningful than it has been described. Still not a smart thing to say, though.

Wonders of logistics

Michael Keizer — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 22:45:04 +0000

Demonicious is a source of often hilarious (but at times simply irritating) visual humour. Two weeks back they posted a series of pictures under the title Wonders of Logistics. Recommended for a smile and an occasional snort. A selection:

Update (November 14, 2009): Apparently Demonicious has disappeared from the web, and their funny photos with them. Too bad.

Updated update (November 21, 2009): And now they’re back again, with a new design. I guess they were just out for maintenance for a while.

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Great quote

Michael Keizer — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 22:28:08 +0000

“Logistics, if it was easy it would be called taxes.”

- Retired Army Lieutenant General Russel Honore, reported by Eric Holdeman at The Disaster Zone.

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