Medair is looking for logistics coordinators in Sudan and Uganda
GOAL is looking for a Logistics Advisor Emergency Response and for Logistics Coordinators for North and South Sudan (what’s up with the ‘logisitics’, guys? don’t want people to find the vacancies?)
An aid convoy set off yesterday from London to Gaza, organised by a number of private donors and organisers. By itself this is nothing new: trucks and small convoys with private aid have been going on for quite some time already, mainly to Eastern Europe. However, there is one difference here: the Viva Gaza convoy comprised about 100 vehicles, amongst which a number of ambulances loaded with medical supplies.
This is more than a quantitative difference: with this convoy, privately organised aid suddenly has reached a scale that puts it in the same league as many established international aid organisations. Up to now, private aid was always limited by the lack of logistics capacity: a more or less hard limit of about ten vehicles, about fifty staff, and about 10 metric tonnes of goods seemed to prevent private aid from ever achieving the scale of professionally organised aid. This convoy smashes that limit with panache.
Not so long ago, ‘citizen journalism’ was seen as a fringe activity that could never threaten the position of the printed press. Just a couple of years later, is was suddenly perceived as the biggest danger to the newspaper industry in decades. These days, most of us would see it as an interesting and useful complement to newspapers and magazines, with both comparative strengths and weaknesses. Could we now see the start of a similar ‘citizen aid’ movement?
Of course the organisers are running into a number of logistical issues; e.g. having a number of participants arrested within a day on suspicion of terrorist activities is not auspicious. However, I still think this convoy might some day be seen as the start of a new era for the aid industry, in which big international and national aid organisations work side by side with citizen aid — and will be more stringently be held to new standards that will develop from successes in private aid activities. The only restraint for that to happen, large-scale logistics, seems to have been overcome.
Over at Market Sceptics, Eric deCarbonnel predicts a food catastrophe for 2009. My knowledge of food production is not good enough to really assess whether or not he is right, but he makes a convincing case. For example, have a look at this map:
You will notice that there is a large overlap between the countries that experience the worst droughts and that produce most of the world’s food: China, Australia, and the USA. Not a very reassuring idea.
So what would this mean for us? Well, you can be pretty sure that organisations that deal with food aid, WFP most of all, will be busy. WFP logistics will most likely be strained to its limit, if not beyond. Logisticians in any organisation that deals with the malnourished (and that would include almost any medical or food aid NGO) will have to deal with an increase in the number of feeding programs that will have to be supported, and should already prepare to be able to do so — e.g. by taking a hard look at their procurement and transport capacity for therapeutic food. And manufacturers of therapeutic food can look forward to yet another big year — if their production and logistics capacity can keep up.
Does your organisation have the logistics capacity to deal with this?
I recently bought thermal underwear from New Zealand outdoor clothing manufacturer Icebreaker. I am not going to bore anybody with an account of how good their stuff is (but yes, it is very good), but tell you a little story about the origins of my undies.
The wool for my leggings came from four of Icebreaker’s 120 sheep stations: Walter Peak Station, Olvig Station, Omarama Station, and Te Akatarawa station, which are all located in the South of New Zealand’s South Island. How do I know? Every Icebreaker garment contains what they call a baacode (no, they will not win the price for the world’s greatest wits). This code links to a database that contains production data for each of the batches of fabric that are used for their products, back to the original station and wool batch data. This is all part of what Icebreaker calls their ‘transparent supply chain‘.
Obviously, in medical logistics, such transparency is as least as important. Everybody who has ever been involved in a product recall will be able to testify to the difficulties that always crop up as a result of a lack of data about exactly which products are where in the supply line. Yet our supply lines are normally quite a lot simpler than Icebreaker’s: for each product, we usually have only a couple of potential suppliers (not more than 100 like Icebreaker), and we usually have only some tens of distribution points, a couple of hundreds at the outside (not thousands); yet we are hardly ever able to easily perform a trace like this one without a lot of hard work (which is too bad), often taking a lot of time to do so (which is a lot worse, knowing that in the mean time people could die from the effects).
Logistics management in medical aid work rarely use relatively simple tools like traces of from cradle to grave. Taking into account what this could mean for our patients, it is high time that we start implementing this as a minimum standard.
Icebreaker shows that this is more than empty wool-gathering.
Original artwork by Australian Leon Rice-Whetton, who made this drawing to honour the Country Fire Authority's (mostly volunteer) firefighters. Some rights reserved; see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/deed.en
I think most aid workers see aid as something that we do for others. However, sometimes things can get very close, even uncomfortably so. Fires are raging across much of Victoria, the Australian state in which I live. Hundreds of people have died, and thousands are homeless. An unprecedented aid campaign is under way, with fire-fighters, both military and civilian, being flown in from all over the country, and resources flowing in from all directions — including international aid organisations like OXFAM and Save The Children.
Compared to aid operation in a country like e.g. Sudan, all this is small stuff; but its impact on a country of only 20 million people that has never experienced anything like it, is staggering. The logistics of it is taking up a large slice of the country’s capacity, especially as this capacity is severely impacted by the fires themselves. Luckily, the aid operations seem to be going relatively smoothly.
I live in a relatively safe part of Melbourne myself, but like most Australians my thoughts are continuously with my friends who are not so lucky — and I am greatful for the aid that they receive.
Although I am obviously very happy that the crew can now safely go home, I am also a bit worried what this will mean for future shipments. The message to the pirates seems to be that, how ever high the profile, you can get away with a high-sea hijack and expect to paid handsomely — and that will not do anything to prevent attacks on aid ships at all. To quote Noah Shachtman: “Score one — a big one — for the pirates of Somalia.”
