New Method Of Delivering Emergency Aid Saves Agencies Precious Time And Money
A revolutionary approach to delivering humanitarian aid to disaster areas introduced by Advance Aid can boost local economies in developing countries, cut costs threefold and reduce carbon emissions by 58 times.
Research by Cardiff Business School (CBS) published today reveals how delivering aid to disaster areas could become more sustainable.
Currently, up to 60% of the estimated $12bn annual budget of disaster relief is spent in Africa. But less than 10% of the products supplied are made there, with the rest being delivered from outside Africa – largely from China and India, but also from Europe and even North America – after a disaster has occurred.
The CBS research shows that Advance Aid’s model of the emergency relief supply chain is more efficient and cost effective than conventional methods.
Advance Aid, a new non-governmental organisation, introduces a proactive model for disaster relief supply. It focuses on the sustainable development of high-risk regions, such as Africa. Advance Aid advocates producing emergency relief goods in the areas where disasters are most likely to happen and storing them locally at all times. This will create local jobs, cut spending on aid and significantly reduce the carbon footprint currently generated by aid agencies that have to fly in relief aid from overseas.
Using four key performance indicators – lead times, supply chain vulnerability, total costs and carbon footprint – CBS focused on one essential emergency relief item, tarpaulin, and analysed the way it is currently being supplied to disaster areas. CBS then compared the standard method of supplying aid against Advance Aid’s model and found the latter to be more efficient.
Betty Maina, chief executive of the Kenya Manufacturers Assocation said: “As the body tasked with promoting competitive local manufacturing, we did not need to be convinced that manufacturing emergency relief materials for Africa in Africa was a good idea. It is very encouraging to see that academic research supports this. I am delighted that Advance Aid’s is planning to establish its first hub in Kenya.”
George Fenton, Chairman of the Humanitarian Logistics Association, said: “I strongly believe that the humanitarian sector has a lot to learn from the highly sophisticated approach taken to logistics by the commercial world. I think the lessons that can be learned from the Cardiff Business School report will be taken to heart by the humanitarian sector – indeed, in many cases they are already being acted upon.”
David Dickie, Director of Advance Aid, said: “I was not surprised by the results of the Cardiff work, as they confirmed all of the anecdotal stories that I have heard over the past two years. But it is still striking to see these results in black and white. Their methodology exposed many of the flaws in the current supply chains which we can fix with local production.”
David Taylor, Senior Research Fellow at Cardiff Business School, said: “Value Chain Analysis (VCA), which is based on the Lean principles developed by Toyota, has been employed here to provide a systematic and quantified evaluation of existing models of supplying aid into Africa compared to the alternative of local manufacture and pre-positioned stock holding. VCA techniques are now widely used by leading edge organisations in the commercial sector, but to the best of my knowledge this project is the first application of these techniques in the humanitarian sector.”
