Conference on Humanitarian Logistics Offers Immediate Real World Applications

Tue., May 13, 2008
When Anna Nagurney, an operations management professor in UMass Amherst’s Isenberg School of Management, organized “Humanitarian Logistics: Networks for Africa,” she gained a far more powerful experience than she had bargained for. Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the conference brought together academics and human services practitioners from 12 nations, who examined logistics and supply chain research, African field experiences, and logistics partnerships between the academic community and African nations and relief agencies.

From day one of the conference (it took place on May 5-9 at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center at Lake Como in Italy) its emotional atmosphere remained supercharged, in large part due to the powerful cyclone that had unleashed its force on Myanmar two days before. “One invited speaker from World Vision International had to leave immediately to help with the humanitarian mission; he continued to feed us reports from the field,” recalled Nagurney. “A second conferee from the UN stayed on but made sure that the right communication equipment was being sent to the disaster area.”

One aim of the conference, noted Nagurney, who is a Fulbright Fellow and John F. Smith Memorial Professor of Operations Management, was to give practitioners a better understanding of the logistics models that business academicians build to move goods and services more efficiently within and across markets and economies. At the same time, the conference deepened academicians’ understanding of the challenges (i.e., inefficiencies) that accompany humanitarian logistics, especially in undeveloped African nations.

“Most of the participants agreed that humanitarian logistics is 15 to 20 years behind its business counterpart,” emphasized Nagurney. “Apart from that, humanitarian logistics poses its own physical, cultural, and governmental challenges. Myanmar, for example, is one of the poorest nations in the world. Its primitive transportation, communication, and financial networks have slowed down the pace of humanitarian relief. But far more tragic has been the military junta’s impediments to relief from the outside world. We learned from a conference participant, for example, that the Myanmar government had ignored the Indian government’s warning of a cyclone several days before it struck,” Nagurney lamented.

“As the conference unfolded, the word from the field was that the Myanmar government was blocking critical external relief. We collectively felt a deepening sense of helplessness and tragedy. The government, we learned, had delayed disbursing what few medical supplies it had allowed into the country until it could stamp its own name over the Red Cross and UN logos.”

As of May 11—more than a week after the cyclone hit and two days after the conference had concluded—the Myanmar government had continued to bar significant shipments to more than 1 million of the storm’s survivors. At the same time, most foreign aid workers had been denied entry into the country: the UN World Food Program had received 1 visa out of 16 requests; World Vision had received 2 out of 20. The longer you wait, the more likely hunger, disease, and their effects will begin to escalate at a nonlinear rate, emphasized Nagurney.

“I have never participated in a more emotionally charged event,” concluded Nagurney. For every quantitative model presented, there were poignant stories from the field. The quants leaned from the practitioners and the practitioners learned from the quants. Long before the conference ended, everybody had gained a sense of urgency. We left the conference energized to apply the lessons that we had learned.”


Photo caption: Anna Nagurney and Humanitarian Logistics Conference participants at the Bellagio Center, Lake Como, Italy.


Click here to visit the conference web site.