Speaker 1: ["Pomp and Circumstance"] ♪♪

Speaker 2: And the solution to all these problems is humanitarian logistics. Going forward, we shall see how humanitarian logistics can help in solving the problems of the people. So first of all, let us understand what is actually humanitarian logistics. Humanitarian logistics, as we can see, is a branch of logistics which deals in organizing the delivery and warehousing of supplies during natural disasters and providing relief to the affected people. Going forward, it is important for us to understand who are the main stakeholders of humanitarian logistics. The donors are the people who make contributions like food, clothing, medicines for the affected people. The aid agencies and the NGOs are instrumental in collecting them and depositing them at a distribution center. The governments and the military are the people who aid in providing these collected materials to the affected people. The logistics providers, of course, are the ones who help in transporting them. There are very famous humanitarian organizations who have been helping the people in these natural disasters. They are American Red Cross, CARE USA, Catholic Relief Services, UNICEF, Save the Children, International Committee of the Red Cross, and World Food Program. Now we shall see how the distribution of relief material is carried during post-disaster. The NGOs which collect relief materials from various donors gets an order for humanitarian commodities from the government of affected countries. After consolidation and documentation, they send the relief material via air and ocean to the affected area. After custom clearance, it reaches the place by trucks where it is unpacked and sorted and then distributed to the affected people by the military people of that country. This relief material then provides relief to the affected people and saves their life. Now we shall see what are the phases in disaster management. There are three important phases, pre-disaster, disaster, and the post-disaster phase. In the pre-disaster phase, we first do assessment of the different areas which are prone to natural calamities. Then we do the planning in which we plan out how much food and medicine might be required in case of a natural calamity. And then we do the training and education of the people living in the nearby areas such that how should they deal in such kind of situation. Then we have the disaster phase in which medicine, water, food, shelter is provided to these people. And then we have the post-disaster phase in which the reconstruction of the area is taken into consideration. And then we have the evaluation and identifying lessons in which we identify what we have learned from this and how we can do better in the future. After having discussed the basics of the humanitarian logistics, now we are going to discuss a project on humanitarian logistics which we did to select the most appropriate structure for post-disaster management. What we did in this project is we selected three basic structures i.e. ACE, CAN, and PIE. ACE stands for Agency Centric Efforts. In this structure, the group members are mainly from the communities affected from disaster. In PIE i.e. Partially Integrated Efforts, some group members are the local ones i.e. who are affected from the disaster but majority of them are for NGOs, international organizations who provide aid to the affected people. In the third structure i.e. CAN, in this structure, the group members have significant presence from the impacted area and also from outside of it i.e. international organizations like NGOs. Having selected the structures, then we selected the parameters on the basis of which we are going to evaluate these structures. These parameters were selected after having a discussion with the experts on this particular field. We held a brainstorming session with them. The parameters which were finally decided were speed, agility, adaptability, decentralization, resilience, alignment, information system, and resource availability. These parameters were considered to be the most important to help the people during post-disaster. Next what we did is, we had a brainstorming session with the experts and assigned weights to each variable in each structure and then solved it through AHP i.e. Analytical Hierarchical Process Tool which is a multi-criteria decision-making technique. The results that we got is, out of the three structures, ACE, CAN, and PIE, CAN scored the highest points as compared to ACE and PIE. We can say that CAN structure is the most appropriate structure in dealing with post-disaster management. This can be attributed to the fact that it has significant presence both inside and outside the affected area and would be the best in coordinating the relief efforts. Also, what we got is, agility came out to be the most important criteria in the selection of any post-disaster humanitarian logistics structure.