The Practices, Challenges And Performance Of Humanitarian Logistics Management In Plan International Ethiopia
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Date
2019-05
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Humanitarian Logistics is a very important cluster of activities during emergencies
due to natural or man made disasters in an effort to prevent loss of lives and property.
However, the subje ct is not well researched compared to the business logistics in
profit making organizations where profit is their main reason of existence. The main
objective of this study was to assess the practices, challenges and performances of a
selected non profit m aking international organization, Plan International Ethiopia
and try to contribute to the research family in the field. The main research design
applied for the research was a descriptive type of research design. The data was
collected through a questionn aire and distributed to 100 selected staff and partners
from Guji and Gedio zones where there appeared a lot of internal displacements
which call upon emergency activities from organizations like Plan International
Ethiopia. Out of the 100 distributed ques tionnaire only 80 were used for the analysis
as the remaining 20 were either rejected for incompleteness or not returned back at
all. The data collected were analyzed through the computer software SPSS and
presented using descriptive texts, frequency table s , cross tabulations, percentiles,
means and standard deviations. The assessment of the humanitarian logistics
practices revealed that Plan International Ethiopia assesses situations well before
deploying emergency supplies and its team and the procurement activity is also
managed fairly well. The transport ation of supplies using third party partners and
own fleet is also at its satisfactory level though there are some reservation indicated
in the responses for some aspects of transport. Storage and distrib ution of supplies
were found to be satisfactory with some remarks. There are both internal and external
factors that challenge the performance of the humanitarian logistics practices of Plan
International Ethiopia where lack of appropriate technology and i nsecurity from the
external factors and disorganized processes and procedures are mentioned to be the
main factors affecting the performances of the organization. In general Plan
International Ethiopia is operating well in the affected areas mentioned and its
activities are found to be fairly properly managed. However, the challenges should be
seriously considered and need to be dealt with the organization for those challenges
in the control of the organization while discussion with part n ers and the respons ible
government bodies are re quired for those beyond control. Flexibility at times demand
fluctuations exist both in volume and variety is crucial and hence a contingency plan
need to be applicable by the organization as flexibility is perceived to be not
performing well. As a future direction for researchers interested in this field, it is good
to consider more organizations especially to generalize on the external challenges
that affect their performances.
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Keywords
challenge performance practice, humanitarian, logistics, disaster, em ergency, supply chain