Turning Lessons into Action for Humanitarian Logistics
With help from USAID, supply chain managers working in fragile settings are improving the flow of health supplies to displaced people
From his post at the INTERSOS pharmacy and central warehouse in Maiduguri, the capital of Nigeria’s Borno State, pharmacy manager Ayuba Nuhu Tarfa reflects on the people he serves.
“We provide medicines and other health supplies to more than 300,000 people who are displaced because of the conflict with Boko Haram,” he explains. “They fled from their villages and now they live in camps in Northern Nigeria’s Yobe, Adamawa, and Borno States, where they depend on assistance from humanitarian organizations and the state government.”
Ayuba, a pharmacist by training, graduated from the University of Maiduguri. He is among the first to earn a certificate from USAID partner JSI’s blended learning course to learn to manage pharmaceuticals and other medical commodities in humanitarian and disaster settings. Since March 2021, 50 staff from humanitarian organizations that partner with USAID have participated in the course to hone their skills in supply chain management.
Though it may be a global hot topic with delayed deliveries and stacks of containers lining shipyards, supply chain management is a mainstay of humanitarian response.
In fact, health supplies are essential to humanitarian assistance, and managing the supply chain is complex, involving many actors, locally and internationally.
In Syria and Yemen, two of the world’s biggest humanitarian crises, USAID supports implementing partners to collaborate through the Health Cluster, which brings lifesaving health supplies to people displaced by conflict. In Iraq, USAID collaborated with JSI and International Medical Corps to establish the supply lines for the health facilities where nurses and doctors built trust with Iraqi refugees displaced by ISIS to return home to their towns. Without health supplies, there can be no stability, and given the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the stakes are higher than ever.
The course, funded by USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance (BHA), combines multiple learning formats — discussion groups, reading, questionnaires, videos, webinars, and online gaming. To build connections with a broader community of health logisticians, participants join the International Association of Public Health Logisticians (IAPHL), as well as its Humanitarian Commodities Logistics subgroup.
“Participants come from humanitarian organizations that partner with BHA; many connect with us from their sites in humanitarian disasters,” explains Barbara Lamphere, JSI’s course manager. “They commit to a 12-week, 12-topic course. Every two weeks we gather virtually for live discussions with supply chain management experts who offer new perspectives. Some sessions end with a game where teams compete to test their knowledge. Using multiple modes of learning keeps participants engaged and motivated.”
The goal of the course is to make supply chain improvements within participants’ organizations.
“The blended learning course taught me how to best calculate the number of health supplies we need for the population we serve,” Ayuba explained. “Although we use an Excel inventory tool, the continuous influx of internally displaced persons from neighboring camps and countries makes it difficult to come up with a good estimation of supplies needed.”
As participants move through the course, they learn how to improve processes related to these issues, and create action plans to implement with their colleagues during and after the course.
“As part of my action plan, I recommended recruiting five pharmacy assistants, one for each of our areas of activities across the state,” says Ayuba. “They work with INTERSOS health staff and local health departments to collect data weekly for the medications dispensed. Based on my blended learning course and with support from Barbara, I trained the pharmacy assistants, medical doctors, and staff from the INTERSOS logistics department on quantification methods and data use.”
“ I also work with my team to ensure that drugs with less than six months of shelf life, and which cannot be consumed in our facilities, are donated to Borno State Hospital Management Board for distribution to state hospitals, and sometimes to implementing partners,” says Ayuba.
The action plans vary from small adjustments in existing processes to comprehensive and structural changes that involve major funding and multi-year plans. Some participants are already sharing their knowledge by training others in their organization. Others are sharing tools and standardizing processes.
Maintaining an adequate supply of health products can be especially challenging during humanitarian situations that continue for years or even decades. And the global pandemic has increased procurement lead times and upended normally stable processes. The USAID-based course is providing humanitarian organizations with the knowledge they need to strengthen health logistics, and the action plans are helping them build more resilient health supply chains and mitigate the effects of the pandemic.
About the Authors
Barbara Lamphere is a Senior Technical Advisor for Organizational Strengthening with JSI in Arlington, Va. Anne Marie Hvid is a Knowledge Management Advisor with JSI. Ayuba Nuhu Tarfa, who is also featured in this story, is a Pharmacy Manager with INTERSOS in Maiduguri, Borno State, Nigeria.
