What a Corporate Funder Is Doing to Meet Urgent Humanitarian Needs Through Technology
Delivering humanitarian aid can be enormously complex. It requires far-flung logistical efforts that involve moving, tracking and delivering huge amounts of material. And all this needs to happen quickly in places where infrastructure may be devastated—such as in Puerto Rico, right now—or distant regions mired in conflict.
The humanitarian aid supply chain has many moving parts and can easily break down. To keep the stream of critical supplies moving, humanitarian aid funders are often left to determine feasible workarounds. Sometimes, those workarounds are successful and other times supplies are left to languish on airport runways or in warehouses while those that need them continue to suffer.
But while virtually all humanitarian organizations are familiar with the frustrations of the aid supply chain, there are very few funders consistently seeking ways to improve cost-effective and adaptable aid delivery. The UPS Foundation is one major funder we've written about often that's a leader in this area. It's been working for years to improve methods to get critical supplies where they need to go and as quickly as possible. Another key player in this space is Cisco, the global IT and networking company...