This week we were lucky enough to spend an hour talking to Paul Molinaro and some of the UNICEF planning and logistics team in Pakistan who are helping people there recover from recent devastating floods

The UNICEF Team

The UNICEF team was lead by Paul Molinaro who is responsible for disaster response logistics - moving supplies into Pakistan and getting them to where they are needed as quickly and efficiently as possible. Paul was joined by other members of the team responsible for supply planning, warehousing and information/data dissemination (when I check the spelling of their names I’ll post them up).

Scale of the Disaster

The UNICEF team used Google Earth to demonstrate the sheer scale and complexity of the problems in Pakistan. The floods took hold gradually over weeks and got steadily worse. Huge volumes of water moved through upland areas down into densely populated lowland areas - swamping them and destroying massive areas of farmland. Even now, weeks later, huge areas are still underwater.

The geography, climate and politics of Pakistan are complex and shifting - suffice to say that in many areas of Pakistan the flooding has has made difficult and unstable circumstances for people there even more difficult and UNICEF’s response needs to operate in this context.

Response, Problems

The UNICEF logistics teams face massive challenges of sourcing, transporting, storing and distributing supplies to where they are needed - we just scratched the surface on this stuff but it is pretty easy to imagine the challenges involved in suddenly activating a completely new supply chain while operating in the midst of a disaster.

We spent a good deal of time talking about how the flow of information from local people, aid workers, partner agencies is a critical component of how UNICEF’s logisticians respond to disasters. Often this information isn’t timely enough or specific enough for them to enable them to perform optimally, and there are increasing demands being placed on UNICEF by governments and partner organisations for accurate information.

It feels as though this is where the Design for UNICEF class at ITP could really help; researching, designing and building more efficient information systems to help speed up and improve UNICEF’s supply chain operations. Not sexy, but absolutely required to get supplies to people as soon as possible.

Next Steps

We’re now going to work in teams to take the insight we gained from the call to sketch out possible solutions; this time we’ve two weeks to work on these ideas - and it’s likely that these ideas will then be taken forwards for further refinement in later weeks.