how can we help?

In her keynote address, Dr. Noeleen Heyzer of the United Nations calls the humanitarian community to “cooperate in a complementary and coordinated manner to respond and prevent crises altogether…and to facilitate the emergence of a new humanitarian model by bringing together multiple stakeholders to forge solutions and partnerships.”

The aim of our project is to heed Dr. Heyzer’s call by investigating the various inter-agency issues existing in the various phases of the humanitarian system. While most of the operations and logistics literature in this area focus on optimizing the allocation of resources under a centralized system with central authority to implement the optimal solutions, we believe that there is a greater and more pressing need to study and to design mechanisms that can help coordinate parts of the humanitarian system.

This daunting and urgent task of humanitarian coordination needs no less than all the theories and tools one can tap from the academic community. Hence, we pool together expertise from three different schools; namely, business operations, political science, and systems engineering. Each discipline brings to the table a different perspective on coordination and unique set of tools. Altogether, we shall look into coordination at the institutional level, individual level, and resource level, while our collection of tools shall include policy analysis, knowledge management, behavioral analysis, empirical analysis, operations research and mathematical economics. This allows us to have an integrated approach to tackle all three phases of disaster management.