The Practices, Challenges And Performance Of Humanitarian Logistics Management In Plan International Ethiopia
Creators: name: Wodaje, Wolde
Publisher: name: National Academic Digital Repository of Ethiopia
Year: 2019

description: 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.