Humanitarian Logistics: Providing Practical Support for Global Emergencies
Maggie Heraty, former logistics officer with UNHCR, the UN refugee agency
Maggie Heraty will explain the vital importance of logistics to humanitarian relief operations and the role of professional logisticians in managing procurement, warehousing and transport in an emergency. She will show the differences from everyday commercial logistics operations from the many and varied challenges of setting up emergency operations at short notice in remote and insecure jungles and deserts. This includes providing transport for moving tens of thousands of refugees and displaced people by land, sea and air, and often building the infrastructure needed to achieve this. She will examine the complexities of coordination and working alongside other agencies and, sometimes, military forces and/or the commercial sector.
Happily, some new developments in technology can assist in making the provision of aid easier and more effective. Alongside examples from current world events, Maggie Heraty will draw on more than two decades of hands-on experience in and around war zones in West and Central Africa, at natural disasters such as the Haiti earthquake and Sri Lankan tsunami, and latterly with the initial response to the Rohingya crisis in Burma. She will illustrate her presentation with her own photographs, and she will demonstrate that a sense of humour is also essential.
Maggie Heraty OBE MSc FCILT FRSA was originally a consulting transport planner/economist, carrying out development studies and providing technical assistance all over the world. She moved into humanitarian work by joining UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. She served in conflict-related operations throughout West and Central Africa, and was also deployed for nine months to Sri Lanka to run the logistics of the tsunami relief operation. After formal retirement, she was re-engaged by UNHCR to set up three new operations including early relief for the Rohingya displacement crisis in Rakhine state in Burma, and worked with NGOs in northern Sri Lanka and after the Haiti earthquake. She still provides ad hoc advice from her home in Hampstead, most recently on the installation of a floating bridge on the Iraq-Syrian border and the logistics of ebola response. She regularly lectures at several universities and on training courses (including for NATO troops prior to deployment on peace-keeping operations), and makes presentations to a variety of interest groups.
