How to get your wording right regarding Humanitarian Local Procurement

I am on my way back from HNPW, the Humanitarian Network and Partnerships week in Geneva. I participated last Tuesday as a panellist on Humanitarian Local Procurement. While so many talk about it, it’s about getting it done. We all know all too well about the importance of not harm local economies and essential risk mitigation with our fragile supply chains. But let’s debunk a few things:

1. The challenge we need to address in local procurement is not local procurement at all… it is about our local sourcing challenge. (related to this, is this a task for every NGO to find local suppliers, service providers and manufacturers in all locations? I argue strongly to work from consolidated efforts!)
2.  Local, sustainable or innovation-friendly procurement is NOT the task of procurement colleagues. It is a strategic and operational decision! This comes with different (technical) specifications, needs descriptions (demand), and other supplier qualification weighting mechanisms. Do we accept a potential higher on-set pricing for items with a longer lifetime, less waste, and a lower lifetime cost? I bet we do! If we all know, do we need to wait for another two years for our studies to say so?
3. We need to discuss tactical procurement when discussing our procurement challenges. After years of solving and adapting, having pre-positioning strategies and solutions, it’s time to tackle tactical procurement systematically.
4. Procurement colleagues are heroes; they need to know everything from everywhere. Unimaginable for their corporate sector colleagues! Let’s support them by making it work so we become far more efficient and effective as a sector, ensuring our supply chains are packed with supplies!

After all the policies, our general understanding, it’s time to be specific: Solve our local sourcing challenges, improve our tactical procurement, and make this effort a strategic and operational task too. Procurement is the KEY to becoming more efficient and effective to improve with BIG steps in our sector.

Besides discussing and sharing my drive for systematic change, digital and humanitarian logistics, I had so many wonderful other conversations. Thankful for all those chats with (new) friends, logistics colleagues, fellow NOHA Alumni, and (future) partners. Discussing Solvoz, humanitarian logistics, and the “general” humanitarian chats. 

this post was posted earlier on LinkedIn, click here for the post. Please reach out to discuss the topic further or have questions for me.