Humanitarian logistics and humanitarian supply chains are gaining academic interest. Several academic and semi-academic groups have been established in recent years, e.g. the HELP forum, HUMLOG, CCHLI, the Fritz Institute, INSEAD’s and MIT’s teams etc. Teaching has also caught up, Washington University giving dedicated courses, INSEAD introducing an executive masters; and others following suit. And while it was still really difficult to find anything academic on the topic in the end of 2005 (for a review made exactly then see Kovács and Spens, 2007); things started to change in 2006. Quite a got lot published in 2006, and even best paper awards went to papers in humanitarian logistics, e.g. the Outstanding Paper award from the Emerald Literati Network went to Oloruntoba and Gray’s (2006) article in Supply Chain Management: An International Journal, and both LRN 2006 and NOFOMA 2006 gave their best paper awards to papers in humanitarian logistics.
2007 looks even more promising. There are new humanitarian logistics tracks at international conferences (e.g. a discussion forum at INFORMS, and right now ongoing a track at POMS), even a new dedicated conference, the CCHLI symposium, best papers of which are going to be selected for a special issue of Management Research News, furthermore, two CFPs focusing on humanitarian logistics are also out in different journals:
- “Managing Supply Chain Risks in Disasters” for the International Journal of Risk Assessment and Management (IJRAM), and
- “Co-ordination of Service Providers in Humanitarian Aid“; for the International Journal of Services Technology and Management (IJSTM)
It will be great to follow the development of this discipline.
Gyöngyi
Gyöngyi – thanks for a great overview of the new interest in humanitarian logistics. We are also starting to see the appearance of some of the supporting tools that humlog professionals need. I have just blogged about a couple of developments at humanitarian.info – on the new Helios logistics software and the UNSDI database schema for transport.
Thanks Paul for this comment! Just to add to the above blog entry, HUMLOG has in the meantime launched its website under http://www.humloggroup.org A lot of humanitarian logistics research-related issues, workshops, CFPs etc. can be found there.
Gyöngyi
does anyone know of a full-time masters program in the field of supply chain management and humanitarian logistics? I have looking all over the internet and have only found a few part-time programs! respond to me by email if you know of any out there.
There is none I’d know of. Rather, there are “regular” MSc programmes that offer courses in humanitarian logistics (as well), e.g. at Cranfield, Hanken, Uni Manitoba, Uni Washington (look for industrial engineering) etc. You can usually specialise in humanitarian logistics at these universities, i.e. write your masters thesis in the field etc.
The rest is executive MBAs (INSEAD, Uni Lugano) or sporadic courses (CBS). There are, however, general humanitarian affairs / disaster management programmes that may (or rather not) include a logistics perspective.
The doctoral level looks better, as a number of projects are looking for doctoral students in humanitarian logistics…
Gyöngyi
Hello all
I am preparing a thesis on the role of stories from the field of humanitarian logistics – as a method to gather data in the form of stories or narratives – about the successes and problems related to the logistics function in humanitarian and disaster situations
Would appreciate some comments and maybe some valuable stories from the field
hope to hear from you
Hej Allan,
You’ll find some stories on WISE’s website that have been compiled for a forthcoming publication.
Gyöngyi