Models, Metrics, and an Index to Assess Humanitarian Response Capacity

The race to meet vital needs following sudden onset disasters leads response organizations to establish stockpiles of inventory that can be deployed immediately, without needing to rely on suppliers. These government or non-government organizations dynamically make stockpile decisions in isolation, and they do so without empirical metrics on how the stock will improve the response effort. To address these issues we develop a quantitative model to analyze stockpile capacity, propose metrics based on model results to assess decisions over time, and normalize the metrics as the basis for a sector-wide index of combined capacity. To guide the development of our analytical assessment approach, we utilize comprehensive information on global stock including publicly available data on inventory stored by various organizations in United Nations facilities and data that organizations provide to the UN on their own stockpiles. In addition, our empirical study offers practical insights regarding the current humanitarian response capabilities and strategies. We show that significant improvement in terms of time and cost can be achieved by reallocating the inventory of several critical items currently in the system and coordinating among the organizations.