One of the major challenges the humanitarian community faces at the onset of an emergency is the provision of necessary logistics support to manage the complex supply chain process of relief supplies. In a continuously changing humanitarian environment the required skill-set for humanitarian logisticians is quite diverse and it goes far beyond the technical expertise of moving, storing and distributing commodities. The current requirements also include coordination, collaboration, communication and team management. To optimize efforts for coordination, maximize usage of donor funding and ensure that humanitarian logisticians develop a certain level of common language and common practice, specific training programs are of utmost value.

By using best-in-class knowledge from academia, the commercial and humanitarian sectors, the Centre has developed a program that encompasses courses on technical logistics as well as strategic supply chain management. The objective is to train current and potential humanitarian aid workers in a way that their work would become as efficient and effective as possible to save time, costs and most importantly: lives.

While the below outlined training program is mainly targeted at practitioners, the Centre will also provide certain modules on humanitarian logistics to postgraduate students in logistics and supply chain management at the NUS and selected partner universities in the region. Special Topics modules in Humanitarian Logistics have already been integrated in the syllabus of the Master of Science in Supply Chain Management at the Logistics Institute – Asia Pacific since early 2012.