Welthungerhilfe Wins Medal for Excellence in Humanitarian Logistics

Welthungerhilfe (WHH) will be awarded the Lynn C. Fritz Medal for Excellence in Humanitarian Logistics this year.

WHH is being honored for its Emergency Supplies Prepositioning Strategy(ESUPS) project, which is leading to a fundamental improvement in the prepositioning strategies for emergency supplies in disaster areas.

The medal, which has been awarded by the Logistics Hall of Fame since 2023, is sponsored by the US-based Fritz Institute.

Mathias Mogge, secretary general of Welthungerhilfe. talked about the honor and his organization in a press release. 

Here is an excerpt of that interview:

Q: Were you surprised that Welthungerhilfe won the Lynn C. Fritz Medal for Excellence in Humanitarian Logistics with the project Emergency Supplies Prepositioning Strategy (ESUPS)? 

MM: Yes, we were surprised. But at the same time, we were extremely happy and also grateful to receive this award because it is really recognizing the team behind the project. The general idea is that ESUPS serves as a platform for humanitarian prepositioning. This sheds a good light on the sector’s efforts to be more efficient in what organizations do and to foster collaboration and localization. 

Q: Why did Welthungerhilfe launch this project? 

MM: The starting point was our analysis of the response after the earthquake in Nepal in 2015, where it became quite obvious that international and national stocks of relief items were not adequately addressing the scope of needs of the affected people.

So we carried out a lot of data analysis and were in contact with other organizations and the United Nations.

Then we said: We need something new — a new platform. Therefore, ESUPS was born, and with the assistance of USAID we were able to set up ESUPS as an idea and then develop it further and further. 

Q: Currently, 127 actors from 60 countries, with up to 800 people, are using the system for their prepositioning strategy. How do you assess this result? 

MM: It shows that more and more actors have seen the effectiveness of this platform. One pillar of this platform is the so-called STOCKHOLM platform — short for STOCK of Humanitarian Organizations Logistics Mapping. On this platform, all actors can see the stocks: which items are in the warehouses, what kind of items are available, and how many are available.

This is presented in a very clear, visual, user-friendly way. The second point is localization: many smaller partners, such as national disaster relief organizations, can use this platform to visualize stock data and get a national overview. At the same time, they know what is available regionally and internationally. I think ESUPS has shown that it is a trustworthy platform and that it can be extremely useful for the users who register to share data.