Humanitarian Supply Chain in East Africa

Abstrakt

Purpose: Novo Nordisk is trying to make human insulin more accessible and affordable to people in extreme poverty. Novo Nordisk wants to establish new supply chains in the East-Africa through a partnership with International Committee of the Red Cross. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the supply chain theory together with an empirical research on practitioners’ viewpoint. Hopefully the paper will give a better understanding on supply chain strategy in East Africa. Approach: The study is based on primary data collection from interviews, supplemented with secondary data collected online. 17 meetings included in the study and one of them was a workshop at International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva to discuss future collaboration. Findings: From a supply chain management view looking at East Africa and humanitarian supply chains; these are mainly based on high demand uncertainty. The theoretical and empirical research suggests responsive supply chain and strategic inventory postponement as far downstream as possible. Information sharing is one of the key tools when operating a responsive supply chain. Originality: The paper provides empirical data specific to a case brought up by Novo Nordisk. The study is very focused on East Africa and humanitarian supply chain management to aid understanding in a specific case. Implications: As the number of participants in the empirical data, limited the study in order to have a more groundbreaking conclusion; it requires a boarder collection of primary data. Keywords: Supply chain management, Human insulin, Diabetes, East Africa, third world, Humanitarian supply chain, logistics, strategy, structure, drivers, Novo Nordisk, International Committee of the Red Cross, Partnership, Kuehne + Nagel, Case study