Desperate to be Efficient

The UNWFP Field and Emergency Support Office based in Dubai supplies critical ancillary services in times of humanitarian crises.

You could easily mistake the office of the United Nations World Food Programme (UN WFP) Field and Emergency Support Office (FESO) in Dubai International Humanitarian City (DIHC) for the office of a typical corporation – gray-coloured cubicles, clacking keyboards, scrambling employees and, of course, a corner office.

Sitting in that corner office, is Finbarr Curran, the WFP’s FESO Director and Administrative Regional Director. But instead of profits and acquisitions, Curran has hunger and poverty on his mind. The WFP’s goal, after all, is to provide food aid to support economic and social development and to respond to refugee and emergency food needs, along with the necessary logistics.

Curran says the WFP, which has its headquarters in Rome, feeds – “give or take” – 100 million people a year around the world, for example, providing food for an estimated 16 million people in Iraq during the initial months of coalition action.

“If you were to measure the number of meals we are responsible for,” he says of the past year, “it goes into the 200 millions. It’s big.”

In the previous year, 2006, for example, WFP reported distributing 4 million tonnes of food to 87.8 million people, including 58.8 million children. The organisation also reported direct expenditure of over US$2.9 billion. Nearly 11,000 staff operated in 78 countries around the world, 92 per cent serving in the field.

The WFP, says Curran, is “probably the least well-known humanitarian organisation, but, in fact, it’s the biggest one.”

“What we do tends to be, what I call, the wholesale side of the business. In other words, we move large volumes of food, we do large monitoring of situations, we look at nutrition, and these are not the sort of things that get publicity in newspapers.”

Curran says the WFP is known throughout the humanitarian world, however, for its logistics. He says over 10,000 humanitarian agencies, including UN organisations such as UNICEF and UNHCR and non-governmental organisations such as the Red Cross, Red Crescent, CARE and CONCERN call upon the WFP to supply food. “The actual handing out of the food is done by the NGOs,” says Curran, which perhaps offers another reason why the WFP is yet to achieve worldwide fame.

Such large-scale operations require large-scale transport. “We probably have, at any moment in time, somewhere between 30 and 40 ships on the sea, 20 airplanes, and, depending on the level of crisis, 3,000 to 4,000 trucks on the road,” says Curran, “We’re the biggest movers of food in the world.”

The DIHC facility maintains over 350 light vehicles, including four wheel drives, which it rents out to the WFP and, occasionally, other UN agencies

The WFP’s Transport and Procurement Division based in Rome takes care of the bulk of WFP logistics, including the large scale transport of food. “They’re geniuses at moving food,” says Curran, “whether its planes, trains, automobiles, donkeys, camels…they’ve even used elephants. I mean, they’re brilliant at that.”

The office in Dubai, according to Curran, assists this movement of food by managing most of WFP’s ancillary logistics, specialising in human resources, administrative and, in particular, telecommunications support. WFP country or regional offices often contract the Dubai chapter to set up infrastructure in crises. “This office,” says Curran, “is currently considered the premiere provider of telecoms services in the humanitarian world.”

The DIHC facility, according to Curran, houses telecommunications equipment such as radios, satellite dishes, antennas, computers, servers, printers, uninterrupted power supplies and generators. It is also developing an “office in a box”, a complete collapsible office that can be easily transported and assembled in 20 minutes, as well as a “local area network in a box”.

It also rents out the services of its FITTEST team, which includes a dozen IT consultants ready for deployment within 48 hours. “FITTEST gets the ground going,” says Curran, “they know what to do.”

The DIHC facility maintains over 350 light vehicles, including four-wheel drives and armoured vehicles, which it rents out to the WFP and, occasionally, other UN agencies. “Not only do we lease vehicles,” says Curran, “but we kit them out. We put in radios, we put in antennas and all the security-related things that are needed.”

The department also plans to track its vehicles through GPS beginning next year. “Up until recently it was far too expensive to use GPS but we’re now getting to the point where it’s feasible.”

All this equipment is stored at the WFP site at the DIHC, not far from the tallest building in the world, Burj Dubai. This facility includes 20,000 sq.m of warehouse space, 200 sq.m of cold storage and 20,000 sq.m of open storage, a quarter of which is covered to protect containers and vehicles. The facility, according to Bouran Najim, Head of Logistics for the Dubai office, sees an average of 1,100 incoming and outgoing transactions per year.

As part of the WFP, the Dubai office offers its services to fellow WFP regional and country offices. It is also reaching out to other humanitarian organisations, slowly trying to sub-contract its telecommunication and administrative services.

We’re trying to do business with all the players,” says Curran, “in a way that reduces their operating costs.”

The Dubai WFP also maintains cool storage facilities to keep medicine for the World Health Organisation (WHO), manages the Humanitarian Response Depot (HRD), a stockpile of rapid response equipment and survival items open to all UN agencies and stores vehicles for two other UN agencies.

Curran says in January this year his office was able to deliver over US$1 million worth of cars and police motorbikes to Mogadishu for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) with only eight days notice. “Word started to spread that ‘these guys are able to do this’,” he says.

While it will not regularly lease vehicles to non-WFP organisations due to financial reasons, Curran says his office plans to work with other UN agencies to develop their own leasing services.

Unlike a commercial business, the Dubai WFP office does not actively pursue projects, but rather responds to calls from other humanitarian organisations that are unable to handle situations with their own resources. “We’re a backroom group,” says Curran.

“No government approaches us directly, they would approach other parts of the agency or other agencies. And what we’re saying to all those agencies is ‘look if you haven’t got the capacity yourself, we’ve got the backup that’s ready to roll’.”

Curran describes his team as a ‘bridging force’, often the first to arrive at an emergency scene. While other agencies mobilise staff from different countries, which can take weeks, he says his team “keeps the show on the road.”

“If I got a call right now, I’d go out there now,” says Curran, pointing to the bustling cubicles outside his office window, “and say ‘pack your bags, you’re going to be on a flight tonight, and they’d go.”

Telecommunications equipment, according to Curran, is the first thing flown into an emergency. “Nothing can happen,” he says, “you can’t get any information on what’s happening on the ground unless you have communication.”

He says when war broke out in Afghanistan, his office supplied seven satellite stations and negotiated with a commercial provider to provide free mobile phone service for six months to members of humanitarian organisations and the country’s new government. It has also set up satellite stations in Iraq.

In emergency situations, political motivations often move out of the way to save lives

Curran says his department’s most recent project in the Middle East was in Lebanon when violence broke out with Israel in the summer of 2006. Most of the work, according to Curran, was IT-related, for example, setting up radio rooms and sending PCs and servers, but the office also supplied a staff member to manage the operation’s finances and a procurement person to source products locally. The Dubai office also sent armoured vehicles to accompany convoys of food.

Staying competitive While non-profit organisations such as the UN are often criticised for being inefficient, Curran insists his office runs like any competitive organisation.

Other than free office and warehouse space provided by Dubai International Humanitarian City, Curran says his department is the only office in the WFP that receives no money from outside sources. It, instead, rents its services to WFP country offices, or any other UN departments that request its services, who then pay for the support from their budgets. These services are charged at cost plus a seven per cent overhead, which the office uses to fund itself.

“I believe that most humanitarian organisations are really quite efficient,” he says. “If you look at the commercial organisations, what is their administrative overhead? Normally, it’s quite high…it can be 10 to 20 per cent.”

Curran says UN organisations, even WFP’s own country offices, are free to go to other IT, administrative or vehicle providers. “We constantly have to, literally, look at our margins,” he says. “WHO would not put their medical supplies here if we were inordinately expensive. HRD wouldn’t be asking us to run their warehouses. Here in Dubai it’s easy to get companies to run your warehouse. So UN organisations are looking at us saying, ‘we need the cheapest option’.”

But Curran doesn’t seem too worried about the competition. “We have an advantage, in that, we know the rules and regulations, so when our people arrive they don’t have to ask ‘What’s this?’ and ‘Where’s that?’, he explains. “They know what to do, they know where the manual is, they know how the UN works, they have the UN passport. So we have that competitive advantage. And we’re not making a profit!”

Curran says non-profit organisations such as his, however, can benefit from commercial principles. “Why does a commercial organisation, for example, pay their financial controller gazillions of dollars?” he asks. “Because the financial controller is adding value to their business, and why aren’t we paying gazillions to financial controllers of humanitarian organisations?”

He feels there is nothing wrong with trying to run a non-profit organisation like a business. “Businesses run efficiently,” he explains, “they lower their costs, but they don’t say ‘let’s get our staff to dress in sack cloth to show that we are efficient’, they use standard performance indicators.” Curran is happy to share his performance indicators, for example, boasting the WFP’s US$2.5 billion turnover a year. He says his office helps the WFP cut costs, particularly through the vehicle leasing programme, because it purchases the vehicles and the parts directly. “This year alone, in concrete terms, where we can actually show figures, we saved the World Food Programme six million dollars in their operations.” He says his office also offers intangible cost savings, for example, providing telecom and administrative support at lower prices than private companies.

Curran says his office is also working to make its services more professional, for example, standardising administrative procedures during emergencies. “We were depending on knowledgeable individuals rather than having defined procedures in place,” says Curran. “People would say ‘send for Mary’, instead of saying ‘we need a project manager’.”

Standards and procedures aside, the WFP has one thing on its side that many businesses lack – desperation. During a crisis, says Curran, “everybody kicks into action pretty fast”. In emergency situations, he says, political motivations often move out of the way to save lives – “the human side of people kicks in.”

While companies are often accused of avoiding moral judgments in the name of profit, the WFP does the same, but in the name of relief. “At the end of the day,” says Curran, “we’re like the Red Cross or the Red Crescent, we don’t make judgment calls. We just say, ‘We’re here to feed people’.”