An article by Pierre Brunet
What percentage, on average and for the humanitarian sector, do purchases represent (food and goods distributed to beneficiaries, purchases of services, various equipment…) of the total operating budget of NGOs?… 50 to 60% of this budget… A substantial figure. As humanitarian organizations face an exponential increase in humanitarian needs, and institutional funding struggles to “scale up”, the need to find out where and how to save their precious financial resources has become apparent. Over the last ten years or so, so-called support functions, and logistics in particular, have embarked on a quest for maximum efficiency and mutualization. Doing more, better, often faster, by doing it together whenever necessary, sharing resources, costs and expertise. From emulation-competition in the field between NGOs to cooperation, the notion of “coopetition” was born, from which emerged the Hulo (Humanitarian logistics) cooperative, which pools logistics resources for eleven humanitarian NGOs.
Hulo is the continuation and culmination of an earlier pooling and coordination initiative, the RLH (Humanitarian Logistics Network), founded by nine organizations (mainly French-speaking) on the inspiration of their logistics directors. The COVID crisis of 2020, which brought scheduled flights to an abrupt halt, posed a serious problem for international NGOs at the time, in terms of their ability to transport the equipment they needed to implement their programs to the field, in a variety of difficult contexts. This was LRH’s baptism of fire: under the impetus of the French government, the European Union and NGOs, an emergency airlift was set up from April to September 2020, coordinated by LRH, through an operational team supervised by Marie Houel, at the time in charge of purchasing and supply at SOLIDARITES INTERNATIONAL. And it’s only natural that LRH should have chosen BIOPORT, to whom we’ll return later, as its partner for the transport of this exceptional operation. As Fabrice Perrot, Director of Logistics and Information Systems at SOLIDARITES INTERNATIONAL, and current President of HULO, sums up: “With the help of the European Union, we coordinated (in 2020) the dispatch of humanitarian cargo ships to countries no longer served by commercial air links…. Since then, the RLH has been renamed HULO and the cooperative became a société coopérative d’intérêt collectif (SCIC) in June 2021… The humanitarian bridge we set up during Covid continues. For example, the European Union very recently financed a flight to N’Djamena in Chad, in response to the crisis in Sudan. And HULO is now present in the Central African Republic, Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Lebanon.
When it comes to transporting humanitarian goods and equipment, you need expertise in this very specific, highly specialized field. This is where HULO’s key partner comes in, the BIOPORT association, created in 1994 and chaired by Benoît Miribel. For the past 30 years, Bioport has been providing logistical support to solidarity players. This non-profit association has 4,500m² of warehousing space at Lyon St Exupéry airport, and in one of Europe’s largest logistics zones at Saint-Quentin-Fallavier. Nicolas Petit, BIOPORT’s Managing Director, comments: “BIOPORT is a highly specialized organization, with people dedicated to logistics issues. Our expertise lies first and foremost in qualifying humanitarian needs. The volume of supplies is not as routine as it is for industrial companies, and is dealt with on a case-by-case basis. In addition, NGOs operate in complex and unstable environments. Finally, the normative and regulatory context is becoming increasingly stringent for humanitarian organizations. Once the need has been identified, BIOPORT will search the market for the “makers”, as we call them, i.e. logistics service providers, mainly in the freight sector, to provide the right solution at the best cost, and with optimum administrative fluidity (customs, etc.)”. But the relationship between HULO and BIOPORT is not a one-way street, benefiting humanitarian NGOs alone, as Nicolas Petit explains: “HULO has enabled our organization to facilitate relations with a ‘pool’ of humanitarian actors with similar needs, without our having to canvass them, which suits our identity very well. In return, BIOPORT enables HULO to benefit from a high level of expertise in technical, operational and strategic issues relating to international transport. BIOPORT is also part of HULO; Nicolas Petit explains: “We are one of the cooperative’s partners, with shares. Through HULO, BIOPORT is in constant partnership, both bilaterally and with all HULO members. Every month, BIOPORT acts as a technical operator in response to needs expressed by HULO, be they high-profile or forgotten crises”. According to Nicolas Petit, “The evolution of the HULO initiative responds to issues that were underlying in the humanitarian sector, but it has enabled us to scale up our response in terms of logistics”.
Optimizing the use of financial resources dedicated to logistics, synergy, responsiveness and scaling up of humanitarian response, particularly in acute crises… HULO’s track record would already be remarkable, but the ambition of this singular cooperative is not limited to these achievements. In the introduction to this article, we mentioned the percentage represented by purchasing in the operational budget of NGOs. While freight service purchasing has already been optimized by the pooling offered by the HULO-BIOPORT partnership, there is still a lot to be done… and much more to come. Fabrice Perrot outlines the cooperative’s development prospects: “We are now working on shared initiatives in purchasing, HR and the environment. We are also working on analyzing our market data, in particular to identify purchases that it would be interesting to pool”. Fabrice Perrot continues: “With HULO, we are also working on the development of LINK V2. This P2P software was created from scratch by Action Contre la Faim, who couldn’t find any off-the-shelf software adapted to the needs of the humanitarian sector, particularly in terms of document traceability and internal validation stages. The software was developed by an information systems team and a humanitarian logistics team. From the outset, Action Contre la Faim showed its willingness to share this software. Handicap International has already adopted it, making us the third organization to use and co-pilot it. Eventually, it will be supported by the HULO cooperative, to be offered to a maximum number of humanitarian organizations wishing to acquire a P2P information system”.
And somewhere in an emergency or forgotten crisis, men, women and children in distress will receive the answer to their needs, thanks to the virtue of this “cooperative-innovation” that opens the way to one of the future necessities of humanitarianism…
To say this makes perfect sense. But if we are to go further, with supporting data, in our study of the positive spin-offs of this singular cooperative, we’ll have to come back, in a forthcoming issue of Défis Humanitaires, to the forthcoming publication of HULO’s first performance and impact measurement report. On this occasion, we’ll be hearing from Jean Baptiste Lamarche, General Manager of HULO, who has played a major role from the origins of the RLH to today’s cooperative. Logistical-humanitarian adventure to follow…
Pierre Brunet
Read more articles on this subject on Défis humanitaire :
- L’entretien avec Nicolas Petit et Christophe Peyrichou de Bioport sur l’initiative « Ukraine Response Consortium ».
- Pari gagné pour le pont aérien humanitaire européen
- Un pont aérien humanitaire face au coronavirus
- Interview de Marie Houel, coordinatrice inter-ONG du pont aérien humanitaire
- Covid-19 : Les avions de la riposte
Writer and humanitarian
Pierre Brunet is a novelist and member of the Board of Directors of the NGO SOLIDARITES INTERNATIONAL. He became involved in humanitarian work in Rwanda in 1994, then in Bosnia in 1995, and has since returned to the field (Afghanistan in 2003, Calais Jungle in 2016, migrant camps in Greece and Macedonia in 2016, Iraq and North-East Syria in 2019, Ukraine in 2023). Pierre Brunet’s novels are published by Calmann-Lévy: “Barnum” in 2006, “JAB” in 2008, “Fenicia” in 2014 and “Le triangle d’incertitude” in 2017. A former journalist, Pierre Brunet regularly publishes analytical articles, opinion pieces and columns.