The Georgia Tech Health & Humanitarian Logistics Center is launching a new Humanitarian Logistics Professional Certificate Program.  This executive learning program is designed for practitioners in non-governmental organizations, government, industry, and military who are active participants in humanitarian relief operations and seeking to build skills to improve decision making in preparedness, response, and system design.

Humanitarian logistics encompasses a broad range of activities related to preparing, responding, and recovering from natural and man-made disasters as well as ongoing humanitarian crises due to war, famine, and infectious diseases. In humanitarian organizations, inefficiencies in preparation, response, or recovery can cause drastic results including the loss of lives.  Addressing the unique skills needed by professionals in the humanitarian world, Humanitarian Logistics Professional Courses, include methodologies for assessment, mobilization of resources, procurement, transportation, and distribution. 

The program is comprised of three courses:

• Pre-planning Strategy for Humanitarian Organizations
• Systems Operations in Humanitarian Response
• Tactical Decision Making in Public Health and Humanitarian Response

The courses include many interactive components, such as case studies and games, which help professionals in the humanitarian world to link the challenges and decision-making trade-offs they face in practice with the systematic approaches, tools, and techniques presented.

Through extensive phone and online surveys among health and humanitarian logistics professionals, research has found “there is clearly a gap in supply chain logistics as applied to complex humanitarian emergencies and learning opportunities to do better.  This kind of training could be very useful.”

The Center for Health & Humanitarian Logistics at Georgia Tech, a unit of the Supply Chain & Logistics Institute and a part of the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, works to improve humanitarian logistics (including short or long term, man-made or natural disasters) and ultimately the human condition by system transformations through education, outreach, projects and research.

For more information about the certification program or its courses, please visit http://www.pe.gatech.edu/subjects/humanitarian-logistics, or send an email to humloged@isye.gatech.edu.