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Tracks: Oct – Nov

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Taking you BEYOND the credential, the Learners Track is designed for graduate and undergraduate students from relevant disciplines, professionals and lifelong learners who are committed to reskill, innovate, upskill, collaborate and are interested in making an impact in their community. Through the month of October, learners can engage in a variety of virtual experiences that facilitate collaboration, development and learning. The Learners Track features a virtual team competition designed to engage students from across the globe who have an interest in humanitarian logistics and a desire to serve their community.

1st Place

Team CSU from Colorado State University Business School wins 1st place in the 2021 HUMLOG Challenge, for their solution addressing local community involvement on mitigation and response for climate-induced natural disasters in Mozambique via a resilience kit.

Top 6 Teams

Team: Coventry Business School, United Kingdom

Coventry Business School, UK

Solution Location: Vietnam

Team Members: Duc Toan Nguyen, Oluwadamilola Gbuyiro, Jesse David Mamodu, and Pauline Nalumango

Team Coventry addressed property damage due to extreme flooding in Vietnam by developing a solution of floating houses/shelters.

Team: Stellenbosch & Los Andes

Team Stellenbosch and Los Andes

University of Stellenbosch Business School, South Africa and Universidad de los Andes, Colombia

Solution Location: South Africa

Team: Tebogo Joseph Molatudi, Juan Pablo Borda Kuhlmann, Diane Meyer, and Waseema Hassen

Team Stellenbosch and Los Andes developed a solution for drought-induced water scarcity in the Xakabantu Informal Settlement in the Western Cape.

Team: MIT Sloan School of Management, USA

Team MIT Sloan

MIT Sloan School of Management, USA

Solution Location: Puerto Rico

Team: Nick Mitilenes, Keanu Isenring, Valentina Contador, and Juan Pablo Millet

Team MIT Sloan evaluated hurricane damage to the island of Puerto Rico and created a solution of a real time donation system with dollar amount immediately influencing aid.

Team: Sasin School of Management, Thailand

Team Zen

Sasin School of Management, Thailand

Solution Location: Thailand

Student Team: Jittapat Sirison, Aditya Shrestha, and Shrisha Sethi

Team Zen examined flash flooding in one of the slums in Thailand, developing a solution surrounding a community education program!

Team: Queensland University of Technology, Australia

Team Real Consulting

Queensland University of Technology, Australia

Solution Location: Australia

Team: Rachel Hall, Peiling Lin, Liliana Neame, and Augusto Salhuana Bellodas

Team Real Consulting addressed severe storms in Brisbane, Australia with a solution involving real time storm alerts and QR codes.

Learners Track Opportunities

Featuring: The HUMLOG Challenge

What’s My Carbon Footprint?!

Learn about carbon footprints through an insightful discussion on how it impacts us on a daily basis, and how we can make our work more sustainable.

Time Management & Keystone Habits

A single habit change can spark a ripple of effects that radiate throughout your team and organization, and transform your office culture. In this workshop, students will be introduced to tools that will help manage their time and energy more effectively, while committing to one keystone habit, that they can implement as a team.

Virtual Communication Skills

We are all being asked to step up to the computer screen and deliver. This new normal has new demands that come with concrete skills and techniques that will make you a more effective communicator online. Learn the best practices of virtual delivery and engagement.

Health and Well-Being Activities

Its not all business, these sessions will be designed to bring a human element focused on self care and well-being.

The HUMLOG Challenge

In partnership with the Hanken Schools of Economics’ HUMLOG Institute, the Learners Track features The HUMLOG Challenge, an international virtual competition, focused on developing local solutions to problems related to humanitarian logistics.

This year, The HUMLOG Challenge focuses on Community Disaster Resilience. The Covid-19 pandemic has tested communities across the world on preparedness and resilience. Major hazards such as hurricanes, earthquakes, volcano eruptions, droughts, and landslides, among others, constantly threaten the livelihoods of the most vulnerable populations across the world. In the context of accelerated climate change and population growth, the current trend of frequent major disasters is expected to increase. To mitigate this trend, increased Disaster Resilience and Community Preparedness is essential to reduce the potential impact of humanitarian crises on the poorest communities who are disproportionately affected by these disasters.

The 2020 HUMLOG Challenge involved:

420 students
113 teams from
38 schools in
21 countries

How does it work?

Register your team.

We encourage multi-disciplinary, teams of 2-4 students from different schools disciplines, and levels, (Undergraduate, Graduate, or Doctoral).

Registration is open.

Identify a local problem.

All participants will be prompted to indicate a local problem from a natural disaster group they wish to focus on that is relevant to their community environment.

Identify a local problem.

Develop your solution.

Develop a unique and implementable solution that can be used in a locally-relevant context. Demonstrate that solution in a creative format.

Develop your solution.

Community disaster resilience is the mainstay of disaster readiness and risk reduction in communities across the globe.

Teams will be prompted to choose a natural disaster relative to their geographical region and address the community’s preparedness, response and level of resilience.

Challenge Prompt.

Identify a natural disaster relative to the geographical region. Describe a locally-relevant problem and illustrate an innovative solution that can be applied in different contexts.

Operationalize Resilience.

It is important to note that “resisting” and “absorbing” (and the other components embodied in the definition) embody different processes. How they are executed varies from hazard to hazard (e.g., flood readiness strategies differ from those required for seismic hazards) and from country to country (e.g. reduction and readiness program in Japan differ from those in New Zealand, yet both face comparable levels of seismic risk). How resilience is operationalized should be able to encompass, for example, the hazard and cultural diversity that prevails in an international context. 2

The Challenge.

In order to improve the systems and processes that predict community resilience, teams will be challenged to choose a natural disaster that challenges its local community’s resilience and response system. The identified problem should enable teams to assess the community’s response, preparedness and resilience. The goal is to design solutions that not only address the problem, but also consider culture and environment in the solution design. No problem or solution are too small. We encourage students to form teams with other countries whose communities face similar hazards. (For example, earthquakes happen in Chile, Japan and New Zealand, but how each country is prepared to respond is different.)

Deliverables

Each team will prepare a Solutions Package that will incorporate both written and visual elements. Teams will submit a written report and a visual creative illustration.

Written Report.

The written report must be no longer than 5 pages in length (double spaced) and must be in English or with English translations. It should be submitted as a Word Document or PDF. It should be separated into the following:

Problem Statement:
- Understanding the problem as it relates to the locally-relevant natural disaster.
- Proof of research
Solution Development and Implementation:
- Strengthening governance to manage disaster risk.
- Reducing disaster vulnerability for resilience.
- Enhancing disaster preparedness for effective response.

Creative Illustration.

Illustrations could include any digital format, such as videos, powerpoint presentations, interviews, podcasts, etc. They can be submitted in PowerPoint, Google Slides, MOV, MP4, JPEG, and PNG. Teams are encouraged to think out of the box, engage local participants in their field work, and capture local perspectives from key stakeholders. However, the illustration must be in English or with an English translation and if videos are submitted, they must be limited to 3 minutes in length. Students must identify the following:

The region represented
Problem identified
Proof of research
The solution and implementation plan

By the end of the course, learners will be able to:

Describe the characteristics of the humanitarian context
Explain how humanitarian relief is provided
Identify the role of logistics in humanitarian relief
Apply logistical principles and concepts to the humanitarian context

Proof of completion of all elements will be submitted through a form that will be provided by GBSN in September. This Academic Certificate is unique to the 2021 HUMLOG Challenge only.

Unique Academic Certificate

As part of the Learners Track and The HUMLOG Challenge, the Hanken School of Economics is offering participants the opportunity to take its online course, Introduction to Humanitarian Logistics, available on the FutureLearn platform. In this course participants will learn how humanitarian relief is provided and will explore the logistical concepts and principles that are applied in humanitarian operations. Learners will consider the importance of supply chain management and recognize how contextual differences alter the requirements of logistics management during aid operations.

This optional online course takes no more than two weeks to complete and estimates an average of 3 hours of work per week. After completing the the course and its assessments, attending one of the HUMLOG Challenge webinars, and submitting a solution package in the competition, participants will earn an academic certificate that can be added to resumes, CVs, and LinkedIn professional accounts!

Course Link

Prizes.

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Cash Prize.

The 1st place winning team will be offered a 5,000 USD prize, sponsored by the Hanken School of Economics and its HUMLOG Institute, to be used towards continuing education or training.

One-on-One Mentoring.

All Top FIVE teams will be offered a one time, one hour professional mentoring session from one of our judges.

Earn a certificate.

Participants have the opportunity to earn an international recognition after completing the competition.

Judges

Preliminary Judges

Dr. Sreerupa Sengupta
Assistant Professor in Healthcare Management
Goa Institute of Management
India
Priya Kataria
Research Scholar
Goa Institute of Management
India
Garima Ranga
PhD Student in Marketing
Goa Institute of Management
India
Radhika K R
Doctoral Scholar
Goa Institute of Management
India

Head Judge

Gyöngyi Kovács
Erkko Professor in Humanitarian Logistics
Hanken School of Economics
Finland

Final Judges

Amédée Prouvost
Senior Advisor
Chapelle Consulting
USA
Pete Gomez
Senior Director, Academy for International Disaster Preparedness
Florida International University
USA
Nonhlanhla Dube
Lecturer in Operations Management
Lancaster University Management School
United Kingdom

Dr. Armand Bam
Head of Social Impact
University of Stellenbosch Business School
South Africa
Courtney Davis Curtis
Assistant Vice President for Risk Management and Resilience Planning
University of Chicago
USA

Judging Information

Judging for this competition will happen in two phases, a preliminary judging that determines the Top Five teams, and the final judging that determines the overall winner. Preliminary judges will review all submitted deliverables to ultimately determine the following:

How well your team describes the problem and its local relevance
Whether or not your team demonstrates creativity
Whether or not the solution your team develops is feasible

The top 5 student teams will present their projects live to a panel of international judges.

10-minute pitch presentation delivered LIVE to judges.

All team members must participate in the LIVE pitch for the team to be eligible to win the prize. Participation is defined as a minimum of 1 minute of speaking during the presentation.
Teams can include supplemental materials to support their LIVE presentations in the finals round, including their creative illustration.

A 15-minute Q&A with the judges.

All team members must be present for the LIVE pitch presentation and virtual Q&A.
Judge and team participation will be moderated by a GBSN staff member to keep time and ensure equal distribution of participation between judges and teams.
The LIVE Pitch Presentations and Q&A portion will be recorded and broadcasted LIVE for the public to watch.

Research Resources

This is a basic list of materials that can be used by teams in the research of problems and solution development.

Winning Presentation from 2020

Access the Presentation

Articles

Mechanics of Humanitarian Supply Chain Agility and Resilience and Its Empirical Validation
- Supply chain agility assisting with humanitarian resilience
- The humanitarian supply chain is a complex network of NGOs, government, military, police, action aids, logistics service providers with zero tolerance attitude to provide relief to the victims of a catastrophic event or disaster in forms of providing eating materials, medicines, medical support and to ensure quick recovery or increase supply chain resilience
Building an Effective Disaster Management Plan
- Quick read on business resilience with a ten-step process
- Operational risk management
- “Form of weather-related events, pandemics, fire, flood, labor actions, port closures and motor vehicle accidents, to name a few.”
Mitigation Processes
- Supply chain resilience in correlation to practitioner based disaster management processes
- Provides a generic integrated framework for supply chain resilience with demonstrations from Hurricane Katrina
FEMA’s Supply Chain Resilience Guide
- “Quickly reestablishing flows of water, food, pharmaceuticals, medical goods, fuel, and other crucial commodities is almost always in the immediate interest of survivors and longer-term recovery.”
- Emergency operations plans
- Community lifelines
Building Transportation Supply Chains After A Pandemic
- From the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine
- “They may see resilience as either part of incident response or they may see it as part of systems performance.”

Guides

ARD-C Toolkit
- The ARC-D toolkit is used to determine the level of a community’s disaster resilience, in two parts:
  - Part A assesses the general context of the community, capturing local population data, governance structures, built environment and ecosystem attributes, vulnerable groups, and major risk scenarios.
  - Part B assesses the community’s disaster resilience level to a chosen risk scenario through a consensus-based focus group discussion, guided by 30 key questions, each linked to a particular resilience component.
Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030
- The Framework was adopted at the Third UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction in Sendai, Japan, on March 18, 2015 and aims to achieve the substantial reduction of disaster risk and losses in lives, livelihoods and health and in the economic, physical, social, cultural and environmental assets of persons, businesses, communities and countries over the next 15 years.

Learners Track