Howard Sharman continues his series of columns about corporations and the global aid industry with a look at supply chain efficiency

If you rushed to download and read Lord Paddy Ashdown’s Humanitarian Emergency Response Review committee report when it was published at the end of March, you may have spotted one phrase on p25 that should have hit you like a sledgehammer between the eyes.

“Plastic sheeting,” it said (and sheeting is one of the staples of emergencies), “can be good but most often is low quality and falls apart immediately”.

This, if true – and if it is not true what is it doing in such an eminent report? – is a scandalous state of affairs and it seems extraordinary that the committee published this sentence without any additional comment, and without any recommendation on what should be done about it.

After all, there are hundreds of millions of pounds of public money being blatantly wasted here on goods that are low quality and “fall apart immediately”.

Not to mention millions of beneficiaries of these humanitarian products who are being scandalously short-changed. Private profit is being put before the welfare of the people who are destitute as a result of disasters.

Let’s now move this scenario into the commercial sector. Imagine that a government report on the retail industry observed that most of the products that our leading retailers sold were of poor quality and failed almost immediately. Major businesses would close overnight in the uproar that would follow.

It is easy to castigate the manufacturers of shelter products for this state of affairs and lament the obscene profit-driven and morality-free attitudes that have led to this sentence being written by Lord Ashdown.

But what about the people who have been responsible for buying these products, and who continue to allow this state of affairs to persist? What do they have to say about their role in this fiasco?

The short answer is ‘nothing’. Nada. A deafening silence. And this is where, in the spirit of Andrew Mitchell’s new broom of involving the private sector in aid and development, there has to be a role for business in shaking up the procurement function within aid agencies, the UN and even national governments.

Imagine you are a manufacturer who had supplied a big order to Marks & Spencer or Tesco.

But most of the products that you supplied turned out not to meet the original specification and days later most of the people who had bought the goods were back in the store demanding their money back.

You are up to your neck in lawsuits from the retailers and your key account salesman now has meetings with the buyers at M&S and Tesco head offices. Surely it won’t be an easy meeting and the chance of a repeat order is less than zero?

But in the world of emergency relief materials the chances of a repeat order would be very high indeed. That’s the measure of the problem that has to be resolved. And, if given the power to do a proper job, there is no doubt that the top buyers from the major retail chains could get this sorted out pretty quickly.

But another aspect of the problem is that the buyers in the aid agencies think that they are doing a pretty good job and don’t see any reason to change. They run major worldwide tenders complete with massive forms to be completed.

They are obsessed with conflicts of interest and like to be seen as cleaner-than-clean. But still they end up buying – on a repeat basis – products of poor quality that fall apart immediately.

So there would be a truly Augean stables to be cleaned by our retail buyers, involving a complete change of attitudes across the industry.

Part of the problem is that the standard checks and balances in the commercial world have no weight when it comes to emergencies – the ‘consumers’ are displaced individuals and families in developing countries who have no effective voice at all, and certainly no market power.

Shareholders are non-existent, which leads to little real accountability for the senior management of the aid agencies.

Our retail buyers, in short, would have a major task on their hands. Maybe Andrew Mitchell should sit down with the chairmen of M&S, Tesco, Sainsbury and Asda and put together a hit team, backed by ministerial authority that could go in and clear up this mess once and for all?

Some years ago there were a series of jokes built around the line “How many [insert nationality or profession] does it take to change a light bulb?”.

Stereotypes were then paraded to hilarious effect. My favourite, which applies very neatly to the aid industry, went as follows:

Q: “How many psychotherapists does it take to change a lightbulb?”

A: “Just one, but the lightbulb has to really want to change.”

Howard Sharman (howard.sharman@advanceaid.org) is a senior consultant with Advance Aid (http://www.advanceaid.org)