Balancing provision of relief and recovery with capacity building in humanitarian operations

Several humanitarian organizations today find themselves thinly stretched in multiple protracted relief and recovery operations around the world. At the same time, the need for humanitarian relief and recovery operations is forecasted to increase dramatically in the next decades. Hence, humanitarian organizations will face increased challenges to provide assistance (e.g., assessing needs, moving the displaced, tending the wounded, restoring water and sewage systems) while trying to build and maintain capacity (e.g., hiring and training people, capturing lessons learned, structuring organizational processes). In this paper we develop a formal simulation model that quantifies the tradeoff that exists between providing assistance and building capacity in humanitarian organizations. We explore in our model the performance of two polar resource allocation strategies: one focusing on relief and recovery efforts and another focusing on capacity building. When humanitarian organizations cannot retain the knowledge gained in the field, a strategy that emphasizes relief and recovery is not enduring and leads to a better-before-worse behavior. However, if humanitarian organizations can retain a large fraction of the lessons learned in the field, they can achieve more enduring performance with a relief and recovery strategy. Nevertheless, high stress levels, caused by relief requirements significantly above those which can be made available by the organization, increase personnel turnover and limit the fraction of learning that the organization can retain, imparing a relief and recovery strategy. Our work sheds light on the tradeoff that humanitarian organizations face between providing relief and building capacity in stressful and demanding environments.