Suleman Dawood School of Business (SDSB) is organising a PhD Management Dissertation Defense.
May 2, 2023
Time:
2:00 pm
Faculty Lounge (SDSB building, 4th floor)
Dissertation Title: “Humanitarian Operations: Challenges in Pakistan, Design of the Flood Relief Chain and Financial Health of Humanitarian Nonprofits”.
The dissertation is by Syed Tariq, PhD Management Candidate.
Date: May 2, 2023 - Tuesday
Time: 2:00 pm
Venue: Faculty Lounge (SDSB building, 4th floor)
The dissertation can be attended online via Zoom.
Zoom link: https://lums-edu-pk.zoom.us/j/92920193081?pwd=a2x0NStVZkNLcGtLZ1Q3TWRtW…
Meeting ID: 929 2019 3081
Passcode: 055876
Dissertation Defence Committee
Dr. Muhammad Adeel Zaffar– Supervisor & Chair
Dr. Tanveer Shehzad – Member SDSB
Dr. Ussama Yaqub - Member SDSB
Dr. Shafay Shamail – Member LUMS
Dr. Muhammad Naiman Jalil – External Examiner (UAEU)
Abstract
This thesis addresses concerns around humanitarian operations with a focus on disaster relief. A three-paper model is followed in this thesis. First, the context of disaster relief operations in Pakistan is explored. Ketokivi and Choi (2014) highlighted the importance of contextual awareness and situational groundedness for research in operations. Research in disaster logistics requires far more attention to contextual consideration as it instructs the design and management of relief chains (Jahre and Spens, 2010; Pedraza-Martinez et al., 2013). Kovacs and Moshtari (2019) emphasised the need for exploratory research on disaster relief cases in every instance to inform about context and test assumptions for analytical methods. Cheema et al. (2016) identified the importance of further studies on disaster relief operations in Pakistan. Therefore, the first study looked into the 2005 earthquakes and 2010 floods in Pakistan. This exploratory study facilitated the development of the analytical model presented in the next study. The second paper studied the design of relief chains for compound flooding. The 2010 Pakistan floods were an incident of compound flooding due to the combined effect of snowcap melt, rainfall and river over-topping (Scott, 2011; IFRC, 2013). Last year’s floods in Pakistan further highlighted the need to study the logistics network design for compound flooding in iv Pakistan (Mallapaty, 2022). Most of the research literature studied network design in only the initial few days of the disaster (Condeixa et al., 2017; Manopiniwes and Irohara, 2020), whereas compound flooding exacerbates the duration and area of flood impact (Zscheischler et al., 2018).
Additional considerations studied in this paper include the need to relocate affectees as flood impact renders more areas vulnerable (Pourrahmani et al., 2015). The third paper of this thesis looks at revenue components of nonprofits and how they predict financial health for humanitarian and emergency health nonprofits. Nonprofits play an important role in disaster relief (Matin and Taher, 2001). While their agile and flexible response makes them important contributors to disaster relief (Park and Yoon, 2022), the financial strain of disaster relief operations may last for several years (Chen, 2021). Revenue acquisition approach may explain the capability of some nonprofits to weather such shocks effectively (Hung and Hager, 2019; Lu et al., 2019). The first paper employed an exploratory case analysis approach. The next two studies used insights from this paper to test problems relevant to the humanitarian context. The second study investigated key network design problems for disaster relief in complex flooding. The third study tested the impact of fund acquisition strategy of humanitarian nonprofits on financial health of the organisations.
