Humanitarian Assistance
Invnetory Control

KLINT FINLEY ... CTS ... a FEDEX-STYLE SYSTEM FOR HUMANITARIAN AID IS NOW FREE TO ALL

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

FEDEX-STYLE SYSTEM FOR HUMANITARIAN AID IS NOW FREE TO ALL

A woman from central Syria who fled to the comparative safety of the northern part of the country looks through a box of rations delivered by the IRC and partner Stichting Vluchteling (SV). INTERNATIONAL RESCUE COMMITTE

SYRIA IS NOW in its fifth year of civil war. More than half the country’s population has been displaced by the conflict, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) estimates.

The IRC has been providing aid such as food and medical supplies in the area for years, but its staff and volunteers can’t enter Syria to deliver the goods themselves. Instead, they depend on local Syrian organizations to pick up shipments from the border and deliver them to the hospitals and refugee camps that need them.

In order to keep track of all the aid packages flowing into the country, the IRC built its own FedEx-style package tracking system called CTS, short for Commodity Tracking System. Today the organization announced that it has open sourced the project, allowing any humanitarian organization to use CTS for free or to improve upon the software by adding new features.

Tracking Aid

CTS consists of two parts: an Android app and a server-side package tracking system. Every package the IRC delivers to its partners in Syria is tagged with a unique QR code. The server includes a database of all the different codes and a list of what supplies are included in the package corresponding to each code.

CTS Image

INTERNATIONAL RESCUE COMMITTEE

The IRC first developed the software—itself based on numerous other open source packages—in 2012 thanks to grants from the UK and US governments and the Dutch humanitarian aid organization Stichting Vluchteling, and they’ve been using it in the field ever since. When the local partners pick up a package at the border, they scan the QR code using a GPS-enabled Android device and transmit the location over WiFi back to the CTS server. This way, the volunteers don’t need to use expensive mobile data plans or even have SIM cards, which the government could use to track their location. All of the data is encrypted automatically. Once the packages then reach their intended recipients, the shipments can be confirmed by email or Skype.

Jake Watson, the regional coordinator for Syria response at IRC, acknowledges that the organization isn’t doing anything that UPS or FedEx haven’t been doing for decades. CTS doesn’t use, say, location tracking technologies to tell where lost packages may have gone. But it does help solve big problems for the organization. For example, if a package ends up being deliver to the wrong partner group, the IRC will have a record of where it ended up.

Watson says accountability is one of the biggest benefits of CTS. You’ve probably heard rumors of aid packages and supplies being hijacked by corrupt government officials or warlords. CTS helps IRC determine which supplies actually made it to their local partners, and gives the organization the ability to provide that information to its donors. By open sourcing CTS, he hopes IRC can help other organizations solve these problems too.