Janti Soeripto

Hi, my name is Brian Blank.

I'm an associate professor of finance at Mississippi State University.

Coming up... The crisis currently unfolding in the Middle East, that is giving our supply chain teams a lot of headaches.

Thank you for having me.

Yeah, that is one way to put it, Kai, indeed.

It's definitely the case.

Look, just to take a step back, you know, of all of our humanitarian responses that we do across the world and certainly also in the Middle East, the supply chain makes up about 75% of that humanitarian response in terms of cost.

So as you can imagine, with the crisis currently unfolding in the Middle East, that is giving our supply chain teams a lot of headaches.

Yeah, in certain cases, that is literally what's happening.

And it's actually not even in the Middle East.

We have currently stock of pharmaceuticals stuck in India that we cannot transport across the road anymore to Afghanistan, which is where the destination is.

We're looking at air freighting it, which is already incredibly expensive.

And it is now twice as expensive as it was before this crisis in the Middle East started because of oil prices.

Look, it was already a pretty difficult job to be a humanitarian response leader in Sudan, let's say, or in Gaza or in Lebanon, for that matter.

And of course, it's become a lot, lot harder still.

You know, specifically when you look at Lebanon now, you know, over a million people displaced.

There's an immediate direct link between a war starting and people being displaced and kids being out of school and et cetera, et cetera.

So we're responding there and we're proud of it because we did have some preparedness there in terms of extra stock.

Our team is being ready to respond, expecting a certain level of escalation.

But if you're in Sudan, where we are still in Darfur, one of the few large organizations still able to work there, and our stocks are depleting, of course, they're incredibly concerned.