Behind the Scenes is a new ESUPS series opening up the work involved in developing and maintaining the STOCKHOLM platform. Through interviews and technical stories, it introduces the people behind the platform and explains the decisions shaping its development.
This first edition welcomes Martin Keitsch, who recently joined ESUPS as STOCKHOLM’s Technical Product Manager, leading new APIs with partners such as UNHRD, UNHCR, IOM and EU Member States. He brings years of experience in digital humanitarian logistics and system interoperability and he is an active member of the Digitalisation Thematic Working Group of the Humanitarian Leadership Group on Supply Chain (HLGSC), driven by DG ECHO.
ESUPS team sat down with him to talk about digitalisation in humanitarian logistics and what it will take for STOCKHOLM to reach the next step of adoption in the the wider community. Check out the interview below.
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As an active member of the HLGSC Digitalisation Working Group, how do you see digitalisation in humanitarian logistics nowadays?
Digitalisation in the humanitarian sector is, in my opinion, a very vivid field, especially now with new AI tools and models appearing all the time, every day something new shows up. What excites me is the impact it can have when used well. It speeds up our ability to understand a situation, spot logistics gaps, and forecast potential disruptions, letting us respond faster than we could ten or fifteen years ago. Where we might once have had ten percent of the information needed for a good decision, we can now push that closer to sixty or eighty percent, for faster, better decisions.
The real challenge, for me, is keeping our humanitarian principles at the centre throughout all our steps, making sure what we do is still, first and foremost, in the interest of the people in need.
In which direction do you believe the humanitarian community is heading now in terms of digitalisation?
Sometimes I feel more overwhelmed by the sheer number of possibilities out there than by the actual work needed to build them. More accessible technology has produced more data, tools and providers, but also considerable duplication. We now need to pool resources and focus on approaches that have proved useful. Common standards for describing things like a warehouse or a relief item, and shared services instead of everyone rebuilding the same thing. STOCKHOLM’s own harmonisation work, standardising item groups and units across dozens of organisations, is a concrete example of that pathway already under way.
What is the role of donors in pushing forward this consolidation?
The role of donors has evolved, the same way the digital world has. Funding is already conditioned on humanitarian principles and procurement practices, and it can be conditioned on efficient digital practices too. This is important because many organisations are repeatedly investing in the same basic digital components, such as hosting infrastructure, translation services, geolocation functions, data protection systems, cybersecurity layers, or mechanisms for exchanging information. Donors could help make some of these services – or access to subject matter expertise – available as shared resources or require funded solutions to connect with an existing ecosystem from the beginning. This does not mean that donors should impose a single platform or prevent experimentation. Innovation remains necessary and failure is a key element of innovation. However, once successful ideas and standards have emerged, donors can help direct resources towards solutions that are reusable, interoperable and beneficial to the wider community. This would allow organisations to concentrate their limited resources on the specific humanitarian problem they are trying to solve, rather than rebuilding the same technical foundations.
Do you believe STOCKHOLM has the potential to consolidate stock prepositioning efforts?
STOCKHOLM, at its core, is a unifying platform. It seeks the minimum common denominators needed to make stock data comparable across organisations. The item groups came directly out of looking at thousands of stock data to find that common, operational language. Different actors can keep their own warehouse systems and ways of collecting information, while STOCKHOLM helps those systems exchange data or translate it into a common standard. This can give responders and disaster-management authorities an improved, shared operational picture. Once you establish a universal language for stock, organisations can easier identify gaps and find opportunities to borrow, exchange or jointly position supplies.
“Who controls the data?”, is this question relevant for localisation efforts in the digital world?
Yes. Localisation in the digital world is a very challenging concept, in my opinion, if you take it seriously. It means national responders and warehouse managers not just using a tool, but deciding for one, owning it, and defining how it works, based on their needs. In practice, that runs straight into issues like, for example, connectivity and hardware, so part of the challenge is finding a versatile solution that works across very different field contexts. There is also a very practical kind of trust question at stake, less about an organisation’s reputation and more about certainty. What if the tool is not there next year because funding changed? I think questions like this have to shape how tools are built. It is easy to build something that is just a website; it is much harder, but maybe the right direction, to build something that can also run independently at the local level and simply synchronise once it is connected. Open source is one part of the answer too, letting organisations run and adapt a tool themselves, though that still takes real technical capacity to maintain. Now, this ownership on tool-level is closely related to data ownership or governance. Starting from the physical location the data is stored, to what ‘control’ mechanisms are actually in place, to where will this data go and with whom being shared. Only solutions that can accommodate for local context requirements, can seriously be considered in a localisation framework.
Data ownership will always be a central aspect to whether a solution is genuinely accepted.
A platform like STOCKHOLM, how can it be sustainable when it comes to the adoption of it by humanitarian responders?
Humanitarian work usually runs on funding that is time-bound, a grant for a year, two, sometimes more, but not a self-sustaining business model like in the private sector. I think sustainability for something like STOCKHOLM comes from combining two things: the same that open-source software relies on – a community of people who believe in the tool and help keep it updated simply because they believe in it and rely on it -, and strong, long-term partners and donors who see the platform as critical infrastructure worth keeping stable and funded over the long term. With both in place, a community that keeps it relevant and donors who keep it funded, you get the stability organisations need to trust in it and adopt it.
As Martin’s answers make clear, STOCKHOLM’s priorities are shaped by the people who use it. The platform continues to be developed and improved step by step, guided directly by feedback from the organisations that rely on it every day. Welcome to the team, Martin.
