Research-Thesis: Development of an Integrated Crisis Management Protocol: The Case of Medicine Distribution in Haiti Using Drones.

Abstract

Every year, humanitarian crises cut off millions of people from the medicines they need to survive. The problem is rarely a shortage of supply at the global level. It is almost always a failure of last-mile delivery: roads are destroyed, airstrips are flooded, security threats block convoy routes, and peripheral health facilities run out of stock while warehouses in capital cities remain full. Unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly known as drones or UAVs, have emerged over the past decade as a credible technical response to this access failure. Rwanda, Ghana, and several other countries have demonstrated that drones can deliver blood products and vaccines faster and more reliably than ground transport under comparable conditions. Yet the evidence based on drone medicine delivery remains largely technical. What has been systematically missing is a structured risk management framework, one that integrates all categories of risk simultaneously into a single, operationally deployable protocol that field teams can execute under crisis conditions. This thesis addresses that gap. The central contribution of this work is the Integrated Crisis Management Protocol (ICMP): a six-stage enterprise risk management protocol for UAV-based medicine distribution, structured around the process proposed by Chapman (2006) and designed to be universally applicable to any humanitarian or fragile-state context. The protocol is validated by projecting it onto Haiti, selected as the most analytically demanding extreme case available: a country where seismic catastrophe, armed insecurity, regulatory void, cold-chain vulnerability, and community mistrust converge simultaneously. Expert validation through semi-structured interviews with humanitarian logistics practitioners confirmed the protocol's operational simulation and identified specific areas for refinement. The findings demonstrate that a structured, field-deployable risk management framework is both achievable and necessary: and that Haiti, far from being an exception, is the lens through which the protocol becomes applicable everywhere.