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Meet Zarrina Mirzoboeva, a Preparedness Officer in WFP’s Tajikistan Country Office.

As part of the Global Logistic Cluster (GLC) Field-Based Preparedness Project (FBPP), Zarrina has been providing support to the Government of Tajikistan’s Committee of Emergency Situations and Civil Defense (CoES). CoES leads national disaster management activities, including FBPP activities to strengthen the national humanitarian supply chain and logistics preparedness.

Before joining WFP in June 2021, Zarrina worked in various professional fields from administration and finance to project implementation and project management. In her current role as a Preparedness Officer, she liaises with and provides support to CoES to reinforce nationally-led logistics coordination and information management and enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of logistics responses.

From her point of view, the FBPP brings a new perspective that compliments the humanitarian supply chain and logistics context in Tajikistan, encouraging joint discussion on logistics preparedness issues and ways to address them. The project is driven by an institutional capacity strengthening approach, where national actors play a critical role in identifying their logistics capacity development goals and determining what they need to do to achieve them.

Led by CoES, the FBPP initiative in Tajikistan started with the establishment of a core group to ensure a coordinated approach to national logistics preparedness and response. The National Logistics Preparedness Working Group (NLPWG) comprises representatives of governmental authorities, local and international organisations and the private sector involved in or contributing to emergency logistics operations in the country. The NLPWG meets on a quarterly basis to brainstorm and exchange on common logistics topics. The information shared through this platform helps the members to be well-prepared for joint humanitarian logistics actions as well as to collectively make strategic decisions on key issues. One of the milestones in their efforts is the conduct of capacity needs mapping which leads to the collective understanding of the baseline capacity of the national humanitarian supply chain and logistics system.

At the current stage, the NLPWG is developing a National Logistics Preparedness Action Plan to commit to and engage with logistics preparedness activities and ensure its resiliency for humanitarian emergencies. Although there isn’t yet a specific national budget allocated for logistics preparedness activities in-country, the initiative has laid a solid foundation to further materialise preparedness activities in the future.

Advocating for institutional capacity transformation can be challenging as it requires the institution’s ability and willingness to take on initiatives through a holistic lens. Looking back at how she first engaged the national actors in the FBPP project, Zarrina recalled some memorable situations.

She proactively translated all key project documents into Russian and shared them with the national counterparts to ensure a thorough understanding of the institutional capacity strengthening framework and processes.

The FBPP’s approach is adapted from the WFP Country Capacity Strengthening Framework, which focuses on enabling national counterparts and stakeholders across several areas of engagement. By shifting the focus from the provision of training and assets to a more ‘holistic approach to strengthening systems and institutions, the FBPP has played a catalytic, pioneering role to promote a more locally-led sustainable capacity transformation in humanitarian logistics preparedness and response.