During the ABW Impact Accelerator, Fleet Forum, ORTEC and the Analytics for a Better World Institute (ABW) developed a mobility planning tool that can support humanitarian organisations in improving their operational mobility decisions. Piloted with eight organisations in Lebanon, the tool brings together historical trip data, costs, emissions and available transport alternatives to support a shared view of mobility demand and identify where travel could move away from cars.
Why is car-centric mobility a challenge for humanitarian organisations?
Humanitarian organisations depend on mobility to keep programmes running. Staff travel between offices and project locations, while commuting between home and work adds to an organisation's overall transport demand. How those journeys are organised affects both operating costs and environmental footprint.
Mobility in the sector is still largely car-centric and car-dependent. Planning tends to concentrate on professional movements and often disregards staff commuting. Fleet Forum's aim is to reverse the mobility pyramid by moving away from the car and towards public transport and shared forms of mobility, to lower operating costs and environmental impact.
How did the mobility challenge become a practical tool during the Impact Accelerator Program?
Fleet Forum brought the idea of an Interagency Mobility Plan into ABW's 14-week Impact Accelerator. The programme is designed to take a high-impact challenge and, through co-creation with researchers, data scientists, software engineers and domain experts, turn it into a practical decision-support solution.
For Fleet Forum, that meant translating the ambition of coordinated and sustainable mobility across humanitarian organisations into a concrete analytics question: could data from different organisations be combined to show how they currently travel and where realistic alternatives to car use might exist?
Fleet Forum contributed its expert knowledge of humanitarian mobility and the operating context along with its network partners, while ORTEC and ABW brought software, analytics and applied research expertise. Together, the team developed the first version of the mobility tool around the needs of organisations in Lebanon, creating the foundation for the dashboard, mobility advisor and a wider Interagency Mobility Plan.
How can prescriptive analytics support better mobility decisions?
The goal was not simply to map how organisations travel, but to offer supporting evidence for deciding where a more sustainable way of travelling could realistically work. The project is built around three pillars:
A mobility dashboard that gives mobility managers a snapshot of the participating organisations’ transport demand, estimates the cost and impact of current practice, and shows which alternative transport modes exist;
A mobility advisor that uses this data to estimate the potential of shifting part of today’s travel to public transport, walking, cycling or ride-sharing, and what that could save in money and CO2 emissions;
A mobility plan, in which this evidence feeds an action plan the participating organisations can use to implement corrective actions.
The dashboard needs at least a year of historical data to show overall mobility demand and provide the foundation for the prescriptive step, the mobility advisor. Rather than supporting live decisions about individual trips, the tool is designed to help mobility managers identify patterns across an organisation’s travel and consider where broader changes in behaviour and policy may be possible.
The mobility advisor is being developed to compare options and show what could change if selected journeys shifted to another mode. Using the Avoid–Shift–Improve framework, it does not assume that one transport mode is appropriate everywhere, but helps identify where a change may be both feasible and worthwhile.
The Fleet Forum Team and humanitarian organisations partners at the launch of the Interagency Mobility Plan in Beirut
What did the pilot result in?
The pilot created a shared view of mobility demand across the eight participating organisations, a mix of international NGOs and local grassroots organisations.
Each journey is recorded with its origin and destination, number of passengers, date, time of day, mode and reason, whether professional or commuting. The dashboard reports journeys, travel time, CO2 emissions and cost, and compares them across modes. The pilot introduced passenger-kilometres, a measure that multiplies the distance travelled by the number of passengers. It shows how much demand a journey meets, which counting vehicles or trips alone does not. The analysis also includes staff commuting, which mobility planning often overlooks.
A map view groups journeys that run between the same areas, across organisations, and highlights the largest groups. This shows where different organisations travel along similar routes and where sharing a vehicle could be worth exploring.
The tool was also built to extend beyond Lebanon. Organisations, countries, regions and transport modes are managed inside the tool rather than hard-coded, so rolling it out to a new region is designed to be straightforward.
What makes a shift away from cars workable in practice?
The eight participating organisations used different systems and their data varied in quality, so the team could not start from one standard dataset. Instead, they worked with the information organisations were able to provide and built transformation tools to bring it into a common format.
The operating context also shaped the project. When conflict in Lebanon intensified, participating organisations had to focus on emergency response. This reduced the time available for co-design, demonstrations and feedback, and limited work on features such as assessing the safety of alternative transport modes. As a result, Fleet Forum's operational perspective played a larger role in shaping the first version of the tool.
The pilot also reinforced that reducing reliance on cars is not simply a question of identifying another route or transport mode. Security requirements, internal policies, and organisations' readiness to change all affect what is realistic. The value of the tool therefore lies not only in showing where alternatives may exist, but in enabling organisations to have a shared evidence base for discussing which changes they are prepared and able to make.
What can this mean for humanitarian mobility next?
The Lebanon pilot gives Fleet Forum a foundation to take the approach further. The tool is designed to be used beyond one country, and Fleet Forum plans to build on the pilot with partners in other operating contexts.
The next step is to move from understanding travel patterns to testing better choices. Follow-on research will examine where journeys could be combined, rerouted or shifted to other transport modes, and what those changes could mean for cost, time and emissions.
That work can shape the next phase of Fleet Forum’s Country Mobility Programme and show where shared mobility planning may be useful beyond Lebanon. Over time, the bigger opportunity is to better coordinate interagency mobility by using shared evidence to identify where organisations have similar travel needs and where working together could reduce duplicated journeys or support alternatives to car travel.
