Fleet Forum, ORTEC and Analytics for a Better World developed a mobility planning tool to examine how humanitarian organisations could reduce their reliance on cars for work-related travel. Piloted with eight organisations in Lebanon, the tool brings together organisational travel demand, costs and alternative transport options so teams can compare where changes in mobility could have the greatest effect.
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 also adds to the overall transport demand of an organisation.
Much of this movement is still organised around cars. Alternatives such as walking, cycling, public transport or informal shared transport are rarely considered systematically, and commuting is often absent from organisational mobility planning.
This creates a gap between the transport data organisations already have and the decisions they make with it. Fleet Forum wanted to understand whether that information could be brought together to show where car use could realistically be replaced by other modes.
The pilot focused on Lebanon and involved eight participating humanitarian organisations.
Why is this relevant to prescriptive analytics?
The first step is descriptive: understanding how people currently travel, how much that movement costs and where car journeys are concentrated.
But the larger question is prescriptive: given those journeys, which alternative transport options could an organisation prioritise if it wants to reduce costs or its environmental footprint?
The project therefore combines two levels of decision support.
A mobility dashboard creates a baseline of current travel demand and costs and shows which alternative modes are available along routes currently travelled by car.
A planned mobility advisor goes further by comparing what could happen if selected journeys shifted to another mode. This allows organisations to examine which changes may produce the largest reduction in mobility costs or environmental impact before changing internal policies.
Rather than assuming that one transport mode is appropriate everywhere, the aim is to give organisations evidence for deciding where a change is both possible and worthwhile.
How did Fleet Forum, ORTEC and ABW develop the approach together?
Fleet Forum entered the programme with the idea of an Interagency Mobility Plan, but the first phase still needed to be translated into a concrete data problem. Early discussions with the ORTEC team refined what information the tool needed and how it could support the wider mobility initiative.
The collaboration used weekly working sessions and two stand-ups each week, particularly during the early stages, so requirements and decisions could be developed together.
The team deliberately kept the first version focused on functions that matched the current needs and data maturity of participating organisations. Fleet Forum wanted to avoid building a technically advanced system that would be difficult for users to operate or interpret.
A UX specialist was also involved so that usability was considered as part of the technical design.
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 resulted in a tool designed to bring mobility information from different organisations into one place and make it usable for planning.
One of the new measures introduced was passenger-kilometres: the distance travelled multiplied by the number of people making that journey. This gives organisations a clearer picture of their total mobility demand than simply counting vehicles or trips. Staff commuting was also brought into the analysis, which had often been overlooked in organisational mobility data.
The tool was designed so that Fleet Forum can manage data and key reference information itself. ORTEC also considered Fleet Forum's future hosting requirements from the beginning, rather than developing a proof of concept that would need to be rebuilt before it could be maintained.
Why were data and change management part of the challenge?
Building the tool was only one part of the pilot. Collecting comparable information from eight organisations proved time-consuming because organisations used different systems and had different levels of data quality.
Rather than requiring every participant to submit data in one perfect format, Fleet Forum and ORTEC worked with what organisations were able to provide. That made it possible to continue developing the pilot while learning what a future standardised data process might need to look like.
The context in Lebanon created an additional constraint. Conflict affected the availability of participating organisations and reduced the level of co-design that Fleet Forum had initially planned. It also prevented some work on features such as assessing the safety of alternative transport modes.
Moving away from car-centred mobility will also require more than showing alternative routes on a dashboard. Organisations may need to change internal policies, procedures and assumptions that currently make car travel the default.
The mobility plan is therefore partly a change-management process. Data can identify where another mode may be feasible, but organisations still need to decide whether their policies, safety requirements and ways of working allow that change.
How was the tool designed to continue beyond the pilot?
Sustainability was considered from the beginning.
ORTEC and Fleet Forum checked that the proposed hosting setup was feasible and involved Fleet Forum in both technical and design decisions so that its team could operate and explain the tool after the accelerator programme ended.
The system was also built to be region-agnostic. Although the first use case is Lebanon, the underlying data structures can be configured for other countries and regions rather than being tied to one geography.
Fleet Forum also invested its own resources in the pilot and is looking at institutional funding that can support the scaling of the project beyond Lebanon.
What can this mean for humanitarian mobility next?
The next step is to use the dashboard and mobility advisor to move from understanding existing travel patterns to developing Interagency Mobility Plans.
That means identifying routes where alternatives to cars are realistic, estimating the implications for cost and environmental footprint, and determining which organisational policies or procedures need to change before those alternatives can be adopted.
The model was designed so that the same approach can later be adapted to other countries and regions where humanitarian organisations operate.
The longer-term opportunity is also interagency. Instead of each organisation addressing mobility separately, shared information could make it easier to identify where organisations face similar travel needs and where coordination could reduce duplicated journeys or create stronger demand for shared transport alternatives.
For now, the Lebanon pilot provides the foundation for testing that shift: from counting car journeys after they happen to using mobility data to decide where a different way of travelling could work.
