Background 

Almost all NGO staff will, at some time in their career, travel in an organisation’ vehicle while deployed. Vehicle fleets are used to monitor, coordinate and execute last mile distribution of humanitarian assistance. Without vehicles NGOs cannot deliver their programmes and support the people in need.

The vehicle fleet also brings a number of enterprise risks to organisations:  

• A pressing need to reduce the environmental impact of the organisation;  

• Exposure to road traffic crashes, impacting staff health and wellbeing as well as that of 3rd party road users;  

• High annual operating costs, for some NGOs estimated around $15k per vehicle. 

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In the sector it is common practice that each NGO operates their own vehicle fleet, even though in many countries the centre of operations is limited to a low number of destinations. Furthermore, in many organisations, vehicles are not fully used to their seating capacity, meaning that many times only one passenger is in the vehicle. And last but not least, many vehicles are idle for long periods during the day.  

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In the corporate sector vehicle sharing is getting more common practice and is used as a way to reduce the operating costs and size of the fleet and to reduce the environmental footprint and risk of road traffic crashes whilst at the same time giving employees access to transport when they need it. In the UN, pilots have been done to share vehicles between agencies, with very promising results: 10 – 15% reduction in costs as well as improvement of driver behavior were reported.  

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Fleet managers in NGOs also recognize the potential benefits of vehicle sharing but concrete steps in this direction have not been taken as senior management and staff need to be convinced of the opportunity’s vehicle sharing can bring.  

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Vehicle Sharing in Lebanon 

In May 2022 Fleet Forum, with the support of USAID Bureau of Humanitarian Affairs, conducted a Proof of Concept ‘Vehicle Sharing Between NGOs. The objectives are to reduce participating agencies’ fleet size, operations costs and environmental footprint, as well as exploring jointly new mobility modalities amongst participating organisations.  

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This is meant to be achieved by increasing the occupancy rate of partner agencies vehicles circulating on concurring roads in Lebanon, by optimizing use of existing resources (such as vehicles and dispatchers) and mechanisms (weekly movement plans), but as well by promoting vehicle sharing for staff commuting (home-office-home).  

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The Results  

As of November 2022, a MoU has been developed and signed by 3 agencies, Action Against Hunger, Médecins du Monde and Terre des Hommes, the initiative minimum requirements have been agreed upon as well as a Standard Operating Procedure and a cost sharing model are being developed.  

Three intercity shuttle routes have been opened, covering the most concurring journeys made by agencies. Joint movements are identified by compiling the partner’s agencies movement plans using a shared folder on MS Teams and in the perspective of scaling up frequency of shared trips, a market assessment of digital booking service has been implemented.  

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The analysis of shared movement plans on the period June-October 2022 on the most used shuttle route (Beyrouth-Zahle) has allowed to identify the potential for reduction and savings of the initiative:  

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• 8% reduction of trips number in the case of not coordinating departure points and time using 5-seater vehicles  

• 18% of reduction of trips in the case of coordinated departure time and points using a 5-seater vehicle  

• 30% of trips in the case of coordinated departure time and point using a 11-seater minivan  

 

Overcoming challenges: Join the bus! 

The PoC has seen challenges. Changing current attitudes towards the use of organizational vehicles has been one of them as well as changing journey planning practices of staff. Strong leadership and commitment of senior management is key to overcome these.  

Another challenge that surfaced was the lack of capacity: vehicle seats were ‘sold out’ quickly meaning that organisations still had to use their own vehicles. To overcome this challenge, the participating organisations took the initiative to hire a bus. This had led to an increase in shared movements. In the first 4 weeks of operations, the participating organisations realized a 31% trip reduction.  
 
Interested to Partner 

Fleet Forum sees the necessity to bring Vehicle Sharing between NGOs initiatives to maturity by replicating them in different contexts of interventions and among different types of partners. We are therefore looking for agencies willing to rollout, contextualise, adapt the current vehicle sharing project and its learnings to other country of operations.  

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More Information  

A starting guide ‘Vehicle Sharing between NGOs’ can be found on the Fleet Forum Knowledge Platform. Click here for direct access.  

Vehicle Sharing between NGOs in Lebanon: Cyril Pierrot, Project Coordinator -cyril.pierrot@fleetforum.org  

Vehicle Sharing between NGOs in new locations: Rose van Steijn, Development Director – Rose.van.Steijn@fleetforum.org  

Materials related to the PoC Vehicle Sharing between NGOs can be found at the Fleet Forum Knowledge Platform. Click here for direct acces.