Social Inference to Gender on Logistics in Disaster Relief Operations in Kenya

Abstract

Social inferences on gender has in the recent past received a lot of attention from logistics practitioners, academicians and logistics organizations management. This sought to find out the impact of this inference on humanitarian logistics in disaster relief operations and how humanitarian organizations are overcoming the inferences. The target population for this research was 40 employees from the 10 humanitarian Logistics organizations that handle social issues such as gender; the response rate was 90%.The research adopted descriptive survey as the research design and a census as the sample design. Questionnaires were used to collect data. Data analysis was done using statistical tools that were broken down according to descriptive information as obtained from the research questions. Both inferential and descriptive statistics were used to interpret the data backed up with the use of measures of dispersion and those of central tendency. The study findings show that indeed there is a strong relationship between the social inferences to gender and humanitarian logistics and it is this relationship that causes effects on disaster relief operations. The findings are in line with the literature review in that there are varied ways in which cultural and similarities and differences affect social inferences to gender. With an overall mean of 3.64, the respondents confirmed that social inferences affects gender during disaster relief. The study confirms that there is a strong relationship between the dependent and independent variables and the independent variables have a strong ability to influence the outcome of the dependent variables. The researcher recommends that disaster relief operations in humanitarian logistics organizations need to be linked to development to ensure sustainability and Long-term impact to the affected communities even after donor aid is depleted. The duration provided for this study was fairly short and this limited the amount of detailed research that would have otherwise been done should there have been more time to do the same.