Recognizing the Private Sector’s Vital Role in Disaster Response
Recognizing the Private Sector’s Vital Role in Disaster Response
January 9, 2025 | Bora Arican
The devastating earthquakes of 2023 challenged every facet of Türkiye’s response system and underscored the importance of leveraging every available resource—especially the private sector. In a recent report, USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance highlights just how critical businesses can be in a crisis. Their ability to rapidly mobilize, deliver supplies, and coordinate efforts internally makes them an invaluable partner in humanitarian response. As the report aptly concludes:
“The humanitarian community should recognize and engage with the private sector as a significant and viable humanitarian actor… given the scale of its contributions.”
In my role as Country Director for Building Markets in Türkiye, I’ve seen firsthand how local businesses demonstrated agility that traditional actors sometimes struggle to match. They worked tirelessly to reopen shops, maintain services, and bring stability back to our communities. This direct engagement not only helped get urgent supplies to the right places faster, but also supported long-term recovery by protecting local jobs and creating a sense of normalcy.
For Building Markets, fostering these relationships between businesses, humanitarian responders, and community stakeholders remains a top priority. Our team continues to help identify local enterprises that can deliver goods and services quickly and effectively during crisis response and recovery, and we work to ensure they are included in humanitarian coordination efforts. By leveraging the power of local small businesses, we help humanitarian agencies tap into a wealth of expertise, resources, and a shared commitment to community well-being.
We agree with the recommendations of this report, specifically those which pertain to local businesses:
Promote small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) involvement in humanitarian supply chains for both economic benefits and stronger disaster response.
Maintain a catalog of local business capabilities to support disaster relief.
Encourage business networks to analyze assessments for better-coordinated response strategies.
Foster local private sector participation to enhance response efficiency and support local economies.
Seek opportunities where the UN and private sector can collaborate at the intersection of humanitarian and development programming.
As Türkiye moves forward, we must continue to recognize the private sector as a key humanitarian actor. With the right partnerships and coordination in place, businesses can drive resilience, help communities recover, and lay the groundwork for more effective disaster responses in the future.
If you represent a business or organization interested in partnering with Building Markets to strengthen local disaster response and recovery efforts, we want to hear from you. Together, we can build resilient communities and a more effective humanitarian system. Contact us at partnerships@buildingmarkets.org to discuss collaboration opportunities.
Read USAID’s full report.
Learn more about Building Markets’ work in Türkiye.