Anonymised practitioner case study. The organisation, precise locations and dates are withheld to protect the client and its staff. Internal metrics are not published, and none has been invented in their place.
The client
A humanitarian organisation delivering food and water assistance from a coastal hub into inland districts in south-central Somalia. Six national staff, two partner organisations, one hired transport contractor.
The problem
Deliveries were arriving late, short, or not at all. Drivers described being stopped repeatedly, but nobody could say by whom, where, or on what terms. Each team negotiated on the spot, so every trip set a new precedent, and the asking price kept rising.
The organisation did not have an access problem. It had twelve separate access agreements that nobody had written down.
The method: checkpoint mapping
- Debriefed every driver and monitor who had used the route in the previous ninety days, separately, and recorded what each one saw rather than what they concluded.
- Plotted every stop on a segment map: location, who holds it, what they ask for, what they accept, and how the encounter usually ends.
- Cross-checked the map against partner reporting and open-source incident data to test which stops were permanent and which were opportunistic.
- Identified the two segments that accounted for most of the delay, the rest were noise.
- Wrote one negotiating position per segment: what may be discussed, what is disclosed, what is refused, and who speaks.
- Named a single negotiator per segment, with a deputy, so authority never travelled with whoever happened to be in the vehicle.
What changed
Passage became predictable because it became consistent. The organisation stopped improvising terms, and the people holding the road stopped testing for a better offer. Two stops that had been treated as unavoidable turned out to be avoidable with a different departure hour.
What was refused
No payment for passage was agreed, and no armed escort was hired. Where a segment could not be negotiated on acceptable terms, the route was suspended and the caseload served from a different hub. Suspension was treated as a legitimate outcome, not a failure.
Transferable lessons
- Map the checkpoints before you write the access strategy.
- Debrief people individually, group debriefs produce a consensus story, not evidence.
- One script, one negotiator, one deputy. Ambiguity is what gets priced.
- A route you are willing to suspend is a route you can negotiate over.