This simulation game is part of the course “Strategic Leadership in Human Rights and Humanitarian Business Practices” — 2026 edition.
Working alone or in teams, you will take on one of three archetypal leadership positions inside a humanitarian organisation — each defined by what it tries to maximise — and steer that institution through the weeks before a disaster, and through what the disaster leaves behind.
The decisions you will face are built from real elements of humanitarian operations: contract design between relief agencies and private-sector vendors, risk management under an uncertain forecast, budget stewardship, donor and media dynamics, and the ethics of measuring harm. Every number is explained as you go; no prior background is needed.
Read the situation below. When you are ready, receive your mandate — and from then on, decide as your institution would decide.
You direct the lead relief agency for the Talassa delta: a coastal floodplain, home to four hundred thousand people, protected from the sea by a single ageing levee. Your organisation plans on science — the meteorological service issues the seasonal forecast, and your own risk model has just processed and confirmed it: cyclone season opens in six weeks, with the probabilities shown below. Until then, you have one budget to manage and a series of decisions to make under time pressure, imperfect information, and competing demands. Once the season begins, the important ones cannot be unmade.
Families reached by the late spot-market wave will have waited more than a week for water, shelter and hygiene. Your field manual, following standard disaster-management practice, converts that harm into money so plans can account for it: €120 of "deprivation cost" per family that waits, rising to €400 per family never reached in the acute phase — the figures climb steeply because suffering deepens the longer help takes to arrive. Treat both numbers as planning proxies: they make the waiting visible inside a budget, and they still understate what a family actually goes through. Whether suffering should carry a price at all is a debrief question; for now, the numbers are in your spreadsheet.
Buying early is cheap. Buying late is expensive and slow. A kit secured now costs €60–85 all-in. After the storm hits, the same kit costs €150 on the spot market, only 2,000 exist for sale, and they arrive a week late — with families waiting that week.
You can own, reserve, or mix. Owning means paying full price now and keeping the kits whatever happens. Reserving means paying a small fee now for the right to kits, and paying the rest only for the ones you actually call after the storm. Mixing is half and half.
"Deprivation cost" is suffering written as money — so it can sit in the same table as procurement. A family that waits a week: €120. A family never reached in the acute phase: €400. Whether suffering should have a price at all is a debrief question; for now, it is a column in your spreadsheet.
Some of your budget moves through reputation. Your budget is donations, and donors read the papers. A bad look costs nothing on the day; the cost arrives later, as hesitation in next year's pledges. During the six weeks, watch for choices that move money through this channel: some warnings become costs and some stay warnings.
Talassa is invented, and built from real parts: an anonymised composite of real cyclone deltas — a port city at a silted river mouth, a mid-century levee, highlands a day's drive inland. If it reminds you of somewhere, that is the point. No single country is being graded.
A silt-rich floodplain where most families live within two metres of sea level. The game's coverage numbers are these places: 1,000 families along the river margins (MILD), 3,000 across the central districts when the cyclone lands (SEVERE), 6,000 once the polder goes too (CATASTROPHIC).
An earthwork protecting East Polder, engineered for the storms of its own century; today's storms run stronger. It has held for decades, but decades without a big storm prove very little about the next one. In one season out of five, a storm arrives that it cannot hold; when that happens, the number of families needing help doubles from 3,000 to 6,000.
The port city. After landfall, buyers from every agency in the region converge on the port auctions: prices double to €150, total stock caps at 2,000 kits, and everything moves the last kilometres by boat — reaching families a week late. In practice: if you under-prepared, this is where you make up the shortfall, at double the price and a week too late.
Capacity 3,000 kits; what sits here is yours whatever the sky does. Storing more means renting the old cannery on the north road — the +€60,000 in your table. Owned stock is certainty you pay for in advance, use or not.
A private distributor whose depot sits upriver, above the flood line. It sells options: €25 to reserve a kit, €60 more only if you call it. Reserving is cheap for a simple reason — any kit you never call, they are free to sell to someone else. In other words, the reservation fee buys guaranteed availability, and you only ever pay for the goods you actually call.
The highlands sit above the flood line — their crises are of a different kind: remoteness and displacement rather than water. Enara's displacement camps, two hundred kilometres north, are the source of Dispatch 1's request for kits. The Kal Plateau's four hundred families — limestone country where roads wash out in the rains, leaving helicopter-only access — are the subject of Dispatch 4.
Your facilitator assigns your archetype — or claim the one you were dealt. From this point on, decide as your institution would decide, even where you personally disagree.
The disciplined guardian of donor money. Your board reads audit reports, not situation reports. Waste in this crisis is theft from the next one.
The humanitarian imperative made institutional. Suffering goes on your ledger at full price — and there is no threshold below which it stops counting.
The evaluator who spends the whole budget and answers for its placement. Saving money impresses you as little as good intentions do: every euro must land where it buys the most relief — here or somewhere else. Your funder's bar is explicit: 3-to-1, or the money moves on.
Coverage and arrangement. The numbers below update as you choose — read them with your mandate's eyes, not your own.
Coverage is a bet on how bad the season gets. 1,000 kits = you bet on the mild season and buy back your mistake later if you're wrong. 3,000 = you are ready for direct landfall, but not for the levee failing. 6,000 = you are ready for everything, and will own a mountain of kits if nothing happens.
Arrangement is who holds the risk of the unused kit. SELF: you pay €60 per kit today; if the storm skips you, the money is already gone. VENDOR: you pay €25 per kit today just to hold capacity, and €60 more per kit only for what you actually call — you pay for certainty only if you need it. SPLIT: half owned, half reserved.
Whatever you choose, coming up short means the spot market: €150 per kit, max 2,000 for sale, arriving after a week of waiting.
"Expected" means the average across many seasons, weighted by the odds — 50% mild, 30% severe, 20% catastrophic. It is the fairest way to compare plans before the weather decides. Keep in mind its limit: the average blends all three scenarios together, but only one of them will actually happen — so also read the per-scenario columns and ask how bad each plan gets in its worst case.
| Your strategy | If mild (50%) | If severe (30%) | If catastrophic (20%) | Expected (weighted) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| — | — | — | — | — |
| Families left waiting / unreached | — | — | — | deprivation, expected |
Assume a mandate and survive a landfall first.
Compare the rankings before and after landfall. Under SEVERE, the plan with the lowest expected spend ends up spending the most money and causing the only waiting: its shortfall is bought back at €150 per kit instead of €60–85, and a week late. Under MILD the same plan performs best. Conclusion to draw out: the outcome of a single season cannot validate or condemn a decision made under probabilities.
The two ledgers rank the same three institutions differently, and each ledger favours a different constituency — donors, the delta's families, or the crisis elsewhere that unspent money could reach. No available ledger is neutral between them, so adopting one is itself a decision about whose losses count. This is Fassin's hierarchy of lives, expressed as an accounting choice.
Deprivation cost puts €120 on a week of thirst. The case for it: suffering that carries no price is ignored by every cost-based decision process (Holguín-Veras's argument). The case against: it reduces harm to a coefficient and understates what families actually experience — Fassin's critique in numerical form. One asymmetry structures the debate: declining to price suffering does not remove it from the decision; it sets its price to zero.
The Strategist stopped at 3,000 kits because 2.19x < 3.0x. Ask who set the bar at 3 — and why not at 2, which would fund full coverage. The threshold is a moral judgement expressed as a technical parameter, with the same structure as cost-per-QALY bars in health systems: the ethics is decided where nobody debates it.
Look at the arrangement column: above minimum scale, the option contract or the split wins everywhere. Private-sector collaboration is what makes the Humanitarian's full coverage affordable at all — €291,000 expected under the split against €420,000 fully self-stored. That is Fan et al.'s core claim, demonstrated in the cost table.
— opens your browser's print dialog; choose "Save as PDF". The record covers your dispatches, committal, landfall and epilogue.