Enabling Sustainable Procurement
Solvoz is dedicated to empowering humanitarian, health, and social impact organisations to embed sustainability criteria directly into their procurement processes. This approach supports the delivery of solutions that maximise impact while minimising social, economic, and environmental harm.
How Solvoz facilitates Greener Humanitarian Responses
Sustainability refers to a solution’s ability to effectively meet user needs whilst minimising any potential negative consequences for the community and environment. It encompasses not only a product’s performance and longevity, but also its environmental and social impact throughout its lifecycle, extending far beyond the initial carbon footprint of a product during its production.
Solvoz is on a mission to support organisations to integrate this broader understanding of sustainability into their procurement processes. Our approach promotes the sourcing of solutions that are both effective and responsible, contributing to greener and more efficient humanitarian responses and a healthier environment.
Through various collaborative partnerships, Solvoz has produced valuable knowledge resources that promote more sustainable practices to humanitarian procurement. This includes the development of new sustainability frameworks and criteria tailored to our sector. Across the world, organisations have utilised these innovative resources to embed sustainability principles within their procurement processes.
Solvoz’s unique approach and technology allows the creation of solutions that directly incorporate key sustainability considerations within their detailed technical requirements. This approach offers guidance to buying organisations, signals key sustainability requirements to suppliers and fundamentally supports acquisition of effective, contextually- appropriate and sustainable solutions
We provide template questionnaires to gather information from suppliers about their environmental and sustainability standards. This approach empowers organisations to directly incorporate sustainability considerations into their RfQ and RfI requests. To learn more about this, click here.
Solvoz’s catalogue of open-access knowledge offers extensive technical guidance within procurement decisions. Our solutions catalogue provides guidance on relevant sustainability criteria, including life cycle management and waste disposal. We also have expert consultants available to assist you in creating your own sustainable procurement strategy and to start making the right procurement decisions to make an impact today.
Our platform enables local and regional suppliers and service providers to engage more easily with the wider humanitarian sector whilst also enhancing their access to international markets. This promotes the localisation of humanitarian procurement, strengthening local economies and enhancing the sustainability of humanitarian responses.
Quality
Toxicity
End of life management
Repairability
Local production
Recyclability
Case study
Sustainable Solar Solutions: Developing clear Criteria and Guidance
Background
Challenge
Process
Background
- A healthy environment is crucial to the safety, security, and wellbeing of refugees, internally displaced persons (IDPs), host communities, and societies.
- UN agencies, INGOs and NGOs have started to mainstream environmental sustainability into their strategies, projects and programmes, and operations; all in line with the environment-related commitments of the SDGs.
- Most refugee and IDP camps lack access to the electricity grid and rely on biomass for energy.
Challenge
- Humanitarian agencies provide off-grid energy solutions like solar lanterns, streetlights, and home systems to meet energy needs in camps.
- The unregulated discarding of e-waste is amongst the fastest growing waste streams in camps and camp-like settings. .
- The humanitarian funding cycle is shorter than the life cycle of procured products. Once devices have been distributed, they are often left to the end-user to maintain and eventually dispose of.
- This can create a risk to human health (e.g., leaking batteries) and the environment (e.g., contamination of groundwater, soil and air with carcinogenic compounds), negatively impacting long-term development goals.
Process
- In collaboration with the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and Innovation Norway, Solvoz has developed key sustainability criteria for solar lanterns.
- It is recognised that solar lanterns are essential for displaced households, providing basic energy needs and serving multiple functional purposes in displacement settings.
- The work of this partnership recognised that a sustainable lantern must be durable, meet household needs, and have a minimal environmental impact, with a focus on longevity alongside carbon footprint considerations.
Outcomes
- We collaboratively identified and defined essential sustainability criteria.
- We then applied these refined concepts to solar solutions in camp and camp-like settings.
- This resulted in the development of the key requirements profile for a sustainable solar lantern included below.
- By integrating these key sustainability criteria into Solvoz’s solutions catalogue, we support organisations to source and procure solar products and other solutions that are both functionally effective and environmentally responsible.
Quality
Toxicity
End of life management
Recyclability
Repairability
Local production
Profile of a Sustainable Solar Lantern
- Matches the lighting need e.g., to allow children to do their homework
- Does not contain toxic materials e.g., no halogens or toxic heavy metals
- Is of good quality and durable i.e., can be dropped without breaking easily
- Can be repaired i.e., can be disassembled and parts can be replaced.
Sustainable household energy resources
Sustainable construction
Bio-degradable packaging
Clean energy
Localisation
Recycling
Interested in reducing the environmental impact of your supply chain?
Then reach out to us today and check out our SDG impact page!