Operational guidance
What experience taught us, written down.
Practical guidance on procurement planning, last-mile delivery and event management in Afghanistan, written from delivered assignments.
Written for the person who has to plan it.
These are working notes for procurement officers, programme staff and operations teams — the constraints that decide whether a distribution lands on the agreed day, and the decisions that are cheap to make early and expensive to make late. Each article comes out of assignments the company has run; where the record does not support a claim, it is left out.
Guide · Procurement
Procurement planning for NGOs in Afghanistan
What determines whether a purchase lands on time in Afghanistan is rarely the price comparison. It is the specification, the destination, the season and the evidence plan — decided before the requisition is raised.
Read the guide →Guide · Field operations
Last-mile delivery in remote Afghan provinces
Reaching a provincial capital is a freight problem with known answers. Reaching a district beyond it is a coordination problem, and it is where most distribution plans lose their schedule.
Read the guide →Guide · Events and field support
Planning workshops and training events in Afghanistan
An institutional workshop is a logistics and accountability exercise wearing an agenda. Most of what determines whether it succeeds is decided before anyone books a room.
Read the guide →
Where the guidance comes from.
Zhikal has run logistics, procurement, warehousing, distribution and event assignments across Afghanistan since 2011, including a deployment reaching all 34 provinces and warehouse management across ten. These notes describe how that work is actually planned, not how it looks in a capability statement.
Review the documented record →Discuss a specific operation.
A guide can only go so far, because the answer usually depends on the destination, the season and the controls the contract imposes. For a live requirement, the operations team will scope it against those directly.
Contact the operations team →