Last Updated: May 11th, 2020
With the COVID-19 coronavirus causing travel restrictions, flight cancellations, and stay-at-home orders worldwide, nonprofits who had planned on service trips or in-person aid distributions are now scrambling to adjust their plans. Longer-term, we're seeing humanitarian organizations evaluating how they will deliver aid and operate their in-country programs if it's harder for staff to travel, and wondering whether aid workers will be able to travel into countries instituting travel bans.
We've put together some initial resources to help navigate international shipping and changes to travel availability, and will continue to update this page with new information as available.
If your upcoming service trips have been cancelled or postponed due to travel restrictions, and you would still like to provide aid items to the communities you serve, we can help you ship internationally. Our team has experience coordinating complex shipments, and we encourage you to reach out to us via email for quotes and information on expected duty and tax rates for your shipments.
International Shipping: Understanding the Basics
If your organization primarily transports supplies in your team's luggage, international shipping may be new to you. As you work on your next shipment, there are a few things it will be helpful to consider:
For further reading, we recommend Flexport's Shipment Essentials help guide.
April 2020: Rising Air Freight Rates and Limited Capacity
We attended Flexport's March 24th webinar on the state of global airfreight during the COVID-19 crisis. You can view a recording here.
Here were some of our main takeaways:
May 2020 Updates:
Things haven't changed too much since the last set of updates we posted, but industries are adapting and outlooks are more positive for countries that have had success containing the virus and are moving towards reopening. Here's a quick summary of where things are now:
You can find more webinars and Flexport's COVID-19 related updates for the freight industry here.
Status Pages - Shipping Carriers:
Here are some of the pages we're monitoring for collated updates from shipping carriers:
USA Carrier Status Pages: Carrier Status Updates Amid COVID-19 (Shippo)
LTL/Trucking, and International Freight: Client Advisory on Coronavirus Pandemic (CH Robinson)
Country-Specific Updates: The Impact of COVID-19 on Humanitarian Aid (The New Humanitarian)
Resources for Cancelled Humanitarian Trips:
COVID-19 Travel Advice (World Health Organization)
US Airline Cancellation & Fee Waiver Policies (Today.com)
Additional Resources
COVID-19 Resources for Nonprofits
LuminAID for Nonprofits Facebook Group
Get Involved With Our Nonprofit Community
We encourage you to join ourFacebook Group and share resources and strategies that may be helpful to others. We know this is a time of uncertainty for both your humanitarian projects and your teams, and hope that through sharing knowledge and resources, we can support each other.
What else would you like to know about? Do you have something to share with the nonprofit community? You can submit an entry to our resource directoryhere, or post in ourFacebook Group.
In addition to making their software tools free or low-cost for nonprofits, many companies are also publishing guides on how to effectively transition to remote work and collaborate while staying home. If you're leading your nonprofit through a transition like this, we wanted to put together some resources that will help you see what others have done, and understand best practices for your organization's security, productivity, and communications to stakeholders.
With many nonprofits shifting to remote work abruptly due to the COVID-19 coronavirus, we've prioritized adding new remote work options and tools to the resources we share. As you review the software below, note that there may be different levels of discounts for nonprofits impacted by COVID-19 versus nonprofits actively working on a cure or frontline healthcare for COVID-19. Do you know about a resource we should add to this list? You can submi...