On Monday 27 February please join the Rotary Club of Suva East in welcoming Florent Chane, Head of the Pacific Regional Office at World Food Program – United Nations, to our regular 4th Monday meeting.

RCSE will be meeting at the Fiji Club at 12:30 for a 1PM start on Monday, 27 February. RSVPs appreciated.

Florent Chané, Franco-Australian dual citizen, joined the World Food Programme in September 2015 to head the newly established Pacific Office located in Suva, Fiji.

Florent has over 15 years’ experience in emergency response and logistics.
After an initial 8 years in the commercial sector, he started his humanitarian career in conflict affected areas for 4 years in Africa and then HQ with Action Against Hunger (South Sudan, Liberia, DRC Congo, Burundi…).

After Africa, Florent joned the Australian Red Cross for 3 years (ARC) as DM to set up the Logistics department of the International department of the ARC. One of his achievement was the joint establishment of the Brisbane warehouse shared with with Oxfam, WV, and AusAID counterparts. His journey then took him to the French Red Cross in New Caledonia where he set up the regional emergency response platform (PIROPS).

The WFP recruited him for a first consultancy in Vanuatu where he put together the first Logistics Capacity Assessments (LCA) for the country, before heading to work as part for the Global Log Cluster Support Cell (GLCSC) in WFP Rome where, once again, his portfolio was Central and Western Africa. He opened logistics clusters in Mali, Mauritania, Central Africa and Pakistan.

The three years before his move to Suva found Florent serving as the Zone Logistics Coordinator for the International Federation of Red Cross (IFRC) in Kuala Lumpur for the Asia Pacific Zone, mostly implementing logistics preparedness projects (capacity building) as well as managing large disaster responses and In-kind mobilisation at global level (Haiyan in Philippines or Nepal EQ).

Florent has led logistics responses as part of various regional disaster response teams in the Pacific in Samoa EQ (2009), Wallis and Futuna (Cylone Tomas 2010) Cyclone Pam (Vanuatu 2015) and more recently Cyclone Winston here in Fiji, and has consequently an extensive knowledge of the logistics in the Pacific region.

Rotary Club of Suva-East holds its regular lunch meetings in the 2nd and 4th Mondays of each month at the Fiji Club, 1 Selbourne Street, Suva. We host a social hour at 6:30 PM on the 1st and 3rd Thursdays of the month at the Holiday Inn Suva. RSVPs to rotarysuvaeastfiji@gmail.com are appreciated.

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