Providing helicopter capacity for humanitarian aid with Logistics Cluster

Our partnership with the Logistics Cluster in Burkina Faso in 2025: 

• 4 predictable helicopter missions, enabling NGOs and communities to plan ahead
• 67.8 tonnes of aid transported, reaching more than 94,000 people in need
• 23 organisations supported (80% of cargo for national NGOs and 20% for international NGOs)

Logistics Cluster staff offloading aid supplies from helicopter in Fada, Chad (photo credit AWIPLAY Brunel Ouangraoua)

2025 marked the 11th year of conflict in Burkina Faso, with over 2.7 million people in need of food and more than 466,000 people experiencing severe acute malnutrition. Many of those affected are children under five, pregnant women and new mothers. In this protracted crisis, there is an urgent, ongoing need for therapeutic food and essential healthcare items, such as vaccinations and women’s hygiene kits. But many hard-to-reach communities find themselves cut off from supply routes for several months at a time. 

This year, in partnership with the World Food Programme-led Logistics Cluster, we supported four helicopter missions in Burkina Faso, transporting 67.8 metric tonnes of essential medical and nutritional aid across 17 local communities. Together, we helped 23 organisations – 80% of whom were national NGOs close to communities in need – ensure that people continued to receive health and nutritional supplies amid the uncertainty of war.  

Coordinating to reach communities in need

The ‘cluster’ approach enables multiple organisations to work together efficiently and effectively in response to crisis-hit regions. The United Nations System appoints different United Nations agencies and civil society organisations to oversee areas such as health, food and shelter. The World Food Programme is responsible for logistics, optimising its supply chain expertise and global operational footprint. 

The Logistics Cluster is a community of over 1,040 humanitarian actors working behind the scenes to ensure life-saving assistance reaches people in need, on time and in the right place. We collaborated with them to ensure our helicopter capacity met a pressing demand among local organisations in a predictable and coordinated way.

Logistics Cluster personnel unload boxes of humanitarian aid in Dori, Burkina Faso (photo credit AWIPLAY Brunel Ouangraoua)

Due to impassable or unsafe roads and the remote locations of communities in need, helicopters are often the only viable means of transport in humanitarian situations. In Burkina Faso, helicopter deliveries are lifelines for hard-to-reach communities. But due to funding shortages and a lack of availability, NGOs simply cannot access them.

Meanwhile, infrequent and unpredictable road convoys can leave crisis-hit communities without urgently needed food and medicine for long periods. For Bess Cisse, the Logistics Cluster Coordinator based in Burkina Faso, helicopter transport is critical for local organisations to achieve their missions: “We always ask, ‘How can we support local partners so they can respond to the need themselves?’ With access to Airbus helicopters, we give partners the means to deliver aid reliably and predictably to communities.”

The impact of supporting locally-led humanitarian aid

Enabling locally-led humanitarian activities is a Logistics Cluster priority – and a strategic objective of the UN’s ‘humanitarian reset’ response to severe cuts to global aid. “The local partners are closer to the communities, they are accepted by them and have access. They know the community leaders and understand how to ensure the aid reaches the people who need it most,” Bess explains. 

By providing regular, predictable heliborne transportation, we support the Logistics Cluster in ensuring that local partners can continue to plan and respond rapidly, efficiently and effectively for priority needs they identified.

Local community members distribute and transport aid in Gorgadji, Burkina Faso (photo credit AWIPLAY Brunel Ouangraoua)

In 2025, our missions:

• Ensured the continuity of healthcare by providing essential medicines, nutritional supplements and laboratory reagents used to prevent malnutrition and control malaria
• Facilitated child vaccinations and support for women in maternal care
• Supported food distribution that ensured vulnerable households received sufficient nutritional intake, reducing the risk of acute malnutrition in children
• Supplied school canteens so students could receive daily meals, restoring adequate learning conditions and re-establishing schools as points of stability in crisis-hit communities
• Supported the distribution of vegetable seeds to enable self-sufficiency through local food production

What if no helicopter capacity existed in Burkina Faso?

In a humanitarian crisis like this one, the difference between intervention and no intervention can be a matter of life and death. But measuring long-term impact is difficult due to people being displaced and challenges with data management.

Below you can read the Burkinabe Red Cross Society’s own account of what happened with Airbus helicopter support, and what would have happened without it.

Burkinabe Red Cross Society impact story

Building advocacy for long-term change  

The provision of transport and delivery of food supplies to Pensa for school canteens was officially recognised by the High Commissioner of Sandbondtenga Province in 2025. This government recognition was a key milestone for the Airbus Foundation-Logistics Cluster partnership. Not only is it a powerful endorsement of work supporting the distribution of daily meals to students and fostering optimal learning conditions, it also helps to build advocacy and create more long-term, self-sustaining systems for humanitarian activities in Burkina Faso.