MAERSK LINE DONATES 300 CONTAINERS TO ADVANCE AID
LONDON – November 24, 2010 – Advance Aid is delighted to announce that Maersk Line is donating up to 300 forty-foot containers to Advance Aid for the latter to use for storage of non-food items for emergencies across Africa. This is a donation with a value of approximately $500,000 if Advance Aid had had to buy the containers on the open market.
These containers have been used for sea transportation for around ten years and are now being de-commissioned by Maersk over the next twelve to eighteen months. They will be delivered to a number of African ports from where Advance Aid will deploy them to the locations where it is stockpiling goods manufactured by African companies that can be used to service African emergencies.
“This is a fantastically generous gift on the part of Maersk,” says David Dickie, chief executive of Advance Aid, “and it helps us to provide a flexible, cost effective African solution for the pre-positioning of emergency relief materials. This is a key piece in the jigsaw that we are putting together. We are aiming to build a stockpile of 90,000 Emergency Kits in strategically located warehouses across Africa and this gift will give us storage space for all of these kits.”
“Maersk Line is happy to support a cause that not only provides jobs for Africa, but also helps to ensure timely relief when a disaster hits. As a company with a large market presence in Africa, Maersk Line is strongly committed to future development of the African continent,” says Søren Toft, VP Maersk Line Operations.
The first containers will be arriving in Mombasa, Kenya, within the next few weeks and will be deployed there and in Nairobi.
