“Leadership is not positional" - How G-GEAP is Building the Next Generation of South African Women Leading the Green Economy

A Greening the Global Export Accelerator Programme story | South African Supplier Diversity Council

In 2011, Shashika Jaggernath stood in her kitchen in Pietermaritzburg with a rolling pin in her hand and a husband too ill to work. The medical bills were mounting. So she did what generations of women in her family had done before her: she made roti.

What started as necessity has, fourteen years later, become Top Rotis: a woman-owned, KwaZulu-Natal-based flatbread manufacturer that produces thousands of preservative-free rotis a day for retailers, caterers, and restaurants across the province.

The brand is built on values she names without hesitation: zero waste, conscious consumerism, sustainable manufacturing, and community upliftment.

In 2024, that same business owner sat in a classroom at the University of San Diego. This year, she is back in her factory in Pietermaritzburg, applying everything she has learned to the supply chain itself.

This is what SASDC's Greening the Global Export Accelerator Programme is designed to do.

What G-GEAP actually is

G-GEAP - the Greening the Global Export Accelerator Programme - is the gender-transformative, green-economy stream of SASDC's broader Project EMBRACE. It is built specifically for women business owners whose enterprises sit at the intersection of two of South Africa's most strategic economic priorities: inclusive supplier development and the transition to a green economy.

What makes G-GEAP distinctive is that it is not a single course. It is a structured journey across three components, designed to develop the leader, the product, and the supply chain in turn.

The International Leadership Executive Development Programme is the leadership stream, including international immersion at the University of San Diego. It is where participants step out of the founder's chair and into an executive's. This is the component Shashika completed in 2024.

Green Supply Chain Management is the operational stream, where participants apply green-economy principles to the way their businesses source, produce, package, and distribute. This is the component Shashika is engaged in right now.

Green Product Innovation is the development stream, where participants design new, green-economy-ready products and bring them to market. This is the component still ahead of her. Each component builds on the one before it. The leader develops first. The systems she runs follow. The products she takes to market come last. By the time a participant has moved through all three, what has been built is not just a more competitive business - it is a globally credible green-economy enterprise led by a woman who is ready for the room she now belongs in.

The leader she has become

The leadership programme is where Shashika began her G-GEAP journey, and her own reflection on it is the right place to start a story about what this work changes.

The most quoted insight from her experience is one sentence, and it carries a whole worldview inside it.

"Leadership is not positional. It is influence, clarity, courage, and service."

It is the kind of line that sounds simple until you sit with it. Positional leadership is the version most South African business owners have been taught to chase - the title, the org chart, the seat at the head of the table. What the programme made clear to her is that none of that is actually the work. The work is influence. It is clarity in moments where everyone else is confused. It is the courage to make the decision the room is avoiding. And it is service, which is the part most leadership programmes leave out.

She names what changed in her concretely. Stronger confidence in decision-making. Improved ability to lead through complexity. Deeper systems thinking. A more intentional, accountable leadership style. These are the operating tools of a founder preparing to take a manufacturing business through its next phase of scale.

The international immersion at the University of San Diego is one of the programme's defining features, and what is striking is what she takes from it.

Her reflection is not about what she learned in San Diego. It is about what she recognised about herself there.

"San Diego was not just a destination; it was a mirror showing me who I was becoming."

"Every room I entered reminded me that I belonged there - not by luck, but by preparation and purpose."

This is the quietly important argument G-GEAP makes. South African women entering global leadership spaces are not catching up. They are arriving. The international exposure is not designed to import foreign frameworks for participants to copy. It is designed to give them the room and the mirror to recognise what they have already built, and to lead from that recognition.

From the boardroom to the supply chain

It would be easy to end Shashika's story at the leadership transformation. Most case studies do. But that is not where her G-GEAP journey ends, it is barely the start of it.

She is now working through the Green Supply Chain Management component, applying everything she learned about leadership in San Diego to the operational reality of how Top Rotis sources, produces, and distributes. This is where the programme's design becomes obvious. A leader without an operation is an idea. An operation without a leader is a treadmill. G-GEAP refuses to develop either in isolation.

What this looks like in practice for a manufacturing business like Top Rotis is the unglamorous work that ESG conversations rarely make space for. How is flour being sourced, and from where? What is the carbon and water footprint of the production process? Where is waste being generated, and how can it be designed out? What does a packaging supply chain look like when zero-waste is not a slogan but an operating principle? How do you build a producer-to-retailer logistics chain that holds to those standards without breaking the unit economics?

This is the work of green supply chain leadership, and it is what South African manufacturers will need to demonstrate as their corporate buyers come under increasing pressure to report on Scope 3 emissions, supplier sustainability standards, and inclusive procurement performance simultaneously.

After Green Supply Chain Management comes Green Product Innovation - the third and final G-GEAP component, where Shashika will move from operational greening into developing new products designed for the green economy from the ground up. By the time she completes that stream, what Top Rotis represents will be a fully integrated case study in what a women-owned, Black-owned, green-economy export enterprise looks like when it is properly resourced.

Why this matters for South Africa

There is a temptation, when telling stories like Shashika's, to frame them as exceptional. They are not. They are evidence. Women-owned, Black-owned manufacturing businesses in South Africa are ready for global markets, for green-economy participation, and for executive-level leadership stages.

What they need is the access, the strategic exposure, and the sustained capacity-building that turns operational excellence into international competitiveness. That is the argument SASDC makes to its corporate members, to development partners, and to government every day.

G-GEAP is one of the ways that argument gets made in practice.

The transition to a green economy will not be inclusive by accident. It will be inclusive only if the women already building sustainable businesses in this country, in food manufacturing, in renewable energy, in green construction, in conscious consumer goods, are given the tools, the platforms, and the partnerships to scale. G-GEAP exists precisely to make sure that transition does not leave them behind.

For SASDC's corporate members, the implication is direct. The pipeline of executive-ready, green-economy-aligned, women-owned Black suppliers you need for serious supplier diversity is being built deliberately. This is what that build looks like.

A closing reflection

Shashika ends her own account with a line that does not need any more from us than to repeat it.

"Leadership is not about the title you hold; it is about the lives you elevate."

That is the sentence G-GEAP exists to produce. Top Rotis is what it looks like when the production is going well. And the next chapter, written through the supply chain and into a new generation of green-economy products, is still being written.

Top Rotis is a woman-owned flatbread manufacturer based in Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu-Natal, supplying retailers, caterers, and the hospitality sector across the province. Shashika Jaggernath is the Founding Director of Top Rotis and a participant in the Greening the Global Export Accelerator Programme (G-GEAP), implemented by the South African Supplier Diversity Council (SASDC) as part of Project EMBRACE. She completed the International Leadership Executive Development Programme component, including international immersion at the University of San Diego, in 2024. She is currently engaged in the Green Supply Chain Management component, with Green Product Innovation still ahead.

To learn more about G-GEAP and SASDC's broader programme of work for women-owned Black businesses in South Africa, visit sasdc.org.za.