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On 22 July we hosted Procurement is the New Battleground: The Impact on Supplier Diversity, a hybrid round table run from the SASDC training room and online. We are pleased to share the highlights.

South Africa has recognised the importance of supplier diversity, enterprise development and inclusive procurement for a long time now. The policy is there. The investment is there. And yet many black-owned businesses and SMMEs still find themselves outside the room where purchasing decisions get made.

Our round table opened with a shift in framing rather than a fresh set of statistics. Gary Joseph, CEO of the South African Supplier Diversity Council, put it plainly. Procurement does not merely buy from a market. It creates the market from which it later claims to buy.

Sit with that for a moment and a lot of things rearrange themselves. Every purchasing decision directs revenue, learning, credibility and future opportunity towards certain firms and away from others. Which makes every procurement function an active market maker, whether it thinks of itself that way or not.

On 19 August 2026, we hosted Building High Impact Enterprise and Supplier Development Programmes with the ESD Community of Practice and we are delighted to share the highlights.

We opened by asking the room a simple question. Is your enterprise and supplier development programme compliance driven, or impact led? Of those who voted, 70% said impact led.

Gary Joseph, CEO of the South African Supplier Diversity Council, offered a warm reality check. Most programmes contain elements of both. They sit on the same spectrum rather than in opposing camps, and that is precisely why the question is worth asking out loud.

The central argument of the session was a hopeful one. Impact and compliance are not competing agendas. A programme designed for genuine supplier outcomes, revenue growth, stronger capability, real market access and supply chain resilience, produces the very evidence that compliance requires. Not as the objective, but as the natural by product of doing the work properly. Plans, milestones, contracts and outcomes create an audit trail, and that audit trail carries renewal value.