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.
Why now
Three things are moving at once, and together they make the case for a rethink.
The policy environment is in motion. The Public Procurement Act has been signed into law and the regulations were published for comment, with the comment period closing at the end of June. Once those regulations are approved, the Act will shape how government procures goods and services, with transformation, inclusivity and development sitting inside the holistic public procurement policy environment rather than alongside it. We have also seen draft code amendments published with a strong focus on formalising the transformation fund, along with proposed additional targets geared towards 100% Black owned businesses, and specifically towards procurement from 100% Black owned EMEs and QSEs.
Importantly, the sector codes are unaffected until such time as these changes are gazetted, and charter councils would then have roughly 18 to 24 months to align the sector codes accordingly. What is in force today, and what remains the primary basis for programme design, is Statement 400 of the generic codes.
The compliance dividend is shrinking. As verification tightens, poorly evidenced once off grants cost more at audit time than well evidenced supplier outcomes. ESD has traditionally been measured at input level, and the return on that approach is eroding relative to the cost of proving it.
And there is commercial pressure for resilience. The shocks of recent years, from the impact of COVID on the economy to ongoing energy and water cost pressures, have shown what supply chain fragility costs. Supplier diversification and local capability are a genuine mitigation. That is a business case in its own right, standing quite apart from the transformation ask.
The four question test
Gary offered a practical diagnostic that any board, transformation committee, executive or ESD lead can run over a programme in an afternoon.
First, commercial rationale. Would this activity still be valuable if the scorecard mechanics changed? If B-BBEE were nullified tomorrow for whatever reason, would you still be doing this because it generates value?
Second, supplier outcome. Is there a credible line from the intervention to growth, capability or resilience, or is it a set of activities that ticks a box and earns the points?
Third, current compliance. Is it properly structured and evidenced under the rules that apply today, both the statutory rules and your own internal ones?
Fourth, scenario flexibility. Can the intervention mix be adjusted without abandoning the suppliers already inside the programme?
A negative or purely compliance based answer to any one of those means the test has been failed, and the programme is exposed by its own design.
There is an even simpler version. Listen to your starting question. If it is "what qualifies for points", the programme is compliance driven. If it is "how does this supplier need to grow", you are already building for impact.
What the world is teaching us
The session was clear that the point is not to import models wholesale, but to understand the mechanisms behind them and adapt what fits.
In the United States, the National Minority Supplier Development Council focuses on getting minority business enterprises into corporate supply chains, with certification giving buyers confidence that the businesses being supported are who they are intended to be.
The United Kingdom's Procurement Act of 2023 embedded a weighting inside the evaluation criteria for government contracting, which moves the conversation from preference into evaluation and then into contract management.
In Canada, the Canadian Aboriginal and Minority Supplier Council runs government and corporate tracks together rather than one or the other. The World Bank uses anchor buyers to concentrate support and speed up supplier graduation, aggregating downstream tier two opportunities.
The OECD audits buyer side tender requirements so that tenders do not unintentionally create barriers to entry for the very SMMEs they hope to attract. Within the United Nations and International Trade Council space, supplier development is framed in sustainable development goal language, which widens internal sponsorship by connecting it to the ESG reporting companies already commit to.
Australia's Supply Nation has partnered with government on an inclusive procurement policy with targets that rise each year, and New Zealand's Amotai works to bring Māori businesses into mainstream economic opportunity through a progressive procurement plan with annually adjusted targets over five years.
The common thread is patience. Targets that climb steadily and predictably tend to build capability. Targets set at a level that cannot realistically be reached inside one annual cycle tend to build disillusionment and sometimes push businesses towards decisions that serve nobody well.
Seven design principles
SASDC has been doing preliminary research towards an enterprise and supplier development and supplier diversity playbook that we will be sharing with our ecosystem. It sets out seven design principles, and they are best used as a diagnostic to find the next practical level your programme needs to reach.
1. Start from opportunity, not budget. Demand drives procurement, so let the opportunity define the programme rather than the available spend.
2. Segment before you intervene. Segment the opportunity by contract size, duration and complexity, scan the market, segment your prospective suppliers, then check that the two sets actually match.
3. Combine finance with capability. How the relationship is financed should move in step with the capability being built.
4. Sequence support over multiple years. Budgets can be set annually. The plan should not be.
5. Measure outcomes, not only inputs and outputs. Design the programme so that outcomes are measurable, rather than only reporting what the codes ask for.
6. Treat suppliers as partners. A supplier who is described as a beneficiary will behave like one. A supplier treated as a commercial partner earns independence and delivers business value.
The seventh principle, along with the detail behind all of them, is unpacked in the playbook and in the full recording.
Where to from here
The shift being described is not a leap. It is a series of small, deliberate moves. From spend first to proof of outcomes. From available beneficiaries to deliberate matching. From once off support to a sequenced plan. From an annual cycle to a multi year horizon. From beneficiary to partner.
Every one of those moves makes the programme easier to defend at verification, not harder. That is the encouraging part.
Together, we are building a stronger, more competitive and more sustainable supplier ecosystem. One that opens real markets for Black-owned businesses and delivers genuine value to the corporates who partner with them.
The session ran on 19 August 2026 from 10h00 to 12h00. Watch it in full here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=bShcK2RNlxI&feature=youtu.be