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.

Access is more than an open door

Part of the difficulty is that we use one word, access, to mean several different things.

Access is not permission to register. It is not an invitation to bid. As it was defined in the session, access is the practical ability to see demand early, to qualify proportionately, to compete fairly, to contract bankably, to deliver sustainably, and to convert a first award into repeatable scale.

Read that list again and you will notice how much of it happens long before a tender goes live, and how much of it happens long after the award.

Exclusion is designed early, not decided late

Most attention lands on the award decision and the scoring matrix. By then the outcome is largely settled.

The real design happens during demand planning and specification. Requirements that ask for a decade of corporate history for a straightforward catering or IT contract. Contract terms that push all the cash flow risk onto the smallest party in the deal. Bundling that lumps a dozen regions together to save on administration, and in doing so quietly reserves the work for national players.

Which brings us to the most useful line of the morning. Transparency at the end cannot repair exclusion designed at the beginning. An open, public tender process fixes very little if the architecture already narrowed the field months earlier.

The merit paradox

There is a circular logic that most of us have watched play out. The established supplier reads as the safe choice because accumulated experience looks like proof of capability. The emerging supplier reads as risky because that experience is missing. And the experience is missing largely because institutions have not yet let them earn it.

Merit is a by product of opportunity. When scale becomes the only accepted proof of merit, past market access quietly becomes the entry requirement for future market access, and new entrants are left in a catch 22 they cannot argue their way out of.

The incentive structure explains a great deal too. If a buyer backs a new supplier and it goes wrong, the failure is visible and someone owns it. If a buyer stays with the incumbent and quietly absorbs higher pricing, stagnation or indifferent service, that cost gets filed under business as usual. Much of what looks like exclusion is rational self protection inside a badly designed incentive structure. The good news in that framing is that incentive structures can be redesigned.

Development without demand

The session was direct about a pattern many of us recognise. Training days and compliance manuals achieve very little if the same supplier is later handed unfinanceable terms or an impossibly bundled contract. Supplier development without demand is preparation for a door that stays locked. 

The room took this further in discussion, and the theme returned again and again. Corporates and government are investing real money in development programmes. The capability is being built. Access to market remains the gap. 

One participant described the disconnect neatly. Enterprise and supplier development sits in one bucket, procurement sits in another, and the two rarely meet.

Others raised the shape of the funding itself, where a contract is structured mainly to repay the facility that funded it, leaving the supplier beholden to the funder and unable to grow past that relationship. And there was the geography problem. A business gets meaningfully supported in one town and never quite makes it to the next province, because nobody built the bridge from that first contract to the second.

There was also a call for honesty, which we appreciated. Programmes are easy to present well and harder to run well. Real progress starts when the people running them are willing to name the friction inside their own organisations and get their hands dirty, rather than waiting for someone else to produce a result at the end of the financial year.

Is the buyer ready?

Perhaps the most valuable question of the morning was aimed inward. You can find a brilliant supplier and still fail them. Disproportionate liability clauses, an onboarding process that takes six months, an accounts payable cycle that takes ninety days. Any one of those can bankrupt a small business that did everything right.

Internal silos and red tape are often the biggest threat to supplier diversity, which is genuinely encouraging news, because those are the things a buyer can fix without waiting for anybody's permission.

Two systems are available. A barrier based system uses exclusionary requirements and late payment to starve suppliers of capital, and then reads the resulting fragility as proof that they were risky all along. A bridge based system uses prompt payment to build supplier cash flow, grows capability, and lowers the buyer's own risk over time. 

Neither happens by accident. Both are built by institutional decisions.

Where to start

Four moves were put forward for organisations ready to redesign.

Give supplier diversity executive level ownership so that it sits as a strategic imperative rather than a departmental task. Develop the pipeline proactively instead of waiting to be found. Package contracts at a scale that emerging suppliers can actually bid for. And build capacity through genuine mentor and protégé partnerships.

Alongside that, change what you count. Aggregate spend percentages and supplier headcounts tell you about compliance. Innovation, scalability, resilience and ESG alignment tell you whether the programme is working.

There is a progression model behind all of this. Suppliers need a runway that moves from short discovery engagements into controlled pilots, then into limited scope contracts, and over time into strategic long term partnerships. 

Without that deliberate pipeline, programmes tend to produce a large number of very small suppliers who remain permanently small.

The question we left in the room

Access is everything, and procurement builds the market it will buy from tomorrow.

So the question is not whether your organisation supports supplier diversity. It is whether your procurement system, as currently designed, is a barrier or a bridge.

Our thanks to everyone who joined us in the room and online, and who shared so openly. Together, we are working towards supply chains that are genuinely open, and towards businesses that are given the runway to grow into them.

The round table ran on  22 July 2026 from 10h00 to 12h00.