21 July 2026 | Author: By Professor Chengedzai Mafini, professor of supply chain management and Executive Dean of the Faculty of Management Sciences at the Vaal University of Technology and Nteta, a supply chain expert and consultant. The authors served on the National Treasury–GIZ project that developed South Africa’s Supply Chain Management Competency Framework.
5 minutes read time.
South Africa’s supply chains are straining under the weight of their own complexity. In June, the World Bank and S&P Global’s Container Port Performance Index ranked Cape Town last among 400 ports worldwide, with Durban close behind — inefficiencies that cost deciduous fruit exporters alone more than R4bn in lost revenue and added costs in the 2025/26 season. Behind such failures sits a deeper, quieter problem: the country keeps asking its supply chain practitioners for ever more sophisticated work without a professional system to develop, accredit, and support them. Yet the remedy has already been designed and paid for. It has simply never been used.
We know this because we helped build it. In 2020, we served on a national project team, jointly commissioned by the National Treasury and the German development agency GIZ, that developed a competency framework and technical standards for professionalising supply chain management (SCM) in SA. The project involved extensive consultation across the public and private sectors, as well as international benchmarking. Its purpose was to give the proposed Supply Chain Management Council of SA (SCMCSA) a credible, standardised professional framework to implement.
Five years later, the framework sits on a shelf. The unified competency standard has not been implemented, and the proposed regulator has yet to assume its role. An independent assessment of SA’s procurement system, published by the Treasury itself in 2024, found that the interim SCM council created in 2018 has not been active since its inception. There is one encouraging signal: the Treasury’s Strategic Plan 2025–2030 lists the establishment of the SCMCSA as a statutory body, and a professionalisation framework for SCM, as core deliverables by 2028. The Treasury now owes the public a progress report. Is that work underway, or is 2028 another aspiration?
The evolving nature of SCM work makes the urgency plain. The field was once confined to administrative logistics and compliance-driven procurement. Today’s practitioners are expected to design integrated systems, lead digital transformation, manage risk and resilience, analyse complex data, uphold ethical standards and champion sustainability targets — work with strategic consequences for the state and the economy. The reforms now moving through the National Treasury, the Public Procurement Act of 2024, the Transport Education Training Authority and professional associations such as CIPS, SAPICS and CILTSA all point to a growing consensus: SCM should be recognised as a profession, supported by a national framework, clear accreditation pathways and sustained professional development.
The question SA must confront is whether its systems, structures and competencies reflect that reality — and what it would take to professionalise SCM to the standard of law, health or engineering. The Legal Practice Council, the Health Professions Council of SA and the Engineering Council of SA bring stability, direction and discipline to their fields. Their example shows that professionalisation is about far more than
credentials. It is about competence, reliability and trust: accreditation that assures the public of a practitioner’s capability, structured pathways that develop talent, and educational standards that match the skills demands of today and tomorrow. In SCM, by contrast, persistent capacity and skills gaps have weakened institutional performance, slowed service delivery and eroded value for money across both the public and private sectors. Professionalisation is not a technical nicety; it is the foundation of institutional capability and of the confidence on which well-functioning supply chains depend.
Other countries show it can be done. Canada launched a structured national competency framework in 2022 that now shapes professional accreditation, skills development and workforce planning. In Africa, the People that Deliver framework has become a reference standard for building formal SCM career pathways in public health supply chains, adopted by Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria, among others. Governments from the UAE and Australia to Egypt, Hong Kong, and New Zealand have adopted the Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply framework as a national reference for the procurement profession. The lesson for SA is that political will and institutional alignment make professionalisation practical and transformative.
At home, parts of industry are already moving ahead of policy. Universities offering supply chain qualifications, and graduate development programmes run by companies such as PepsiCo, Nestlé, Shoprite, Takealot, Unilever and Woolworths, are narrowing capacity gaps and investing in technology-driven competencies and leadership development — evidence of what a nationally aligned system could achieve at scale. Any such system must also be inclusive. Young people and women remain under-represented across much of SCM, and initiatives such as the African Women in Supply Chain Association, Women in Logistics and Transport, and university logistics student forums need institutional support, mentorship and defined graduate pathways. A genuinely professional supply chain system should mirror the country’s demographics and aspirations.
SA’s SCM sector stands at a critical juncture. The architecture has been designed, and the destination is well understood. What is missing is implementation, aligned institutions and the will to treat SCM as a strategic profession rather than an operational function. The path is concrete: the Minister of Finance and the National Treasury should use the phased commencement of the Public Procurement Act and its forthcoming regulations to establish the SCMCSA as a statutory regulator, adopt the competency framework the state has already paid for, and report publicly against the 2028 deadline in the Treasury’s own strategic plan. Professionalising SCM is not an optional extra. It is an economic imperative — a means of strengthening the state, empowering industry, deepening public trust and securing SA’s economic future. The blueprint exists. What is needed now is the courage to build.