Pam is the founder and CEO of Pamela Steele Associates (PSA). She has a passion to reduce suffering by increasing access to essential medicines in Africa. It led her to found PSA in Kenya in 2016 to address the problems of in-country health supply chains which she encountered while working for the United Nations. She provides overall technical and strategic leadership to PSA supply chain transformation programmes in Africa.
Pam was born and raised in Kenya. The struggles she experienced during her childhood inspired Pam to join the humanitarian and development sector and has informed her approach to international development.
She has over 30 years’ experience of working in logistics and supply chain management for leading INGOs and the United Nations. She advanced from being a procurement officer on the shop floor to holding strategic positions in several international organisations.
- Supply Chain Specialist-Programme and Supply Integration, UNICEF, Denmark
- Humanitarian Logistics Specialist, United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), Denmark
- Deputy and Acting Head of Global Logistics and Supply, Oxfam Great Britain
- Regional Operations Manager, Oxfam Regional office for Horn, East and Central Africa, Kenya
- Regional Relief Purchaser, International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Kenya
- Procurement and Logistics Manager, World Vision, Kenya
Pam has an MBA in Supply Chain Management from the University of Leicester and is a member of the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply, and the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport UK.
She is a guest lecturer at several universities in Europe where she shares her real-world experiences of humanitarian logistics and of the health supply chain in low- and middle-income countries with graduate and post graduate students.
She has a keen interest in mainstreaming gender and co-founded WISE, the Women’s Initiative for Supply Chain Excellence, to promote gender issues in the humanitarian supply chain community.
Pam is also a co-founder and an ambassador of TaC (Teach a Child Africa), a charity that enables orphaned and other vulnerable children from poor families to attend secondary school by paying school fees and providing uniforms and other essentials to help orphans fulfill their academic potential and escape from a life in poverty. The charity currently focuses on the highly affected Lake Victoria region in Western Kenya.
Since her cancer diagnosis and recovery in 2013, which you can read about here, Pam believes more than ever that everyone deserves access to essential medicines.