PSA researches lack of African female entrepreneurs in supply chain management
Pam Steele founded Pamela Steele Associates (PSA) in 2013 as a niche consultancy focused on supporting humanitarian and public health supply chain management in low and middle-income countries.
Today, thanks to support from organisations, such as the Bill &Melinda Gates Foundation, PSA employs almost 40 staff across our programmes. We take pride in being a woman-owned business working to ensure that no one, regardless of gender, suffers due to a lack of quality-assured essential medicines in Africa.
As we head towards another International Women’s Day, we are in the process of conducting a study to identify female-owned supply chain business in Africa and determine how many have been awarded contracts by aid organisations – or if not, what his hindering them from a supply and demand perspective.
We would like to see more African women-owned businesses in supply chain and logistics, as from early insights from this research, there appear to be relatively few of these outside of South Africa. If you are a female business owner in Africa, we would love to hear from you.
We are hoping this study will contribute to an understanding of why this might be, what is deterring female entrepreneurs on the African continent and what is hindering their success. In the field of supply chain, as with most industries, root cause analysis is a systematic approach to help you determine the real, rather than the assumed cause(s) of a problem. Once we understand the foundations of the problem, we can start to think about the solution and how we, as an organisation and as individuals can help to support this.
Read more about why gender inequities in supply chain management hinder success in our blog post >