How we think about
transformation.

Three forces are converging. Regional trade corridors are deepening, driven by infrastructure investment in ports, rail, and road networks across Kenya, Tanzania, and their neighbours — creating new routing options but also new operational complexity that many supply chain teams haven't yet had to manage at this scale. Modern trade and e-commerce are growing faster than the distribution infrastructure built to serve traditional retail, forcing route-to-market models that were stable for a decade to be redesigned within a few years rather than over a generation. And FMCG and manufacturing groups expanding cross-border are discovering that supply chain leadership experience gained in a single domestic market doesn't automatically transfer to multi-country operations.

The result is a widening gap between the operational ambition of fast-growing companies and the depth of supply chain leadership available to execute it. This shows up most visibly in two roles: the Supply Chain Director, increasingly expected to manage cross-border complexity rather than a single domestic network, and the COO of logistics and distribution businesses, who needs both operational discipline and the change management capability to overhaul legacy systems while keeping the business running.

For organisations facing this gap, the practical choice is often not whether to invest in supply chain leadership, but how quickly genuinely experienced capacity can be brought in — and how it's governed once deployed, so the redesign doesn't simply add complexity on top of complexity.

A SAP, Oracle, or NetSuite rollout is, at its core, an organisational change programme that happens to involve software. It requires a programme director who understands both the technical implementation and the human reality of an organisation whose workflows, reporting lines, and daily habits are about to change. When that leadership gap exists — when the programme is run primarily by IT with insufficient senior business ownership — implementations slip, user adoption stalls after go-live, and the "failure" gets attributed to the system rather than to how the transition was led.

This is compounded in markets where the pool of programme directors with genuine large-scale ERP delivery experience, combined with cross-functional change leadership credibility, is thinner than in more mature markets — meaning the role that matters most is also the hardest to fill quickly and well.

The practical implication: the technology selection process deserves real rigour, but it is rarely the deciding factor in success or failure. The deciding factor is whether someone senior enough, with enough change management experience and organisational credibility, is accountable for the human side of the transition from day one — not brought in to fix adoption problems after go-live.

The challenge is rarely a lack of capable next-generation leadership. It's the absence of governance structures built to support a transition that founders, often still deeply involved operationally, haven't had to formalise before.

Three patterns recur. Decision-making authority is often concentrated informally in the founder, with limited documented process for how decisions should be made once that person steps back — meaning succession isn't just a leadership change, it's the first real test of whether the organisation has governance at all. Professionalisation and succession tend to arrive simultaneously rather than sequentially: a business preparing to hand over leadership is often also being asked, by investors, banks, or the next generation themselves, to adopt more formal reporting, board structures, and management practices for the first time. And the next generation, even when capable, frequently lacks the specific operational experience the business needs at its current scale.

Where this works well, it's rarely because the succession plan itself was unusually clever — it's because someone with genuine governance and transformation experience was brought in, often on an interim basis, to professionalise structures and support the transition before authority formally passes, rather than after. The more useful question is often not "who succeeds" but "what governance needs to exist before the handover, so that whoever succeeds is operating inside a structure rather than inheriting a vacuum."

Three needs recur across DFI portfolios. Reporting credibility matters disproportionately: DFIs answer to their own institutional backers and need management teams capable of producing board-level reporting that meets institutional standards, not just internally useful management information. Governance maturity is expected earlier in a company's lifecycle than commercial investors might require, because DFI mandates typically include governance and ESG commitments that need operational follow-through. And management strengthening post-investment is frequently necessary precisely because portfolio companies were invested in for their growth potential or development impact, not because their existing management depth matched institutional-grade requirements on day one.

This creates a specific and recurring need: senior interim leadership — often an interim CFO or COO — capable of building institutional-grade financial and governance infrastructure inside a business that was, until the investment, run more informally. It requires someone equally comfortable satisfying an investment committee's reporting expectations and running day-to-day operations in a still-maturing organisation.

The practical takeaway: management strengthening is rarely a one-off intervention. It works best when treated as a structured, governed mandate — with clear milestones tied to the institutional standards the DFI itself needs to meet — rather than an informal advisory relationship layered on top of existing management.