Douglas Boateng wins 2026 IMM Institute Supply Chain Lifetime Achievement Award

Professor Douglas K. Boateng, Africa’s first Professor Extraordinaire in Supply Chain Management, has been named recipient of the 2026 IMM Institute Supply Chain Lifetime Achievement Award, Africa’s highest Supply Chain award.

The honour is in recognition of his extraordinary and enduring contribution to supply chain in South Africa in particular. Prof. Boateng becomes the second person to receive it since the Institute was founded in 1948.

“In seventy eight years, the IMM Institute has awarded this lifetime distinction only once before. Today it belongs to the strategist who spent three decades turning Africa’s supply chains into an instrument of industrial destiny”, IMM Institute stated.

For nearly three decades, Professor Boateng has argued a single, stubborn idea, that supply chain management is not a back office function, but the connective tissue of a nation’s industrial future.

From boardroom advisory work to academic leadership and public policy engagement, he has carried that conviction across Africa and into international forums, rarely allowing the argument to rest. That idea has now been recognised as one of the most consequential contributions to the profession in Southern Africa’s history.

The CEO of the IMM Institute, Irene Gregory, described the honour as long overdue recognition of an extraordinary body of work. “Few individuals have done more to elevate the strategic importance of supply chain management in Africa than Professor Douglas Boateng,” she said.

“As a globally respected thought leader, board advisor, author and Africa’s first Professor Extraordinaire in Supply Chain Management, his life’s work has advanced the profession, strengthened institutions, influenced policy, and inspired countless practitioners across the continent”, she said.

Professor Douglas Boateng has touted his conviction that supply chain decisions are ultimately decisions about Africa’s industrial destiny in the maxim “Africa can. Africa must. And, working together, Africa will”.

Receiving the honour in Johannesburg on Tuesday, Professor Boateng said he was humbled to receive the award as the second recipient of this Lifetime Achievement Award from an institution whose history dates back to 1948.

Speaking at the African Continental Free Trade Area during which the African Union’s Agenda 2063 for reshaping the continent’s economic imagination was championed, Prof. Boateng emphasised that “Africa cannot achieve sustainable industrialisation, realise the full promise of AfCFTA or deliver the aspirations of Agenda 2063 without resilient, competitive and increasingly integrated African supply chains.”

He stressed that Africa’s next chapter cannot be written by simply trading with one another. “AfCFTA must ultimately be about more than Africans buying from one another. We must increasingly produce with one another. Our minerals, agricultural resources, manufacturing capabilities, technology, finance, logistics, professional expertise and growing consumer markets must become increasingly connected through competitive African value chains.”

According to Prof. Boateng every sourcing, procurement, manufacturing, logistics and investment decision carries an industrial consequence, determining whose factory receives demand, where value is added, which skills are developed, and where tomorrow’s employment is created.

His conviction has defined his three decades of work across boardrooms, universities, governments and professional institutions on the continent and beyond.

**For more ** news**, join The Chronicle ** Newspaper** channel on WhatsApp: **https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VbBSs55E50UqNPvSOm2z

The post Douglas Boateng wins 2026 IMM Institute Supply Chain Lifetime Achievement Award appeared first on The Ghanaian Chronicle.