Compliance is when you can answer one question very confidently, ‘Are all the suppliers we are transacting with currently meeting our requirements?’

When we run supplier prequalifications, the inclusion data comes out automatically because ownership type is a required field at onboarding. What we see consistently surprises procurement teams – not in the aggregate, but in the pattern beneath it. Women-owned and youth-owned businesses are dominant in some categories. Office cleaning: 100%

Every organisation that has ever run a supplier diversity programme knows its aggregate number. Or thinks it does. The percentage of spend that reached women-owned suppliers last year. The share of the supplier base that is youth-owned. These numbers are quoted in board presentations, included in ESG disclosures, and repeated

When we were building Scale’s supplier onboarding flow, Comark, Brian and I had an argument about one field. The field was ownership type. Women-owned, youth-owned, persons-with-disabilities-owned. The argument was simple: should it be required or optional? The case for optional was reasonable. You do not want to add friction at

If you supply goods or services to businesses in Kenya, you have probably lived through this more times than you would like to admit. A buyer asks for a quote. You open an old Excel file, find a price list that may or may not be current, copy the items