Temidayo Akenroye is an associate professor of supply chain and analytics. His research focuses on issues of sustainability in supply chains. (Photo by August Jennewein)

Temidayo Akenroye always aspired to be a scholar. He liked the idea of working in an area not well understood by the masses.

“That gives me an opportunity to be able to educate people about it,” Akenroye said.

It’s one of the things that led him to the field of supply chain management and logistics while pursuing a postgraduate diploma at the Maritime Academy of Nigeria.

“That was why I went for it,” said Akenroye, who first earned a bachelor’s degree in geological engineering. “Supply chain management was new then. And it was something that felt linked to every organization – how to produce goods and services, how to add value to it, and how to facilitate global trade.”

Twenty years ago, structured university degrees in supply chain management were rare across Africa and virtually nonexistent within Nigerian universities. But Akenroye was determined to study it, so he moved to England and enrolled at the University of Salford, where he went on to earn a master’s degree in supply chain management and logistics and a doctorate in supply chain sustainability. He also received a master’s degree in sustainability studies from the prestigious University of Cambridge.

Today, Akenroye serves as an associate professor in the Department of Supply Chain and Analytics in the Ed G. Smith College of Business at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. His research focuses on using supply chain management to address sustainable development challenges.

He has recently edited two books – “Indigenous Supply Chain Management in Africa: Theory and Practice,” published in September by Palgrave Macmillan, and “Green Innovations in Supply Chain Management: Case Studies and Applications,” published in November by Wiley – with colleagues around the globe.

He is also the lead editor on a third book, “Digitizing Healthcare Supply Chains in Africa: Success, Challenges and Impact,” expected to be published later this spring by Springer. UMSL Professor Haitao Li is also one of the book’s co-editors.

In the latest installment of the Ask an Expert series, UMSL Daily talked to Akenroye about the three projects, what connects them and why it’s important to study supply chains in developing countries around the world.

When did you start the research that went into these latest books?

It all started in 2022. My collaborators on the three books were working on a grant project from the Government of South Africa on sustainable development. It was a three-year grant that got extended for another two years. The books are part of the output of that engagement with various researchers that participated in that project.

Each of these three books homes in on a different topic. How do you see them fitting together?

My work is about sustainability in the supply chain. Each of these books addresses different elements of sustainability. So, when you look at sustainability, we are talking about environmental sustainability, which is climate change, emission reduction and all of that. And then you have the social sustainability, which is, “How do we make life fair, equitable and just in the supply chain?” So, engagement with smallholder farmers; reducing modern slavery and child labor in the supply chain; paying fair wages to supply chain actors; giving, for instance, farmers that produce commodities the best profit rather than giving them peanuts. That’s the social aspect of sustainability.

Then you have the economic aspect of sustainability, which is about efficiency. I’ll give an example in England. England has what you call localization, a local sourcing strategy. What that means is that there are certain commodities that you are supposed to buy from your local community – like fresh eggs, like milk. When you have such policy, that means that you are domesticating the spend of your company. So, instead of spending that money with other regions, you are empowering the businesses within that local community, right? That is the economic aspect of sustainability.

The Green Innovation focuses more on the environmental aspect. The indigenous supply chain focuses on the social element of sustainability. And the third one that is coming out very soon is on digitization of the health care supply chain, particularly in developing countries. That falls in between the economic and the social aspect because the more the supply chain of the health care system is digitized, the more efficient the businesses are, and improving health care in developing countries is also social development.

As you think about building supply chains, why is it important to consider Indigenous knowledge as part of that development?

Indigenous knowledge includes things that grew or developed organically. These are things that resonate with people’s culture, their beliefs, their attitude and their way of life. There is a sense of identity to such knowledge, and when such knowledge is developed, the adoption would be faster, and it has potential to be more impactful. Conventional alternative practices – what we call Western practices – are things that people need to learn or unlearn. Some of those interventions are not organically developed from Africa and do not speak to the realities of Africa. That’s why you find out a lot of theories, a lot of principles, a lot of technology that are imported to Africa but are not working. Because they were developed to resonate with the realities of other regions. The argument we make in this book is we are not saying that other conventional or important ideas should not be practiced. We are showcasing the efficacy of indigenous practices and developing a kind of roadmap or recommendation for such Indigenous practices to be developed and integrated with Western ideas.

There are commonalities in the challenges that global businesses face. Supply chain across the globe has common challenges, but then there are specific unique challenges. Where Western or global conventional practices speak to those commonalities, indigenous practices could address the gaps or unique contextual challenges that exist.

In your upcoming release, why did you want to explore digitization in health care? Why was that important?

Over the past two decades, donor organizations such as USAID, the Gates Foundation, and the Clinton Global Initiative have invested significant resources across Africa, particularly in efforts to digitize health care systems. Numerous training programs and digital health solutions have been introduced to strengthen health services and improve outcomes. Yet, despite these investments, there is no central record that captures what has truly worked, what has fallen short, and what still needs improvement. This gap highlights the need to document these experiences as a shared body of knowledge , a kind of collective post-implementation reflection or “postmortem,” so that future initiatives can learn from the past rather than start from scratch. Having implemented various things, let’s get a sense from various countries in Africa about digitization initiatives to address supply chain issues in health care. Was it successful? Why was it? Why not? That was the whole idea. And these could help to provide insight for future investment.

The funding for the said grant came from South Africa, but it seems like your research is looking at multiple other countries within sub-Saharan Africa. Is that correct?

Yes. It was the Africa Nuanced-Sustainable Developmental Goal Research Support Programme in South Africa that offered the grant. But the contributors, the authors, come from different African countries, including north, east and west Africa.

Why is Africa so significant as you look to the future of global supply chains?

A country like Nigeria, the population is very close to that of the United States as we speak. Nigeria has more than 200 million people, and that’s just one country. You have South Africa – 60 million – and you have Egypt, huge countries. And they’re growing faster than other countries in the world. Those numbers also present some opportunities. Or they will be opportunities if the people are economically empowered. The population would become a liability when they are not economically empowered. If an entrepreneur in the U.S. produces something that is very interesting and you want to sell it in Africa, and the African population cannot afford it, that population has no meaning to the entrepreneur. But if they have good economic empowerment, that’s a huge market for future products.

The more the African economy improves, the more it’s good for everyone.

Are there lessons to be learned from studying supply chains in Africa that can be applied to developed countries like the United States?

Yes. For example, our department has a grant from Department of Transportation, and one of the projects that we’re working on is on a project called omnichannel health care. What is omnichannel health care? It’s looking at how we create multiple channels of paths to health care in rural communities in the U.S. I led part of the project, which involves rural communities in Missouri. So, we investigated the possibility of using telehealth kiosks as a complimentary access to health care in those regions. The realities in those regions are not far from what I experienced from Africa. There are places where broadband access is limited. In some places where there is broadband, there is a social, cultural factor. For instance, someone said, ‘I’m not going into that kiosk if there is nobody there. If I’m talking to the screen, how am I sure I’m talking to a human being?’ People won’t use it if there’s no influence from community leaders.

To be honest, that reflects the typical perception of how things will work with people in developing countries . So, here we’re talking about telehealth care digitization, but then how do we embed a digital solution in a rural environment? Our findings from rural Missouri showcase that the success of such digital intervention is beyond technology. It’s more of social, cultural and local, societal influence. That resonates perfectly with the mentality and the reality in some developing countries.