Africa’s enterprise AI problem starts with procurement

The Digital Procurement Africa Summit holds on May 26 in Lagos, bringing together enterprise leaders for a focused conversation on why procurement digitisation has become critical to how large African organisations manage costs, governance, and data.

At a procurement innovation conference in the United Kingdom last year, Amazon Business, SAP, and Oracle were in attendance. So was a Nigerian company.

“Save for a representative from the Lagos State government, we were the only African company in the room,” Gloopro CEO, Olumide “D.O’ Olusanya recalls.

Olusanya and his team came back and spent months looking for an equivalent forum on the continent. There wasn’t one. So they decided to build one.

Set to hold on May 26, 2026, the Digital Procurement Africa (DPA) Summit is invite-only and deliberately intimate. Olusanya describes it as a frank conversation about what is working, what is not, and what has to change.

But the more interesting question is why it didn’t already exist.

Procurement is boring

In most large Nigerian enterprises, procurement is a back-office function. It’s where purchase requests go to accumulate approvals, where vendor relationships are managed through personal contacts and phone calls, and where nobody looks until something goes wrong. Finance owns the budget. Operations owns the delivery. Procurement sits in the middle, mostly invisible, often on spreadsheets.

That invisibility is expensive.

Related Story:

Madica backs three startups, launches fundraising guide for first-time founders