Supplier Development in Tanzania; Experiences, expectations and motivation

This paper contributes to a limited number of empirical studies focusing on African suppliers meeting international sourcing requirements in host countries. The present article is based on a survey of 110 companies targeting the emerging oil and gas industry and follows an explorative study design aiming to examine experiences, preferences and motivation of potential suppliers located in Tanzania. Techniques such as cluster analysis, graph visualization, descriptive statistics and concepts from social network analysis (SNA) were adopted to carry out the study. Our analyses show that only 15% of targeted firms collaborate, or have previously collaborated, with two or more companies and that close to one-third of the firms are unwilling to contribute financially for a training/development programme. Finally, a majority of the firms are willing to spend 15 days or less, which is assumed to be far below the minimum for an effective inter-firm improvement programme. Perhaps more interestingly, our study reveals that “open firms” are also more positive to contribute in improvement programmes. Several implications and guidance can be drawn from this study (e.g. need of a greater number of inter-firm collaborations, joint development initiatives including also foreign supplier firms, international oil companies and learning institutions).