The scale of the challenge justifies that focus. Nearly 70% of South Africa’s freight still moves by road, while logistics inefficiencies are estimated to cost the economy close to R1bn a day. Freight rail volumes have begun to recover, reaching about 160-million tonnes in the past financial year, but government wants that figure to rise to 250-million tonnes by 2029.

These reforms matter. But they also reveal a gap in the way we think about logistics capacity.

South Africa tends to treat the problem primarily as one of physical infrastructure. Yet ports, railways, warehouses and technology platforms do not operate themselves. Their performance depends on the people who design, maintain, manage and improve them.

In other words, South Africa is rebuilding two kinds of infrastructure at once: physical infrastructure and human capability. The first receives far more attention than the second.

That imbalance will become increasingly difficult to ignore.

The logistics system being rebuilt today will require capabilities very different from those of the past. Automation, artificial intelligence, advanced analytics, sustainability requirements and climate risk are changing how supply chains operate. The sector will continue to need engineers and operational specialists, but it will increasingly compete for technologists, analysts, planners and leaders capable of managing complex and interconnected networks.

That raises a fundamental question about where the next generation of logistics talent will come from.

Statistics SA’s second-quarter 2026 labour-force data offers an important clue. Of South Africa’s roughly 16.7-million employed people, 7.3-million or 43.6% are women. In transport, however, only about 187,000 of 1.1-million employed people are women.

That is just 16.9%. Put differently, roughly five out of every six people working in transport are men.

There are likely to be many reasons for this imbalance, from historical career choices and skills pipelines to workplace design and perceptions of the sector. But a gap of that size deserves scrutiny, particularly in a country where the official unemployment rate stood at 33.6% in the second quarter of 2026.

South Africa cannot worry about high unemployment, shortages of technical and managerial capability, and the future performance of its logistics system without also asking whether it is drawing widely enough from the available talent pool.

This is where the conversation needs to move beyond simply celebrating successful women and towards examining the systems that determine who gets access to opportunity, development and leadership. For businesses, the focus should be on creating sustainable pathways that enables women to enter, progress and lead within industries where they remain significantly underrepresented.

The issue is not simply whether women are recruited into organisations. It is whether they progress through them.

The latest Commission for Employment Equity data show that women hold just 29.3% of top-management positions nationally, despite representing 45.7% of the economically active population used by the commission as its benchmark. In the private sector, women account for only 27.6% of top management. This points to a broader pipeline problem.

If South Africa is serious about building future logistics capacity, businesses need to examine talent with the same discipline they apply to operational bottlenecks. Who receives technical training and apprenticeships? Who gains meaningful frontline experience? Who gets the assignments that prepare people for leadership? Where do capable employees leave the pipeline, and why?

The response cannot rest with individual companies alone.

Industry, universities and Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) colleges need a clearer shared understanding of the skills the logistics sector will require over the next decade. Employers need to widen recruitment into technical and operational careers, assess whether existing workplace practices unnecessarily narrow participation, and measure progression and attrition rather than focusing only on entry-level representation.

Government is already planning the future capacity of ports, rail and freight corridors. Human capacity should be planned with equal seriousness.

None of this diminishes the urgency of fixing South Africa’s physical logistics network. Better rail, more efficient ports, infrastructure investment and greater competition remain essential.

But rebuilding physical capacity without developing the people required to operate, modernise and lead it addresses only part of the challenge.

South Africa has spent considerable time debating who should fund, own and operate its logistics infrastructure. It has spent far less time asking who it is preparing to build and lead the system that comes next.

Because a country can invest in all the infrastructure it needs. But without the depth of talent to run it, improve it and lead it, the bottleneck simply moves somewhere else.

Wongiwe Ludidi, Senior HRBP Supply Chain, CHEP Sub Saharan Africa