Three faculty members from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology’s (KNUST) Department of Supply Chain and Information Systems have won international recognition after receiving the Emerging Economies Showcase Award at the 2025 Decision Sciences Institute (DSI) Annual Conference in Orlando, Florida, the United States.

The award went to Dr. Okyere Anim Barima, Dr. Matilda Owusu-Bio and Dr. John Frimpong Manso for their research presented at the conference, a leading global forum in supply chain management, operations, analytics and decision sciences.

The DSI Emerging Economies Showcase Award recognises research that addresses critical development challenges with context-appropriate and high-impact solutions.

The KNUST team’s winning paper, “The Capability Chain to Resilience in Emerging Market Supply Chains,” examines how capability chains spanning sensing, learning, adaptation and innovation strengthen supply chain resilience and robustness in African contexts.

The study highlights the role of informal institutional strengths such as apprenticeship systems, indigenous financial models including susu, and trust-based governance in enabling firms to anticipate disruption, sustain operations and recover more strongly after crises.

“Our work underscores the ingenuity embedded in African supply chains early sensing, rapid adaptation and pragmatic innovation despite institutional voids,” Dr. Barima said. “This recognition affirms the global relevance of Ghanaian scholarship.”

In a further boost to the department’s research profile, another KNUST manuscript, “Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education: Barriers, Enablers, and Impact on Learning Outcomes in Emerging Economies,” was shortlisted as a finalist for the same award.

The recognition underscores KNUST’s growing influence in supply chain and artificial intelligence research focused on emerging-economy contexts and reinforces the University’s role in advancing resilient and inclusive policy-relevant scholarship.