Joanny Compaore

In August 2011, Joanny Compaore took up a posting at the Forobaranga site in Darfur as Logistics and Supply Chain Operations Manager for the African Union-United Nations Hybrid Operation, serving under the Burkina Faso peacekeeping battalion known as BURKBATT3. Through July 2012, he handled movement control and humanitarian services for United Nations staff and observers and planned the delivery of food and essential supplies to roughly one million internally displaced people. The United Nations awarded him its Medal in 2012 for that service. Ask him today which accomplishment means the most to him, and Darfur is the one he names first.

That posting set a pattern the rest of his career has followed. Joanny Compaore now works as an entrepreneur and supply chain consultant specializing in operations optimization, advising mining companies with particular attention to gold and oil, and the thread connecting Darfur to the present has held steady throughout: identify where a supply chain is leaking time, money, or information, and stop the leak.

His technical foundation predates the mission. He completed a Master of Mechanical Engineering at the Royal Navy School of Morocco in June 2010, and he has been affiliated with the United States Quartermasters since April 2014. In November 2017 the Society of Logistics Engineers recognized him as a Demonstrated Senior Logistician.

Between October 2013 and April 2019, Joanny Compaore held the post of Transportation and Logistics Manager at the Direction of Logistics and Transportation of Burkina Faso. The scale of the job was considerable. He moved roughly 972,000 tons of merchandise from seaports to inland destinations, keeping approximately 500 trailers and forklifts in rotation each month, and he directed supply chain support for United States Africa Command assistance that reached 32 countries by sea, air, and road.

He carried that experience into a classroom during the same period. From January 2016 to January 2019 he worked as a part-time teaching assistant at the Institut Supérieur de Logistique de Ouagadougou, where his subjects were warehouse operations, transportation operations, and fleet management. Rather than lecture from theory, he anchored each class in scenarios drawn from actual logistics work, taking students through inventory flow, storage operations, material handling, route planning, vehicle utilization, and cost optimization. His reasoning was simple enough: the judgment these decisions demand is acquired by making them, not by reading about them.

From 2018 to 2019 his responsibilities expanded again, this time as Senior Liaison Officer between U.S. Africa Command and partner African countries. The brief covered multinational logistics activities and support for joint training and field operations. He built and ran joint logistics exercises drawing personnel from several African partner nations, and he designed and implemented field-feeding and transportation operations for multinational training at scale. At its busiest the assignment meant putting recurring food service, transportation, and logistical support in place for approximately 1,200 personnel representing 32 countries. None of it worked without continuous coordination with American and African stakeholders across planning, resource allocation, and execution, most of it conducted in cross-cultural, high-tempo settings where a delivery that failed to arrive was felt immediately.

In June 2020 he finished an MA in Operations Management at the United States Command and General Staff College, where his coursework spanned leadership and organizations, human resources, and logistics operations. A Combined Logistics Diploma from the United States Army Logistics University sits alongside those degrees. The Burkina Medal of Honors came to him that same year.

The role he is best known for came in May 2022, when Joanny Compaore became Chief Executive Officer of SONABHY, the national oil company of Burkina Faso. He held the position until September 2023, and during that span SONABHY was named Best Company of the Year for 2023 in the national review of state companies chaired by the Prime Minister.

The initiative with the longest reach was a tank farm capacity extension he championed, adding 100,000 metric tonnes of storage and lifting the country's fuel security autonomy from 12 days to 32 days. Burkina Faso is landlocked and depends on fuel trucked in from distant seaports, so close to tripling that cushion altered what a disruption actually meant on the ground. He also drove a digital transformation of the company's supply chain, introducing technology that sharpened transportation visibility and data accuracy. Sales under his leadership climbed to 1.2 billion dollars, 500 million above the previous year, and process improvements applied to distribution operations produced 65 million dollars in savings during 2023 on their own.

Two decisions from that period speak to his priorities as much as the numbers do. He directed one million dollars of corporate social responsibility funding into medical support for wounded soldiers. He also chaired the executive committee behind SONABHY's basketball and volleyball teams and won them a 35 percent budget increase. Before stepping away he championed a five-year strategic plan running from 2023 to 2028, which the company adopted.

Board service runs parallel to that executive record. Joanny Compaore has sat on the Board of Administration of the Refinery of Côte d'Ivoire as a member of its audit committee. The board convenes quarterly, and his charge there was to oversee the chief executive's compliance with regulation and procedure and to carry recommendations to the chairman. Those recommendations included bringing SCOR DS metrics and Internet of Things instrumentation into the refinery's supply chain, which trimmed lead time by 25 percent and lifted customer satisfaction by 15 percent in 2023.

Consulting followed. From August 2024 to January 2026 he advised Comabel SA in Abidjan as a supply chain consultant, constructing logistics plans that cut lead time by 20 percent and eliminated idle time outright, and formulating sustainability recommendations that reduced waste and generated more than 20 million euros in savings across 2024 and 2025.

His own ventures sit in commercial brokerage and import and export. He trades cocoa and coffee out of Côte d'Ivoire and moves vehicle spare parts from Europe into West Africa, and he is working to add potash export from North America to West Africa to that book of business. He has been a Certified Supply Chain Professional through APICS since January 2026 and is currently pursuing an MBA with a concentration in supply chain management and organizational leadership. SAP S/4HANA underpins his technical work, spanning extended warehouse management, integrated business planning, and sourcing and procurement, with Excel analytics and Python rounding out the toolkit.

The impulse that sent him to Darfur has not left him. Joanny Compaore has volunteered with Siloam Mission since June 2026 and with Harvest Mission since August 2026, and at both he has applied his logistics background directly, handling, organizing, and distributing essential goods so that supply reaches vulnerable people reliably and on schedule. He describes helping people in need as the thread running through his working life, and treats the Darfur mission and the volunteering as the same commitment expressed at different scales.

He speaks French, English, Darija, and Moore, a range that has carried him through assignments across West Africa, North Africa, Europe, and North America. He plays and follows football, an enthusiasm that found its way into his executive work through the athletic programs he championed at SONABHY.