Joanny Compaore

Few logisticians hold a mechanical engineering degree from a naval academy, a military operations master's, and a certification body's professional credential all at once. Joanny Compaore does, and the breadth explains a good deal about the career that followed. He is an entrepreneur and supply chain consultant working in operations optimization, advising mining sector companies with a focus on gold and oil, and he is most widely recognized for having served as Chief Executive Officer of SONABHY, the national oil company of Burkina Faso.

 

The training came first and came from four countries. He graduated with a Master of Mechanical Engineering from the Royal Navy School of Morocco in June 2010. A decade later, in June 2020, he completed an MA in Operations Management at the United States Command and General Staff College, taking coursework in leadership and organizations, human resources, and logistics operations. He also holds a Combined Logistics Diploma from the United States Army Logistics University. He is presently working toward an MBA with a concentration in supply chain management and organizational leadership.

 

Professional recognition accumulated alongside the degrees. Joanny Compaore has been affiliated with the United States Quartermasters since April 2014. The Society of Logistics Engineers named him a Demonstrated Senior Logistician in November 2017. Since January 2026 he has held the Certified Supply Chain Professional credential through APICS. In practice his technical work is built on SAP S/4HANA across extended warehouse management, integrated business planning, and sourcing and procurement, with Excel analytics and Python supporting it.

 

Where that toolkit has been applied is the more interesting question. The answer starts in Darfur. From August 2011 to July 2012, Joanny Compaore was Logistics and Supply Chain Operations Manager for the African Union-United Nations Hybrid Operation, stationed at the Forobaranga site under the Burkina Faso peacekeeping battalion BURKBATT3. He ran movement control and humanitarian services for United Nations staff and observers and planned food and essential supply deliveries reaching approximately one million internally displaced people. He was awarded the United Nations Medal in 2012. Of everything on his record, this is the accomplishment he cites first.

 

From October 2013 to April 2019 he served as Transportation and Logistics Manager at the Direction of Logistics and Transportation of Burkina Faso, where the numbers ran large: roughly 972,000 tons of merchandise moved from seaports to inland destinations, about 500 trailers and forklifts deployed per month, and supply chain support directed for United States Africa Command assistance reaching 32 countries across sea, air, and road routes.

 

The AFRICOM relationship became a formal post from 2018 to 2019, when he took the role of Senior Liaison Officer between U.S. Africa Command and partner African countries. He coordinated multinational logistics activities and supported joint training and field operations, planning and coordinating joint logistics exercises that pulled personnel from multiple African partner nations and designing and implementing field-feeding and transportation operations for large-scale multinational training. At the peak of the assignment he was organizing recurring food service, transportation, and logistical support for some 1,200 personnel from 32 countries. The position rested on continuous collaboration with American and African stakeholders across planning, resource allocation, and execution, generally under cross-cultural, high-tempo conditions where the consequences of a missed delivery were immediate. In 2020 he received the Burkina Medal of Honors.

 

He also spent three of those years teaching. Between January 2016 and January 2019, Joanny Compaore worked as a part-time teaching assistant at the Institut Supérieur de Logistique de Ouagadougou, covering warehouse operations, transportation operations, and fleet management. He built his sessions on real logistics scenarios rather than theory, guiding students through inventory flow, storage operations, material handling, route planning, vehicle utilization, and cost optimization. His view was that judgment of that kind develops only through practice.

 

In May 2022 he became Chief Executive Officer of SONABHY, a post he held until September 2023. During his tenure the company took Best Company of the Year for 2023 in the national review of state companies chaired by the Prime Minister.

 

His signature project there addressed a structural weakness. He championed a tank farm capacity extension that added 100,000 metric tonnes of storage and raised the country's fuel security autonomy from 12 days to 32 days. For a landlocked country whose fuel arrives by truck from distant seaports, very nearly tripling that reserve changed the real-world meaning of a disruption. He led the digital transformation of the company's supply chain in parallel, introducing technology that improved transportation visibility and data accuracy. Sales under his leadership reached 1.2 billion dollars, an increase of 500 million dollars over the year before, and process improvements in distribution operations separately yielded 65 million dollars in savings during 2023.

 

Two other choices from those months are worth noting. Joanny Compaore directed one million dollars in corporate social responsibility funding toward medical support for wounded soldiers, and he chaired the executive committee behind SONABHY's basketball and volleyball teams, obtaining a 35 percent budget increase for them. Before his departure he championed the company's five-year strategic plan covering 2023 through 2028, which was adopted.

 

His board work has run alongside the executive roles. As a member of the Board of Administration of the Refinery of Côte d'Ivoire, Joanny Compaore sat on the audit committee. The board meets quarterly, and his role was to oversee the chief executive's compliance with regulation and procedure and to put recommendations before the chairman. Those recommendations included adopting SCOR DS metrics and Internet of Things instrumentation across the refinery's supply chain, changes that cut lead time by 25 percent and improved customer satisfaction by 15 percent in 2023.

 

From August 2024 to January 2026 he consulted for Comabel SA in Abidjan, where he built logistics plans reducing lead time by 20 percent and eliminating idle time, and produced sustainability recommendations that reduced waste and generated over 20 million euros in savings across 2024 and 2025. His entrepreneurial activity is concentrated in commercial brokerage and import and export, trading cocoa and coffee out of Côte d'Ivoire and moving vehicle spare parts from Europe into West Africa, with plans underway to extend into potash export from North America to West Africa.

 

Outside his paid work, Joanny Compaore has volunteered with Siloam Mission since June 2026 and with Harvest Mission since August 2026, and in both settings he has drawn on the same logistics skills, 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 sees the Darfur mission and the volunteering as one commitment at two scales.

 

He speaks French, English, Darija, and Moore, a range that has served him well across assignments in West Africa, North Africa, Europe, and North America. He plays and follows football, an interest that surfaced in his executive work through the athletic programs he championed at SONABHY.