Abstract: Postgraduate supervision remains inconsistently managed across universities in many third world countries, with weak policy enforcement, overburdened supervisors, and strained supervisor-student relationships undermining timely and quality thesis completion. This study examined the role of supervisors in the management of postgraduate programs in third world countries, drawing on Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory and Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory to frame supervision as both an institutionally embedded and pedagogically scaffolded process. A secondary data design was adopted, relying entirely on previously published literature rather than new primary data collection. Data were gathered through structured searches of academic databases and open-access institutional repositories using terms combining “postgraduate supervision,” “supervisor role,” and “doctoral education management.” Studies were included if they were peer-reviewed, recently published, and directly addressed supervisory role, practice, or management across developed, middle-income, or developing-country contexts; sources lacking empirical grounding, focused solely on undergraduate supervision, or unavailable in full text were excluded. Selected sources were analyzed using document analysis, with findings extracted and organized thematically. Findings revealed four recurring themes: weak institutional management and policy enforcement, supervisor capacity and workload constraints, the centrality of relational quality and mentorship, and marked structural disparities between developed and developing systems. The study concluded that postgraduate supervision challenges in developing countries are primarily structural rather than individual, rooted in inadequate institutional support rather than supervisor deficiency. It recommended stronger policy enforcement, supervisor training investment, formalized mentorship structures, and benchmarking against better-resourced systems to strengthen postgraduate program management in third world countries.