Established in 2016, Ndagha Sustainable Foods (NSF) produces and sells tilapia at Kamwendo trading center in Mchinji District. Founders and Managing Directors Benson Longwe and Grace Longwe have been steering the business for over eight years.

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Facilitating Improved Fish Production and Value Addition through Contract Farming and Investment

The project demonstrated how fish supply gaps in the market can be filled with aggregation from contracted smallholder suppliers with minimal investment towards the smallholders’ technical skills development and linkage to quality inputs supply.

This 30-month partnership (completed in December 2024) supported NSF to design and set up a fish aggregation and offtake model with 969 farmers. The model did not include provision of quality feed to the farmers and, as with other projects at this time, this resulted in the farmers failing to produce fish of the size, quality and volumes required by NSF for their market. Such feed provision (whether on full or partial credit – to be deducted at point of sale) is clearly a necessary element of such a business model.  

In the project, CASA also supported NSF with experts to strengthen the company’s management systems in preparation for investment (although to date this has not been forthcoming at affordable interest rates). CASA also continuously facilitated matchmaking with potential third-party debt investors for the company to attract an investment of £34,500. NSF requires this investment for a solar-powered cold chain facility, solar-powered fish drier, a fish smoking facility, a 3-tonne refrigerated van for transporting fish from aggregation centres to the central outlet market to viably support the model scale-up plan, and two solar powered high-yielding boreholes to support expansion of the ponds within the partner’s farm. However, to have sufficient throughput to justify these investments, it will also require sufficient working capital to cover the cashflow requirements to establish a feed inputs credit scheme. 

Updated: July 2025