Established in 2017, Chema World is a poultry company headquartered in Kasungu District, Central Malawi, also with operations in Lilongwe. It was set up to drive commercialisation of village chickens in Malawi. Chema World has a vision to become the leading supplier of indigenous chicken meat in Malawi. The company solely depends on rural households to supply village chickens as they do not have a commercial production farm. Initially, chickens were obtained through middlemen. However, this model had challenges with inconsistencies in volume and quality. The company was only supplying live chickens even though the market demanded dressed chickens. This was because they did not yet have facilities for slaughtering, dressing, and storage.

Chema World’s CEO is Ms Pilirani Chisembe, who holds both master’s and bachelor’s degree in animal science and has vast experience in poultry production. Mr Joseph Gondwe is the co-owner, with a bachelor’s degree in agriculture and extensive experience in operating livestock businesses in Malawi. The two partners oversee the day-to-day operations of the business through direct management of a team of five full-time staff: a farm manager, three farm assistants, and a market officer.

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Commercialising the Village Chickens Value Chain

The project demonstrated to agri-SMEs, policymakers and donors a model that commercialises the village chicken value chain by addressing constraints such as poor production (mainly due to poor management, production systems, and poor breeding); a lack of aggregation services among village chicken producers; and access to stable markets for village chickens.

Running from January 2023 to June 2024, this 18-month project took an integrated, market-driven approach to commercialise the village chicken value chain. The overall purpose was to improve access to stable and profitable markets by village chicken farmers through organised aggregation centres. The project built the capacity of the agri-SME to deliver technical backstopping to farmers to ensure sustainability after the project. Chema World has been an offtaker of village chickens and with CASA’s technical assistance, it set up a smallholder farmer-led village chicken supply chain. Individual farmers were organised into groups of 25 members each. A total of 82 groups were formed, and then organised into eight aggregation centres, where trainings on group dynamics, poultry management and contract/collective marketing were conducted. Of the 2,011 smallholder farmers involved, 1,248 were women. The total cost of the technical assistance and grant support was £54,030, of which CASA contributed £41,062.

Chema World is seeking equity investment of £26,200 for breeding and processing units.

Updated: February 2025