Established in 2017, Kuhle Limited (formerly 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. Kuhle Ltd 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. Because they did not yet have facilities for slaughtering, dressing, and storage, the company was only supplying live chickens even though the market demanded dressed chickens.

Kuhle Ltd’s Managing Director Mr Joseph Gondwe (photo) holds a bachelor’s degree in agriculture with extensive experience in operating livestock businesses in Malawi. The Director oversees 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 low 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 provide village chicken farmers access to stable and profitable markets through organised aggregation centres. The project built the capacity of Kuhle Ltd to deliver technical backstopping to farmers to ensure sustainability of the supply chain. Kuhle Ltd, with CASA’s technical assistance, became a direct offtaker and set up a smallholder farmer-led village chicken supply chain. Individual farmers were organised into 82 groups of 25 members each, 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 project was £54,030, of which CASA contributed £41,062 of technical assistance and grant support. Kuhle Ltd is seeking equity investment of £26,200 for breeding and processing units.

Updated: July 2025