Fannie Gondwe

Orange fleshed sweet potato does not have the profile of maize or rice in Malawi’s food system conversation. It does not command the policy attention or the market infrastructure that the major cereals attract. But it is climate resilient, high yielding, early maturing, and, critically, rich in Vitamin A at a time when malnutrition among young children remains a stubborn reality in rural communities. Fannie Gondwe built Perisha Agro and Packaging Enterprise around the conviction that this overlooked crop deserved a serious value chain, and that the women who grew it deserved a reliable market.

Winning the Women Empowerment Champion category at the 2024 WAYA competition did not create that conviction. It amplified it, and opened doors that three years of effort had not yet managed to unlock.

The market breakthrough that three years couldn’t produce

For three years before the award, Perisha had been trying to secure countrywide retail distribution for its products, OFSP flour and puree, orange maize flour, cassava flour, nua bean flour, without success. Within a year of winning, that changed. Shoprite signed a contract to stock Perisha’s products across all 12 of its Malawi stores. Food Lovers Market, an existing client, increased its monthly order from a quarter ton to one and a half tons. A Chinese company came on board as a new buyer for OFSP flour and beans. Three years of closed doors, then, in the wake of recognition that changed how the market perceived Perisha, several opened at once.

The prize money of $20,000 went into the infrastructure that made it possible to say yes to these contracts: quality packaging materials sourced from China that were degradable, market-compliant, and shelf-ready, and the recruitment of 700 additional smallholder farmers into Perisha’s supply chain. Because a larger market means nothing if the raw material supply cannot keep pace.

Financially, annual turnover grew from $371,000 in 2023 to $456,000 in 2024, a 23% increase, with a 21% net profit margin. The addition of vacuum sealers and deep freezers expanded the OFSP puree product line from 2 to 5 sustainable markets in supermarkets and hotels, with packaging now certified by the Malawi Bureau of Standards.

6,700 farmers and 800,000 households

Behind the retail contracts is a farmer network that Fannie has been building for years and accelerating since the award. The existing base of 6,000 trained farmers, 5,560 of them women and youth, grew by 700 new recruits between November 2024 and February 2025, 80% of them women. New clubs were registered in Santhe, Kasungu and Kanyerere, Lilongwe. In 2024 alone, Perisha processed 140 tons of OFSP flour and 30 tons of OFSP puree, paying farmers over $30,000 for their raw materials in the process.

The nutrition impact running through these numbers is not incidental, it is the point. In Santhe, Kasungu, 25% of 100 rural farmers surveyed reported that their children were safe from malnutrition in 2024, attributed to both the income from selling to Perisha and the household consumption of OFSP. Perisha’s products have now reached more than 800,000 households, with a target of one million by 2026.

A leader the award made visible

What WAYA gave Fannie beyond capital was a platform that changed what she was able to step into. Shortly after the award, she was appointed Board Chair of the Root and Tuber Crops Development Trust, a national body she now leads with a mandate that extends well beyond her own business. In that role she has travelled to seven of Malawi’s twenty-eight districts, speaking to over 1,000 women and youth about food security, nutrition, and the economic opportunity in root and tuber crops. She has registered over 460 people into the root and tuber crops community. She has booked ministerial meetings, with both the Minister of Agriculture and the Minister of Trade, to advance national promotion and policy around root and tuber crops, particularly in the wake of the government’s ban on certain crop imports, a development that created sudden, large-scale demand that farmers needed encouragement and support to meet.

In April 2025, Fannie stood in front of four television broadcasting channels, MBC TV, Zodiak TV, and several print and electronic media, to host a live press briefing on that opportunity. She says it was the first time she had done something like it. The confidence, she acknowledges, came from somewhere new.

She has also been appointed a Global Governing Council Member of the World Agriculture Forum, a platform through which she is advancing her vision of reaching one million beneficiaries with biofortified food products.

Fannie’s own reflection on the journey is characteristically direct: “No matter how far, how insignificant your business is, how you feel about your past failures, if you keep focused, resilient and transparent to your cause, one day your work impacts will be exposed and recognized to your surprise.” For a woman who built a serious value chain around a crop nobody was watching, that surprise turned out to be well earned.