Sphiwe Msiska wears many hats. She serves as the Director of Administration in the Ministry of Industrialisation, Business, Trade and Tourism, while also making her mark as an entrepreneur and innovator, driving agricultural transformation and trade facilitation.
As Managing Director of MCM Investments, a company she founded in 2017, Msiska is leading efforts in crop value addition, particularly sunflower processing.
Under her leadership, the company produces Sweet Gold sunflower cooking oil and sunflower cake, contributing to local value chains and job creation.
MCM Investments now employs 25 full-time young professionals, the majority of whom are recent female graduates.
“I was previously a poultry farmer and I used sunflower cake as feed for chickens. That’s when I decided to venture into sunflower farming. Later, I started producing Sweet Gold sunflower cooking oil. With the growing demand, I entered into sunflower contract farming agreements with farmers and cooperatives, mostly women,” she said.
The company collaborates with over 500 smallholder farmers and five farmers’ cooperatives by providing them with input seed loans, offering them agricultural extension services on best agronomic management practices, and buying their produce for processing into cooking oil.
“Apart from that, we also buy sunflower from other farmers who are not contracted to us, so that they have a steady market for their harvest,” said Msiska, who has also worked as a District Commissioner (DC) for four councils before being moved to the Ministry of Industrialization, Business, Trade and Tourism.
With its factory situated at Mpingu, along Mchinji Road in Lilongwe, MCM Investments is selling sunflower cooking oil in 2-litre and 5-litre bottles at retail and in drums at wholesale.
Cooking oil production in Malawi is a growing sector, marked by recent large-scale investment from companies mostly owned by wealthy foreigners.
Despite the competition, Msiska’s passion to join the trade was not for money only but to support fellow women and young people who are into farming.
The company entered into partnership with the Centre for Agricultural Transformation (CAT), which aims at boosting productivity, providing financial and technical assistance to produce high-quality value-added products, and offering ready markets for farmers.
Currently, MCM Investments is part of Cohort 6 of the Growth Accelerator (GA), which targets post-revenue businesses to assist them to scale up and grow with a combination of blended financing (a matching grant of up to US$40,000), mentorship and business development support.
Under the programme, Msiska aims to expand her business to soya value addition. She has procured a machine that will be processing 20 tonnes of soya per day.
“We have a very huge demand which we are failing to satisfy. So with the procurement of the soybean processing machine, we want to diversify our production. We want to be producing soybean cooking oil as well as soap.
“This also means roping in more farmers and workers at the factory. We expect to create over 20 permanent jobs at our factory, with 50% of these opportunities dedicated to women and youth,” Msiska said.
She adds that the company aims to scale up production to over 250,000 litres of cooking oil and 750 metric tonnes of sunflower cake.
The GA is Malawi’s pioneering business acceleration programme implemented by UNDP, and is designed to inject risk capital into start-ups led by young, impactful Malawian entrepreneurs.
Beyond financing, the programme offers business acceleration support and mentorship to foster sustainable growth.
With the company’s ongoing expansion, Msiska is setting her sights on supplying Sweet Gold cooking oil to major retail chain stores across the country.
