During a recent visit to Malawi, we visited some of our growth programmes for an extensive interview with their founders about the company, their lives and entrepreneurship in their country.

The Malawian social enterprise Kibébé designs and crafts handmade products to provide employment for artisans who live in and around the UN Dzaleka refugee camp. This way, the organisation empowers women, refugees and people with disabilities by helping them find sustainable work, educating them and teaching them vocational skills. Kibébé's products are being sold in Lilongwe, but also online across the world. Using recycled materials, the Kibébé artisans are creating a sustainable future while earning a decent income. Leading Kibébé is Maria Chiponde, an entrepreneur who has taken on the mantle of CEO from Kibébé's founder and is leading the organisation to greater heights with her young, but extremely passionate team.   

Part 1: Work

Can you tell me a bit more about what Kibébé does?

Maria: Kibébé was founded in 2014 with the aim of providing employment to refugee and Malawian artisans, mainly women. At the time the idea was to support women to be able to find some decent jobs and decent income, because traditionally in Africa but also in Malawi, women have been restricted into traditional roles. We initially went to church groups to find women who had skills, either in cutting or tailoring, so that they could make different products to generate an income. Ever since, Kibébé has grown into a big brand, and we are now in the international market. We have a website and are selling in the UK and the US as well. All of what we're doing is for the purpose of being able to alleviate the problems that our artisans are facing.

I want to talk about one artisan in particular. Her name is Claudine. She has been with us the longest. She's one of the founding artisans, so to speak, because she belonged to one of the first church groups that we adopted into Kibébé. And she was one of the first to make our very first product, called the Safari Book. The Safari Book was made to be a baby book. It has a sensory feeling to it. The whole story of it came from our founder, because she had a baby that was disabled and needed a lot of sensory toys to keep her stimulated. After that, we started making different accessories, led by the demand from a lot of our customers in Lilongwe. Our picnic blanket - which is one of our best selling products because we are repurposing denim and using chitenge - was actually an idea that came from a customer who said 'Hey, could you try and make something like this?' We also introduced soaps. Our natural soaps are really beautiful and very well fragranced, because we're using 100% natural essential oils and we're using African based oils as well. These are locally sourced here in Malawi.

The unfortunate bit about our growth trajectory happened in 2020, right after COVID hit. We weren't sure that it would hit us the most, but it did, and it especially hit the Malawian economy. We were at the peak of our growth and planning to open an airport shop. We were trying to expand into new markets, but due to the pandemic, due to the economic downfall, we weren't able to. When Exchange came in and said ‘we can provide you with this growth programme’, it felt like we made a jump start. And this very exciting, especially right now, because we are trying to grow our product range. We're trying to make purposeful products because we want to be able to appeal to the international market. Unfortunately here in Malawi it's not very easy, because there's a lot of competing factors. There are a lot of chitenge products. There's a lot of informal vendors that will compete with us. And as a formal enterprise, paying taxes, paying staff, paying a lot of rentals and fees like that, it's not always easy to be up to par with those informal vendors. But what is so unique about Kibébé is our story and the way that we do it, especially because we also promote circular economy a lot. We make sure that we include repurposed as well as recycled materials in our products. Our shopping bag for example, uses repurposed milk packets. This milk packet wasn't something that we thought of at the very beginning, but it became an idea. Once we see something, we think about how we can we make it better and more unique. You start to see little things and you piece them together and it becomes a really, really beautiful thing. The fact that Exchange was able to see our potential and our growth and be able to give us this opportunity to work with a qualified coach, we're very excited for that.

When and how did you start?

Maria: Kibébé was founded in 2014, and I came to Kibébé in 2016, a month after I graduated from college. I was very young and very passionate. And what drew me the most to Kibébé was the mission, the refugee crisis. It's very sad to see that we have neighbors from Congo, from Burundi, from Rwanda that are suffering just miles from where we are. I didn't grow up in a very poor household, we’re middle income earners. So I was able to go to good schools. I had a decent education. And so I really wanted to give back. When I read the story of Innocent Magambi, who is the founder of our sister charity There Is Hope, it kind of pushed me to say you know what, I think this is one way that I could help out with my skills. That's how I ended up at Kibébé. I've been here for nine years now and I'm now going through the most exciting journey of my career, because at the beginning of last year, the founder of Kibébé left the company. I took over as CEO and have the opportunity to work with my beautiful colleagues. it's been an amazing journey thus far for me.

What are you most proud of?

Maria: I want to say I'm most proud of the relationships that I've been able to build. When I first came here, my job was very much focused on interpersonal relationships. I did a lot of sales, but I also did a little bit of communications. I was able to interact with a lot of the artisans and some of the students at There is Hope. My job was to interview them, gather stories, write articles. That helped me to kind of create special bonds with a lot of the community. I think that was something that was really meaningful for me. I'm very proud of the trust that I was able to develop with the people, because it made it so much easier for me to enter the space, to come into this space and do my work.

What are your ambitions and long term goals for the company?

Maria: For Kibébé to grow beyond what we are, I think the first thing that we're looking forward to is being able to expand our revenue streams. We want to grow bigger and we want to get into bigger spaces. At the moment we have one shop here in Lilongwe. It's in a very beautiful place, in a garden with flowers. It's a perfect ambience for our customers, most of whom are the expat community. Having been introduced to that community, we've realized that there is a much bigger world out there. There's a lot of ethical consumers, there's a lot of ecoconscious consumers. And so there's a lot of potential for us to grow outside of Malawi, and that's where we're looking towards. When we look at three years from now, we want to be able to see that there are three, four, five shops in Europe that are reselling Kibébé products. Because our work directly translates to how someone's life is affected here in the camp, especially because refugees at the moment receive an equivalent of $5 a month. It's very little to be honest. When they work with us, on a good month they're able to make double, triple. Decent income can only come when we start to grow into those markets. So we want to be able to grow our e-commerce. At the moment we're able to make around $200 a month, but we want to double that. We want to grow towards making $1000, $3000 a month. We want to be known as thé ethical brand from Malawi that is being laid by refugees making different products. So in ten years from now, I want to see a bigger and beautiful production house, double what we have right now. At the moment, we're housing about 27 artisans. To grow, we want to be able to house 100 artisans. We want a much bigger space, more people being helped, more lives being changed.

Can you tell me a little bit more about the challenges and opportunities that come with working with refugees?

Maria: I think the biggest challenge is when there are assumptions. That's the one thing that I started to see when I first joined here. There's a lot of assumptions, especially in the media, about refugees. And it comes from a place of not knowing. It's comes from a place of not interacting. You can only know what refugees are capable of or what the refugee crisis looks like, when you actually begin to interact with them. And so our biggest challenge for Kibébé and for our sister charity There Is Hope, is that when the broader community is looked at from a negative eye, from a negative mindset, it makes it much more difficult to kind of positively share all the beautiful stories that we're able to share. And the thing is, there is a lot of positivity in the refugee community. There's a lot of positivity in the minor integration that we're already seeing here at Kibébé. It's not very hard to support the refugee community. You just have to kind of be willing to do it. You have to be willing to say okay, I have my assumptions, but I want to learn, I want to listen. And you can come to Kibébé. You can talk to us. You can buy our products and try to understand a bit more about what we're doing and who the people we're trying to serve are.

Part 2: Exchange

What has your experience with Exchange been like?

Maria: The experience for Kibébé has been something very unique, because our coach and the director of Exchange came here with understanding spirits. But it's difficult. As an enterprise, Kibébé is very different from most of the enterprises that Exchange is working with. I think we're probably the only handicraft enterprise that they're working with right now. You can find a ton of experts who want to help with agriculture for example, because food is the world's biggest problem, right? But it's not the same when you say 'I want to help people to make beautiful products with their hands so that they can help the refugee community'. Having a coach who understands that, yes, it's not agriculture, but it's directly impacting somebody's food if they make things themselves, has been the most meaningful for us. Because having to validate who we are, and what our impact is, has been very easy if somebody already comes with an understanding spirit and says ‘we see your impact, we see your potential’. I think being able to now dedicate themselves to identify experts who can support our mission, has been the best part of our work with Exchange.

Can you tell us a bit more about the coach and the experts you worked with?

Maria: We've had one expert so far who came for a short mission. It happened right before we signed on to the three-year growth programme. We have been in conversations with a few experts who are in product development as well as product management. So this is obviously something exciting that we're looking forward to. But the first expert we met, Liesbeth Verhelst, is an amazing, brilliant, young, soulful, passionate product designer and she helped us to make period pads as well as period underwear. Before 2024, we were only able to make our usual catalog. Since we were able to introduce this, we have been able to partner with a German organization that is ordering a thousand pads at a time, and that's going straight towards addressing the menstrual poverty in Malawi. That has been brilliant, because it already created a new revenue stream for us by having her as a product designer to support us. And so we're very hopeful about the new experts as well, because there's now more potential to make new products. We can enter new product lines as well. We can definitely introduce some product lines that are different from what we're already making, something exciting for the European market. So yeah, it's very exciting and we're very, very, very happy about that. And our coach, Natalie Aerts, obviously has been amazing. She's a very dedicated coach who stays in touch and understands where we are, understands our needs and sees how she can support us best.

What will be your next big goal with the expertise provided by Exchange?

Maria: I think our biggest goal right now is to understand how we can make better products with a purpose. And I say purpose not in the grand scheme of, you know, creating a design about the impact of the refugees. No, for so long we have been creating products with the mindset of 'Oh, I think people would like this, this would be amazing'. But now we want to be intentional about it. We want to use data-driven methods to create these products because we don't want to rely on guesswork. We want to be able to create a product and know for sure that it is exactly what the market is interested in. And what these experts are going to bring is a data-driven approach into our product management and also streamlining all of our operations. We're going to be looking at the trends to see what is selling, what are people looking into, what are people excited about, what sort of colors, what sort of prints, what sort of styles. And so that's the biggest thing I think; the next products that people are going to see from Kibébé, they're going to be wild.

Part 3: Life

Can you tell me a bit more about yourself?

Maria: I am 32 years old, born and raised here in Malawi. And I have had an interesting career. I had a patient mentor, the founder of Kibébé, and that's where my career started. Alongside this, I was able to build a family for myself. I have a husband and a six-year-old child. She is very out loud and extraverted, very different from who I am at the moment. And a couple years ago, I started pursuing an MBA, which I have now completed. It was very interesting juggling all of these things at the same time. I excel at being organized, but I think juggling everything, especially now being the manager of Kibébé, it kind of put me in a very sensitive spot. I was very stressed. And when I get home, I can't be too stressed because I need to be a mom and I need to be a wife. All of these hats have at times been very overwhelming.

But the beauty of that is that I've had the most amazing support from my team. I have an incredible team of young people who are just as empowered to do this work as me. And so when I go home, I'm able to leave my work at the office. I find that very powerful. And I find it very meaningful as well, especially for me. It has allowed me to lean into who I am as a person outside of work. I like to work out a little bit. I also like to write. I actually wrote a blog for three years when I was younger. And I just like to have meaningful conversations with my friends and family.

What inspires you in life?

Maria: My daughter. I recently lost my mother and I was at a place where I wanted to just be a daughter. I didn't want to be the manager at work. I just wanted to be somebody's daughter that was grieving. But every time I looked at my daughter, it's like oh, we are very much aligned. She's the daughter and obviously I'm the mom in this situation, so I want to be able to give her a future. I want to be able to give her a different understanding of what a woman is in Malawi, or what it means in the world. I don't want her to have to battle with her identity. And so when I see her, I want to be able to try everything, fail at some things and still be okay with that, because I want to create a path where she can say 'Hey, my mom did all of these things, I can also do these things'. And they don't have to be my things. They can be her own things. But just to know that it's possible to do whatever you want, to be able to pursue a career, to be able to go to a good school. I think that's the biggest inspiration for me, that I want to be able to pave that kind of path and direction for her.

Part 4: Entrepreneurship and Malawi

How do you look at entrepreneurship in your country? What do you think about the business climate?

Maria: There is a lot of entrepreneurial activity in Malawi and I think as a people, we are entrepreneurial. It's just that there is a large gap between the formal entrepreneurial sector – so this is private, big companies, big corporations that have access to loans and funding – and the informal sector. Somebody can have a good idea, but not a lot of money. So they start with just one thing and hope they can expand to do more. But there's a lot of the formal and less of this informal entrepreneurship. And so when you enter that space in the middle like us, it's quite difficult to access funding or to kind of be recognized for what you're doing. The good thing is that there has been an introduction of the SME sector within the Ministry of Trade. And so they are slowly starting to pick up on the existence of small to medium enterprises. Enterprises that need funding and capacity building. And so international partners as well are partnering with the government to make sure that there's actually some capacity building for SMEs. I have friends who have started their own enterprise, and we share different stories about the struggles of leading a business in Malawi. It's not easy, because you're often competing with somebody whose budget is in the millions. When you are living in an environment that's mostly reliant on imports, already your cost of production is insane. And so to justify everything else, your markups and your pricing, it's not always easy.

What we try to do at Kibébé is to do meaningful pricing. We want to make sure that the value of the product stands out, as well as the value of the brand. But we're also trying to be fair to ourself as a business so that we can be sustainable. While of course being mindful that our customers are able to not break the bank when they're buying our products. This isn't always easy, especially considering the current economy that's ripe with inflation. A lot of enterprises are suffering because of that. The devaluation or the inflation, the lack of foreign currency like the dollar here in Malawi – which is what most people rely on to import materials – is exacerbating this whole thing. And so today you had a good day, but tomorrow you might not. This is what it's like most of the time. And so it takes a lot of resilience, really. You have to be committed to what you're doing, because the banks or bigger organizations are not going to bail you out, because your enterprise or impact is too small for them to recognize. And so you have to be mindful and able to always pivot your strategy. If you cannot do that, you're going to remain stuck in place. So it's very difficult, but it's manageable if you're resilient and you're very strategic about it.

How do you see this situation evolving throughout the next years?

Maria: I mean, I'm praying for a miracle. No shade to everybody whose job is to make sure our economy is stable, but we're a very long way off as a country to a stable economy. And that drives the entrepreneurial activities, because if the economy is unstable, the entrepreneurial landscape is also going to be very unstable. And the fact is that a lot of employment happens within SMEs and the informal sector. Because when people create ideas, they're bringing other people alongside to support them. For everybody's sake, it would be good if in the next two years the situation got better. But for now, I think it's going to take a lot of strategic governance from different stakeholders, our government especially, to set aside political ambitions a little and focus strictly on getting the economy to be stable before we start to look out for other things. Everything is reliant on how well we can stabilize the economy. And at the moment, it looks very grey for Malawi. And I think I would honestly empower a lot of other enterprises to also start to look into export. If you can get a little bit of foreign currency into your business, it should also help cushion you when the local currency is unstable.

What difference would you like to see the most?

Maria: I want to wake up in 2026 and be able to see that the black market isn't thriving as well as the formal market. Maybe we can learn from other countries that have gone through similar situations, having a struggling economy, fluctuations, inflation, fuel shortage, food shortage. I want to see somebody who is being proactive in actually addressing the situation, because it shouldn't come as a shock that last month there was no fuel and this month there's no fuel. It means that there is something that's missing, something we aren't quite doing right. And it doesn't mean that we're not trying. We're definitely trying, but it just means that there are other factors that are also playing into it and there is more that we could do. There are more people we can talk to. The trajectory of our economy needs to start going up. It can be as simple as having strategic conversations with other economists, with other experts who have witnessed failing economies. I think that would be the most graceful thing at the moment, because if we can't begin to turn that around, everything else kind of falls apart.

What do you like most about Malawi?

Maria: I am Yao by tribe and growing up in that community, there is a very strong kinship. You need to know your cousin and your cousin's cousin and your uncle and your uncle's uncle, ... Everybody will make sure to remind you ‘I'm your cousin from so and so's side of the family’. And I think that's very beautiful, because you have a big tribe and so many people around you. You don't walk this path alone. There's always somebody that says ‘Hey, I'm your family, you should call me’. And I think that's what I like about it, that we are very strong with kinship. We are with family, all the time.