Hellen Chabunya is a Mid-Career Master’s of Public Administration candidate and founder of “Chuma”, an agricultural bank that seeks to resource women and youth to utilize climate smart agriculture to tackle food insecurity in Malawi. As a social enterprise “Chuma” operates a revolving fund for affordable farm inputs, community commodity aggregation points to ease access to markets, and provides food parcels to ultra poor families and facilitates climate smart agriculture training.
Hellen was elected Secretary General for the Farm Mechanization Association of Malawi and is the President of Commercial Farmers Cooperative Society in Malawi and uses her platform in the agricultural sector to champion an in-grower anchor farm model that matches idle farming estates with landless farmers on soft-term lease conditions.
Hellen is a retired government relations and communications specialist with substantial experience across the public, private and non-profit sectors and is now focused on scaling her agricultural enterprises. She is an advocate for public sector transformation in her country and is dedicated to sharing her passion for public service and creating opportunities for others to succeed.
Hellen values the balance of theory and practice and hopes that as a Cheng Fellow, she will attain a broad spectrum of analytical competencies and skills to effectively scrutinize the implementation of agricultural government programs and safeguard their intended public benefits.
(Chuma is a Chewa word for Wealth and is derived from ‘Chuma chili mu Nthaka-Wealth is in healthy soil’ philosophy.)