“Every Drop Helps a Girl Shine”

TeamLift’s Sunflower Oil Project

We are excited to announce the launch of TeamLift’s sunflower farming and oil processing initiative, a program that will not only provide gainful employment opportunities for women-headed households in Karonga District, but also offer a consistent revenue stream to directly support the ongoing needs of St. Mary’s Secondary School students and our graduates who are in college. TeamLift recently purchased 125 acres of farmland near Karonga to grow our first crop of sunflowers. We hired local villagers to sustainably clear the land that they will plant in early December, coinciding with Malawi’s rainy season. Next Spring, TeamLift will purchase at market rate all the sunflowers the growers harvest, and process them into cooking oil. All proceeds from this initiative will be invested in our education programs in Malawi.

Sunflower seed oil is a core component of cooking in a Malawi household. Every family uses it on a daily basis, and almost all of the oil is imported. With each bottle TeamLift produces and sells, Malawi families will have the chance to empower the young women of St. Mary’s and our girls in college, affording them a brighter future. TeamLift aims to become a trusted supplier of sunflower seed oil in Malawi both through distribution in local village markets as well as in grocery stores. In our many years of trusted work in Malawi, we have developed partnerships that will enable us to distribute our product, beginning in the Spring of 2026. We are energized by the community, and extremely grateful to the local chiefs who assisted TeamLift in purchasing the land.

In our planning, our immediate focus is on securing all the necessary factory supplies and connecting with the women who will farm the land. We will work with the local chiefs to hire teams of farmers, led by team managers, who will plant and maintain the sunflower harvest for us. We will purchase the seeds from the farming teams and use this raw product within our factory. Women working in our factory will then dry, press, and process the seeds into oil, bottling them and preparing them for sale across Malawi. We estimate in our first year we can produce and distribute 40-50,000 liters of sunflower seed oil throughout the country.