From beans to businesses: How the Alliance is growing entrepreneurs in Malawi

On Sept 5, 2025, the Alliance won Malawi’s “Best Incubation and Capacity Building” award for its BA4Y project, which empowers youth startups and SMEs with funding, training, and mentorship to drive jobs and resilient businesses.

When the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT won Malawi’s award for “Best Incubation and Capacity Building for Small and Medium Businesses” on September 5th, 2025, presented by Africa Agriculture in collaboration with the Ministry of Trade and Industry, Ministry of Agriculture, and the Centre for Agricultural Transformation (CAT) it might have seemed like a case of mistaken identity. After all, this is an organization that has spent four decades perfecting bean varieties, not business models. Yet the award tells a deeper story, one that reveals the skills needed to nurture crops and to nurture entrepreneurs are remarkably similar.

The Alliance arrived in Malawi in the 1980s with a simple mission: help farmers grow better beans. The crop was considered an “orphan,” mostly grown for household consumption, ignored by policymakers, and far from commercially viable.