Mercy Chikhosi
Kafotokoza
Founder and Executive Director since 2016
Mercy grew up in a rural farming community in Malawi. She knows the gap Wandikweza was built to close from childhood. She is a nurse, a midwife, and holds a Masters in Public Health. She has led Wandikweza since its founding day in Dowa in 2016.
Today she leads a four-district organisation with 1.5 million people reached and a scale pathway to seven districts and three million people by 2030.
She built the model
she wished had existed
in the community she grew up in
Mercy was raised by her grandmother in a rural farming community in Blantyre, Malawi. She grew up knowing what it means to live hours from skilled care, to navigate a health system that was not designed to find you and to lose someone to a complication that care had it arrived in time could have prevented. As a child, she lost her uncle to a tooth infection that was treatable. The care never reached him.
Her grandmother kept her in school. Mercy trained as a nurse and a midwife working within the health system she would later build alongside. She saw, from the inside, what government services could and could not do: what the facility provided for those who arrived and what it could not provide for those who never made it there. The gap was a design consequence.
In 2014 she began listening, two years of conversations with families in Dowa District before she built anything. The question she was carrying: what would a health system look like if it was designed to find people and not wait for them? In 2016, she founded Wandikweza with one CHW network, a government endorsement and a conviction that has not changed in years.
Where it began
Early years: Rural Malawi: raised by her grandmother. A smallholder farming community in Blantyre, Malawi. The community that shaped the model's entire design logic.
Training: Nurse and Midwife. Trained in Malawi's public health system, understanding it well enough to know where it stopped reaching and why.
Masters in Public Health: The academic grounding that shaped the evidence framework and the Assessment Tool measurement system now governing PDC in the active districts.
2014–15: Two years of listening before building anything. Conversations with families and traditional leaders in Dowa. The listening that produced the model.
2016: Wandikweza founded in Dowa District. The first Community Health Worker deployed, the first government MoU signed. The founding question still the work several years later.
Today: Multiple districts. Three million people by 2030.
Leading the scale pathway she designed, same convictions and a sharpened blueprint.
THE QUESTION THAT STARTED EVERYTHING IN 2016
How do we ensure that the families living furthest from care are reached before it is too late?
This is the question a Malawian nurse and midwife asked in 2014 before Wandikweza had deployed a single CHW, before a single outreach clinic had arrived in Dowa. It is the question the organisation is still answering, district by district, household by household, year by year. And with each new district that enters the system from Dowa in 2016 to Nkhotakota in 2027, it is answered a little more precisely than the last.
What Mercy leads today
In 2026, Mercy leads an organisation that reaches 1.5 million people across four active districts. This is still the work of the question she asked in 2014.
The same question. A much larger answer.
Government partnership: Every active district is co-managed with its District Health Management Team from Day 1. Mercy's founding conviction that government co-ownership is non-optional, applied in every MoU she signs.
Measured accountability: The Assessment Tool she co-designed governs both system quality and district exit. Exit is earned by measurement, never granted by a funding timeline, regardless of pressure to do otherwise.
Sector leadership: Mercy speaks on last-mile health system design at international forums, sharing an evidence base: what it actually takes to build a system that a government can own and operate after the founding organisation steps back.
Learning architecture: The evidence generated by the active districts on community trust formation, government co-ownership trajectories and what essential elements must travel unchanged between geographies is structured, documented and shared with the sector.
2030 is the proof of concept.
Seven districts and three million people by 2030 is the goal that currently governs Wandikweza's scale strategy. But Mercy's vision does not end there. What seven districts prove that a last-mile health system built on community trust and government co-ownership can be replicated, measured and handed back is a methodology that belongs to any geography asking the same question.
The model Wandikweza has built in Malawi should not stay in Malawi. The replication blueprint, the Assessment Tool and the evidence base generated across seven districts should be available to every health system builder in sub-Saharan Africa looking for a credible answer to the reach question.
The question Mercy asked in 2016 is a question that belongs to every community the health system was not designed to reach not just in Malawi.
Reach the person who built this
Mercy is available to funders evaluating a first partnership with Wandikweza, governments considering an adaptation of the PDC model, researchers proposing a collaborative learning agenda and conference organisers looking for a practitioner voice on last-mile health system design. She speaks from evidence, active districts and years of data.
Funding partnerships: First conversations with institutional funders, foundations and district adopters considering a multi-year investment in the PDC model.
Government engagement: National and sub-national government leaders exploring PDC adoption, community health policy alignment or district co-ownership models.
Speaking and events: Conference keynotes, funder briefings, policy forums and university events on last-mile health system design and the evidence of what works.
Research collaborations: Academic and sector researchers proposing a structured learning agenda around community trust formation, co-ownership trajectories or system design replication.