Mercy Chikhosi Kafotokoza
Mercy Kafotokoza grew up in a smallholder farming community in rural Malawi, where she experienced firsthand the realities of living far from healthcare. Raised by her grandmother, she learned early how distance, cost and delayed access to care can shape a family's future.
She trained as a nurse and midwife and later earned a Master's in Public Health. Working within Malawi's health system, she saw that many preventable maternal and child deaths occurred because families often reached care only after complications had already developed.
Between 2014 and 2015, Mercy spent two years listening to families, community leaders and health workers in Dowa District. Those conversations revealed an important reality: many families face barriers that make it difficult to access care in time, particularly when services are concentrated far from where people live.
That insight led to the founding of Wandikweza in 2016 and the creation of Proactive Doorstep Care, a last-mile health system designed to reach families early, continuously and in time before complications arise.
Today, Mercy leads Wandikweza's expansion across four districts, with a pathway to reach seven districts and three million people by 2030.
Listening before bulding
That commitment to listening remains part of Wandikweza's approach today. Communities help identify priorities, nominate Community Health Workers, shape implementation and provide feedback that strengthens the system. We believe that lasting health systems are not built for communities they are built with them. Listening showed that effective solutions must be grounded in the experiences of the people they are intended to serve.
Two years of listening produced four things: the community-nomination mechanism, the decision that CHWs would always be selected by the communities they serve, not deployed by Wandikweza. The Village head engagement sequence, the understanding that no community activity could begin before the traditional leader had been consulted and had given their endorsement. The birth preparedness framework, built around what families actually do and know. And it produced the founding conviction that has governed every district entry since: that community trust is a relationship built over time, through consistent presence, by people the community itself has chosen.
Wandikweza listens before it builds because the communities it serves are not the recipients of a model designed elsewhere. They are the designers of the model the people whose knowledge of their own geography, their own trust structures and their own barriers to care is the intelligence the system runs on.
