Our Mission

To cultivate sustainable, productive enterprises that leverage renewable energy to combat off-grid poverty, promote inclusive growth, and catalyze socio-economic advancement across Malawi.

Vision

We envision a future where energy poverty in rural Malawi is lessened, and economic growth is fostered through the widespread adoption of FTI’s approach, using local entrepreneurship to grow both biofuel and renewable electric energy.

Our Focus

For the past decade, we have worked with social entrepreneurs from diverse backgrounds, and helped them to build out their dreams. As the support ecosystem for Malawian entrepreneurs grows stronger, we are free to refine the focus of our work.

Energy access is fundamental for the advancement of healthcare, education, employment, agriculture, and women’s empowerment. We at FTI are addressing those needs by mitigating energy poverty. This strategy requires building capabilities on two fronts, distributed renewable electricity and “waste to energy” biofuels. 

Malawi’s population is 85% rural with only 11% of people connected to the national electric grid. At current rates of electrification, rural areas will not receive access to the national grid for decades. The solution is to create small, dispersed, off-grid electric generation “minigrids”, tapping into either solar or small hydroelectric sources. Energy poverty is also lessened by the innovative use of biofuels, which can provide lighting and other energy needs on a small scale. 

We work towards these goals by assisting entrepreneurs who want to supply energy, via hydro or solar power, as well as small businesses producing biofuels. We also work with entrepreneurs who are creating societally productive demand for energy, often in the form of agriculture needs such as irrigation.  

Flame Tree Initiative is an entrepreneur support organization that collaborates with talented, focused, dedicated Malawians to confront foundational energy access problems that restrain sustainable development.

Core Values

1. Teamwork

2. Open Communication

3. Listening & Learning

4. Humility

5. Innovation

Goals

Our entrepreneurs are working tirelessly to fight the status quo and create prosperity in their communities. They are tackling difficult issues - like gender inequality, educational attainment, youth unemployment, and lack of energy access.

We are proud to have honed in on our goals and strategies through 2023. We seek to help launch 100 more development enterprises in the coming years. We recognize, however, we have much to accomplish to achieve that end in four overarching categories: funding and administration, open DELab, topic-specific DELab, and DEStudio.

Our goals by 2025:
1. Secure a diversified stream of funding and broaden our network of donors
2. creation of new partnership with individual social intrapreneurs and institutions
3. Support communities in productive use of renewable energy i.e. warehouse electrification and Agroprocessing
4. Improve and scale DELabs in partnership with multiple universities in each region of Malawi
5. Develop and implement issue-specific DELabs in areas such as off-grid energy and agribusiness
6. Improve operation of the DEStudio by providing improved, tailored, one-on-one support for DEStudio Members