Founder Spotlight: Derrick Chilu — Turning Farm Waste Into Cleaner Cooking in Malawi

Originally featured as a 265 Business Angels Founder Spotlight on our social media channels, October 2026. Expanded for the blog with additional Malawi clean-cooking and charcoal-sector context.

What if the waste left behind by agriculture could help reduce the need to cut down trees?

Meet Derrick Chilu. At 29, an electrician by profession and the founder of CHILU Bz Mult Offers Business, he is working towards an answer through fuel briquettes made from agricultural waste.

His route to that idea did not begin with fuel. It began with a multi-service business, sixteen team members, and a hard lesson about scaling.

At a Glance

Founder: Derrick Chilu, Founder, CHILU Bz Mult Offers Business
Age: 29
Professional background: Electrician
What the venture does: Producing fuel briquettes from agricultural waste as an alternative to charcoal and firewood
Earlier business: A multi-service company offering electrical services, plumbing, welding and fabrication, tailoring, mushroom-related services and agricultural supplies
Stage: Idea and pre-launch, built on more than two years of practical briquette production experience
Now seeking: Financial support to establish and grow briquette manufacturing

Sixteen People, Then Six

Derrick's entrepreneurial journey began in 2019, when he started a multi-service business built around the skills he already had and the problems he could see around him.

The operation covered a lot of ground: electrical services, plumbing, welding and fabrication, tailoring, mushroom-related services and agricultural supplies. At its peak it ran with sixteen team members.

Then financial challenges arrived, and the business had to be scaled back. The team shrank to six.

For many founders, that is where the story ends. For Derrick, it was where the story changed direction.

The Pivot: Waste Into Fuel

Rather than abandon entrepreneurship, Derrick began focusing on a problem he believes deserves far greater attention: the environmental cost of everyday cooking.

Across Malawi, most households depend on charcoal and firewood. Every pot of nsima, every kettle, every morning fire draws on a resource that takes decades to grow back.

Derrick's idea is to take the residue that farming already produces — crop stalks, husks and other agricultural waste that is often burned in the field or left to rot — and compress it into briquettes. A briquette is a dense, uniform fuel that burns hotter, longer and more efficiently than loose biomass, and can stand in for a portion of the charcoal burn.

He has now spent more than two years working directly with briquette production, learning the process from the ground up rather than from a business plan.

Why This Matters Now in Malawi

The problem Derrick has chosen is one of Malawi's largest, and one of its most documented:

Almost no one cooks with clean fuel. More than 97% of Malawian households rely on firewood or charcoal as their primary cooking and heating fuel, according to the National Charcoal Strategy. The picture inside the home is starker still: biomass accounted for nearly all — around 99% — of the energy used by Malawian households in 2020, according to Government of Malawi energy statistics.
Charcoal now dominates the cities. Charcoal has overtaken firewood as the primary urban cooking fuel, used by more than 54% of urban households. Nationally, reliance on charcoal rose five-fold between 1998 and 2014, from 2% to 11.3% of the population.
The forest cost is direct. Because charcoal production cuts the entire tree — and because producers typically clear an area at a time — charcoal is driving the loss of an estimated 75,000 hectares of natural forest every year.
Adoption of alternatives has barely started. Only about 1.5% of Malawi's population had access to clean fuels and technologies for cooking in 2023, according to World Bank data. Adoption of sustainable charcoal remains at roughly 0.6%, and pellets at 0.3%.
Policy has already made space for it. Malawi's SDG 7 Cleaner Cooking Energy Compact sets a target of 50 biomass briquette or pelletising projects implemented, and envisions 3% of urban households transitioning to briquettes and other alternative biomass fuels by 2030.

The distinction Derrick is working with matters. Much of Malawi's firewood is gathered through pruning, trimming and culling regenerants — harvesting that takes from the crop and the forest without necessarily clearing it. Charcoal production removes the whole tree. Replacing even part of the urban charcoal habit with a fuel made from a residue that already exists turns a harvesting problem into a supply opportunity.

From Experience to Enterprise

CHILU Bz Mult Offers Business is currently at the idea and pre-launch stage, and Derrick is clear about that.

What remains is the unglamorous work that separates a proven idea from a working business: securing equipment, building reliable supply of feedstock, producing briquettes at consistent quality and standard, and earning the distribution and trust required to sell a cooking fuel to households that currently buy another one every week.

This is the stage where many ventures quietly stall — not because the idea is weak, but because the distance between making something once and making it reliably, affordably, and at volume is wide.

Derrick's advantage is that he has already spent more than two years on the far side of that gap, learning how briquettes are made and what happens when real materials do not behave exactly as expected.

The Ask

Financial support to help establish and grow the briquette manufacturing venture.

For investors, this is an early-stage entry into a sector where the demand is well documented, the feedstock is agricultural by-product, and Malawi's own energy policy explicitly names briquettes as part of the answer.

Meet the Founder

Derrick's journey has not been easy. Since starting out in 2019, he has continued looking for the support and resources needed to bring his vision to life.

What stands out is the instinct to keep going, and the decision to chase a problem larger than his own balance sheet.

For him, this is about more than building a business. It is about creating practical solutions for present and future generations of Malawians.

So we return to the question he started with:

Can agricultural waste become part of Malawi's clean-cooking future?

Connect

Are you an investor, supplier, off-take partner or organisation interested in supporting a clean-cooking venture? Derrick Chilu is seeking financial support and partnerships to move from production experience into a working business. Reach out via 265 Business Angels.
Do you work with crop residues, agricultural waste or biomass supply chains in Malawi? Reliable, aggregated feedstock supply is one of the practical bottlenecks for this venture, and partnerships here would be valuable.
Are you a founder building something worth sharing? 265 Business Angels is looking for entrepreneurs whose ventures and stories deserve to be introduced to Malawi's entrepreneurial and investment ecosystem.
Apply for our Founder Spotlight: https://forms.gle/8Gh4izyGmBgvg2bx9
Email: info@265businessangels.org | WhatsApp: +265 984 15 54 35

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265 Business Angels is looking for founders building businesses and creating solutions worth putting in front of Malawi's entrepreneurial and investment ecosystem — agriculture, agri-tech, manufacturing, energy, health, education, tourism, blue economy, waste, clean cooking, climate, creative, fashion, retail and more.

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Email: info@265businessangels.org | WhatsApp: +265 984 15 54 35

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Sources and further reading

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