About DNC
Daka Ntembe Corporation is a Zambian rural infrastructure organisation. We exist to advance human prosperity, starting with the people who feed the nation and have long been given the least: the smallholder farmer. We begin with maize, but the work reaches much further.
Our belief
For too long the world has looked at Zambia and seen only what is broken. We see the truth. The smallholder farmers who grow the nation's food are its greatest economic force, and all they have ever lacked is access: to a fair market, to finance, to the systems others take for granted.
Prosperity does not begin with charity, and it does not begin with a loan. It begins with a fair market, honestly run, and the trust that grows from it. Everything else follows.
Why we start with maize
Farmers do not need another app. They need a market. Procurement is the wedge that unlocks everything else, so it is where we start. We buy maize directly from smallholder farmers at a fair price, and we pay quickly.
Every harvest is months of work, worry and hope. Our first responsibility is simple: to meet that work with a fair price, paid on time. Do that honestly, season after season, and trust is earned.
Each purchase is recorded and verified through Panjiia. Each becomes part of a farmer's financial identity, and in time a path to finance and opportunity that was never open to them before. We do not see maize as the destination. We see it as the door.
We are not here to extract. We are here to lift.
Built by Zambians, for Zambians.
Our vision
Roads connect communities. Power connects businesses. Trusted data connects farmers to opportunity.
We are building the infrastructure that lets rural economies thrive. It begins with maize. Over time it becomes the trusted record on which finance, services and whole new livelihoods can stand. The farms of today can become the workshops and tech hubs of tomorrow, and a generation can grow up working as engineers and data scientists, not only as farmhands.
We move slowly and deliberately, because this is a legacy meant to compound over decades, some of it after us. A giant in the making does not shout. It builds.
Our ambition is simple: to become one of Zambia's enduring institutions, creating the trusted infrastructure on which rural prosperity can compound for generations.
How we create change
Building for the long term
Everything DNC does grows from three foundations.
We create reliable access to buyers through fair, transparent procurement, so a farmer's harvest always has a home.
We capture trusted information that strengthens every transaction and gives each farmer a financial identity that grows with every sale.
We turn trusted information into better decisions, for farmers, partners, financial institutions and policymakers alike.
Meet Regina
Regina is DNC's Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer, and the person who makes the model real. She leads procurement across the Eastern Province: meeting farmers where they are, agreeing a fair price, weighing and buying the maize, and making sure every purchase is paid quickly and properly recorded.
She is a Zambian woman who refused to accept the limits placed on rural communities. No certificate, no permission, just grit, intelligence and the determination to build the relationships and trust that let DNC operate where others cannot, village by village, season by season.
Leadership and team
A team that pairs deep local knowledge with technical and financial discipline.
Founder & CEO
Sets strategy, capital and partnerships, from a background in enterprise data and technology.
Co-Founder & COO
Leads field operations and farmer relationships across the Eastern Province.
Land & Social Licence
Community engagement, traditional leadership and the relationships that let the work happen.
Finance & Grants Lead
Financial discipline, reporting and non-dilutive funding.
Engineering Lead
Builds Panjiia, the data and technology layer behind DNC.
Technical Programme Lead
Delivery, data quality and the discipline behind every transaction.
Field Agent, Eastern Province
On the ground with farmers: buying, weighing, registering and verifying.
Field Agent, Eastern Province
Extends DNC's reach on the ground, village by village.
We are recruiting a board and advisors from development finance, agribusiness, financial inclusion, governance and impact. Get in touch.
Our promise
We are building an institution Zambians can trust, precisely because they have been let down before.
Prosperity for all, built from the soil up. See how it works, and where it leads.