Our Board Members

Sonja is the Co-Founder and Director of Samawati Capital Partners Limited in Nairobi, Kenya with 10 years of work experience mainly in the field of development cooperation and impact investing. Prior to founding Samawati, Sonja worked at Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt in the Sustainable Investments team, held different positions at GIZ in Ghana and Germany and lastly partnered with the Munich Re Foundation when writing her Master Thesis. She completed a Bachelor of Science in International Management at the European School of Business (ESB) and a Bachelor of Arts in European Business at the Dublin City University and further completed a Master of Science in Agricultural Economics at the University of Bonn.

Bwalya Chilufya-Musonda is a partner at B&M Legal Practitioners (Bowmans Zambia) with over13 years legal experience. She specialises in corporate and financial law and has considerable experience advising clients on syndicated lending, corporate financing, project financing, finance leasing, export credit financing and debt restructuring, mergers and acquisitions, and capital market transactions. In the agriculture and agribusiness space, Bwalya has advised lenders to the sector including commercial banks, agriculture cooperatives and leasing companies, and national and international development finance institutions. She has a unique blend of private and public experience, having worked as State Advocate under the Ministry of Justice’s Department of Civil Litigation, where she advised and represented the Republic of Zambia in litigation both in and outside the country. Bwalya is a member of the International Bar Association and the Law Association of Zambia and is an advocate of the Superior Courts of Zambia. She has an LLB from the University of Zambia, an LLM in International Business and Trade Law from the John Marshall Law School, Chicago, USA and a post-graduate diploma in Legislative Drafting from the Zambia Institute of Advanced Legal Education.

Jonathan is a development practitioner with extensive experience designing, implementing and evaluating complex projects across Asia and Africa related to smallholder agriculture, financial inclusion and child protection. He spent 6 years working in Zambia where he was involved in the establishment and management of several large-scale mechanization initiatives, including AgLeaseCo.

James Luhana has more than 25 years of professional experience, 12 of which he has accumulated in agricultural trade, processing and private sector development and 11 years in in the finance & services market in enhancing private sector development under Musika Development Initiatives. He has for 3 years managed a $3.6m NORAD funded project (Agribusiness Accelerate Initiative) an SME development program focusing on capacity building implemented both in Zambia and Malawi, and managed to facilitate training programmes to over 720 SMEs (165 female run) in various aspects of improving their business performances in both countries. He spent a year in sector training with a focus on value chains and cluster approaches to women creating wealth in Zambia (WcW). He is an expert in topics around business and finance and private sector development interventions, he understands access to credit as an important tool for rural development especially women SMEs. His expertise ranges from agricultural corporate firms, SMEs, microbusinesses and smallholder farmer assessments, credit risk management, microcredit product development in the context of agricultural finance, the development of the lower end of the agricultural market for mechanization and digitalisation. James has extensive experience in market systems development interventions, and has been guided by evidence based solutions in developing products and services to the ultimate clients such smallholder farmers and SME agribusinesses.