While most of her teenage schoolmates spent their allowances on snacks and other small treats, Susan Namangale made an unexpected move with the little money she had.

She and a few friends pooled their change to buy two chessboards for their school in Malawi.

“If my mother knew then what I had done with the little pocket money she had given me, I would have been in trouble, especially looking back on how much we struggled,” said Ms. Namangale, dressed in a black suit and a white shirt with a checkered necktie, an outfit evocative of the game she adores. “But that’s how much I had fallen in love.”

Now 49, Ms Namangale is on a mission to change the narrative that chess is only for the elite. She has introduced the game to rural schools, prisons and some of the world’s most underserved communities.

“Chess is for everyone,” she said, in a recent interview in Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi.

Her first encounter with the game occurred when she was 9. One school holiday, an older sister, Gladys, returned home with a chessboard, a gift she had received from Peace Corps volunteers after excelling in mathematics at secondary school.

Her sister began teaching her the basics of the game, but after Gladys returned to school, her little sister had no one to play with in Chombo, a small village along Lake Malawi, where opportunities and resources are few and far between.