Daniel Nyere is like other students in Africa or elsewhere. He is a student at JKUAT, Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, in Kenya taking electrical and computer engineering courses. The only unique thing is that, by coincidence, he got an excellent idea and became an entrepreneur with focus on insects, more specifically a maggot which is the larvae stage of house flies, in order to produce animal feed used by farmers afterwards. The initial idea came along with his mum who is a poultry farmer and faces many problems as other African farmers do and one of the problems is high costs of production. Due to the evidence that oceans are almost depleted of fish, which is the main source of the feed for animals in Africa, the prices for feed made from fish are so high and also there is a high soil competition for feed made from soya beans, which is a very labour intensive and it occupies a place for human food on the agricultural land. Daniel realized that the feed for chickens is too expensive and tried to find out how to decrease the costs of production and find some substituent for fish or soya beans which would be more convenient for longer storage and would have more nutritious content in order to feed animals properly. The feed from maggots seems to be very nutritious containing a lot of protein. The process of rearing maggots starts with house flies which lay eggs and from those eggs maggots came out. The maggots are crushed after a day and mixed with other components (e. g. seed flowers) and the feed for animals is prepared.
More at SLU’s website: https://www.slu.se/en/ew-news/2018/5/young-kenyan-entrepreneur-working-with-insects-gets-inspiration-from-slu/
Author: Anna Kroutilová (Agrinatura)