Ganta Highway, Gbarnga,
Bong County, Liberia
Project Mila, led by young Kenyans, utilizes black soldier fly larvae to tackle food waste and provide sustainable fish feed. In Mombasa, the project collects organic waste to feed the larvae, reducing pollution and benefiting marine ecosystems.
This approach decreases reliance on wild-caught fish for feed, promoting sustainable aquaculture practices.
Project Mila’s team of volunteers collect organic waste from households, markets and restaurants in Mombasa and feed it to voracious larvae
A group of young Kenyans are working on an unusual solution to the problems of food waste and fish feed produced unsustainably from wild-caught fish stocks: maggots.
The larvae of the black soldier fly are now devouring unwanted food in projects around the world. Their excrement, known as frass, can be used as a fertiliser for land-based crops, and their protein-rich bodies, harvested before they turn into flies, can be fed to livestock.
In Kenya, the environmentalists behind Project Mila, which in Swahili means tradition, are employing the larvae to clean up food waste, as well as nurture mangroves and feed fish in coastal farms.
Project Mila’s team of volunteers collect organic waste from households, markets and restaurants in the south-eastern coastal city of Mombasa, and feed it to voracious larvae, which produce frass while helping to clean up the city.
Nusra Abed, co-founder of Project Mila and a community health promoter, says she was “perturbed by the number of sanitation-related infections within the community due to poor waste management, and wanted to be part of the solution”.
According to a report by the UN Environment Programme, Kenya has some of the highest levels of household food waste in the world, producing 40-100kg per person annually.
Apart from alleviating the problem of food waste, the frass fertiliser has also been helping small-scale farmers in the Mombasa area increase their crop growth and diversity. It can enable farmers to diversify away from planting coconuts – a commonly grown crop which is slow to mature – into fast-growing produce including onions, tomatoes and other fruits. This offers them the opportunity to earn extra income through farming that’s sustainable and organic, and selling their surplus harvest in markets, says Roselyne Mwachia, a marine and fisheries researcher working with Project Mila. Read_more
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