A handful of small operators scattered across Uganda are turning food scraps and market waste into a business most Ugandans have never heard of. In Kasese district, Ugavoil collects roughly 40 metric tonnes of municipal waste daily, sorting out about 10 tonnes of organic material — supplemented by avocado-processing waste from a local factory — to feed colonies of black soldier fly larvae. In Kayunga, Marula Proteen runs an out-grower model in which farmers rear the larvae themselves and sell them back to the company for cash or fertiliser. The Centre for Insect Research and Development has built a network of 240 trained farmers. None of this is subsidised pilot activity. These are functioning small businesses, and together they are the early shape of an agribusiness sector Uganda barely had five years ago.
The insect doing the work is unremarkable to look at and, for now, largely unknown outside a narrow circle of farmers and entrepreneurs. Over roughly six weeks, black soldier fly larvae consume food scraps, market waste and animal manure, reducing it by more than half while converting it into two marketable products: protein-rich larvae that can replace imported fishmeal and soybean meal in poultry, fish and pig feed, and a nutrient-dense residue called frass that works as organic fertiliser. The business model writes itself once the biology is understood — operators get paid to take waste off a city’s hands, then sell what that waste becomes.
The economics are what’s turning curiosity into actual enterprises. Industry-cited research suggests black soldier fly-based feed can cut feed costs by up to 35 percent compared with conventional fishmeal and soy-based diets, a margin that matters enormously in aquaculture and poultry, where feed often consumes the largest share of production costs. Those costs climbed further after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupted global fertiliser and feed supply chains, pushing more Ugandan farmers to look for alternatives to imported protein sources. For operators like Marula and Ugavoil, that price pressure on their customers is effectively the market they’re built to serve.
What makes this a genuine small-business story, rather than another donor-funded demonstration project, is how low the barrier to entry actually is. A starter operation needs little more than a waste source, a container and starter larvae; Monitor reporting on local producers puts basic setup costs under Shs1 million. That has made black soldier fly farming a realistic entry point for youth and women’s groups in both urban and rural areas, and a possible path into more dignified work for informal waste collectors who currently operate in hazardous, unstructured conditions. The Centre for Insect Research and Development’s 240-farmer network and Marula’s out-grower model both show that the business can be built around smallholders rather than requiring large up-front capital from a single investor.
The sector is still small enough that its limits are obvious. Awareness remains confined to the farmer networks already plugged into operators like Marula and Ugavoil; financing for new entrants is thin; and Uganda’s regulatory framework for insect-based feed and fertiliser products hasn’t yet caught up with an industry that needs clear safety standards if it’s going to scale past a collection of disconnected operators. Demand is outpacing supply in the other direction too — research into Kampala’s black soldier fly value chain found that even an established player like Marula cannot meet either the city’s waste-handling needs or full farmer demand for its feed and fertiliser products.
Closing those gaps is a policy job as much as a business one: clearer rules for insect-based feed and fertiliser, financing that actually reaches small-scale entrepreneurs, and demonstration projects that build trust in products most Ugandan consumers have never used. Development partners are starting to move on this — the GIZ-backed BUGS initiative is working with Uganda, Ethiopia and Ivory Coast to scale black soldier fly waste-processing technology regionally — but that support is still modest next to the size of Uganda’s organic waste problem.
For now, the businesses being built around Ugavoil, Marula Proteen and the trained farmer networks behind them remain niche. But each one is proof that a viable Ugandan agribusiness can be built on something the country already has too much of: waste. The question is whether policy and financing catch up before the next batch of entrepreneurs gets stuck at the same setup-cost-and-no-market wall the current ones are still pushing against.
The writer, Lydia Biira, is the finance and admin manager at the Centre for Citizens Conserving Environment & Management (CECIC).
