From Market Waste to Fish Feed: Inside the SIFLOOP Hub’s First Year in Voi

Fish farming in Taita Taveta County has never lacked demand — the county's ponds produce roughly 175 tons of fish a year against an appetite for 1,578. What it has lacked is affordable feed. Commercial fish feed is expensive and often unreliable to source, and that single constraint has kept hundreds of ponds in the county running under capacity.

The SIFLOOP Hub was built to break that bottleneck. Set up in Voi through a partnership between MAZIDO, Taita Taveta University (TTU), and Three o'clock (3OC), and funded under the European Union's Horizon Europe programme through its INCiTiS-FOOD initiative, the hub runs on a simple premise: organic waste that would otherwise rot in a landfill can instead become Black Soldier Fly Larvae (BSFL) — a high-protein ingredient for fish feed. After a launch event delayed into September, the hub officially opened its doors on 17–19 September 2025, bringing together consortium partners, county officials, researchers, students, and local farmers for its first public demonstration.

Step inside the facility and the whole cycle is visible in miniature. Adult flies breed and lay eggs inside a fine-mesh enclosure the team calls the "love cage," using wooden egg-laying structures nicknamed "eggies" to make collection easy. From there, eggs move into a darkened hatchery to incubate for about five days, before the newly hatched larvae are transferred onto rearing beds loaded with prepared organic substrate — where they spend roughly two weeks eating their way to harvest size. What's left afterward, the frass, is collected separately and doubles as organic fertiliser.

The organic waste that feeds this whole system comes from Voi's own kitchens and market stalls. Voi Wildlife Lodge has become a steady supplier of kitchen waste, alongside fruit and vegetable vendors around the town's markets, all of it stored in airtight containers to keep it fresh before it reaches the rearing beds. By the end of the reporting period, the hub had processed roughly 10 tonnes of that waste into larvae and fertiliser.

The results have held up under scrutiny. Laboratory analysis confirmed that the larvae produced at the hub contain 39.99% crude protein on a dry matter basis — comparable to many commercial fishmeal ingredients — giving the project the technical grounds it needed to begin formulating an actual feed product.

None of this works, though, without people who know how to run it, which is why training has been the hub's other main output. A first cohort of 40 farmers trained at TTU's campus on BSF rearing and feed application, and went on to mentor a second cohort of 104 farmers through applied feed management — 144 people in total, including 64 women and 65 youth, trained across sessions in November 2025 and March 2026. A separate two-day entrepreneurship track in Wundanyi walked 75 participants through business planning and financial literacy for a BSFL-based enterprise, and a co-creation bootcamp at Taita Taveta National Polytechnic (TTNP) brought together 61 students, county officials, and community members — a near-even 31 women and 30 men — to map out the county's organic waste problem and prototype solutions to it.

Adoption is still early, but it's real: five of the trained farmers have already begun applying what they learned on their own, in small-scale trials outside the hub. A wider group has expressed interest in going further once feed trials are complete.

At the September launch, Mwandawiro Samboja, the County Executive Committee Member for Water, Sanitation, Environment, Climate Change, and Natural Resources, used his remarks to frame the scale of the opportunity: Taita Taveta generates an estimated 200 tonnes of waste every day, 61% of it organic and largely unsorted, and sustainable waste management, he said, begins with sorting it at the source. The hub's own operations have since drawn attention beyond the county — Professor Grace Wamue of the Kenyatta University Living Lab visited to see the BSF system in person, part of a growing exchange of ideas among the INCiTiS-FOOD programme's network of hubs across the region.

The SIFLOOP Hub is still a demonstration project, not yet a commercial one — the next phase is about proving the economics through full feed trials and building the cooperative structure that will let trained farmers and entrepreneurs run it as a business. But the pieces are now in place: a working facility, a lab-verified product, and 144 trained people who know how to use it.