How young graduate turned maggot farming into a lucrative venture

Edwin Mugendi with maggot feeds. [Nanjinia Wamuswa, Standard]

The morning Edwin Mugendi walked into his rented space in Kajiado County two years ago and found his maggots floating in a pool of floodwater, he quietly sat down, failing to move.

Months of hard work had gone down the drain, just like that. “I thought about quitting,” he says quietly. “I had put everything into this.”

He was 28 at the time. He had traded his camera for farming, an operation most people could not even mention at the dinner table - maggot farming.

Not the most glamorous pivot, but Mugendi had a reason. He was not done yet. Mugendi, now 30, is a communications graduate of St Paul’s University and knows how to operate a camera.

And in less than two years, after learning from a YouTube video and a training at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE), he has built a maggot farming venture that feeds fish, trains farmers, supplies feed across multiple counties, and has taken root inside a children’s rehabilitation centre in Kajiado.

But he did not set out to farm maggots. He set out to make money from pigs. Growing up in Karigini village, Tharaka Nithi County, Mugendi had always been drawn to agriculture.

It was a pull he could not quite explain, even as his career in photography and videography took shape.

When the Covid-19 lockdowns hit the country, he began rearing pigs. But the economics quickly became brutal. “The feeds were the biggest problem,” he says. “Very expensive. And because of that, when it came time to sell, the pigs were always underweight. “I was losing money I could not afford to lose,” he noted.

The question that kept him up at night was simple: how do you make your own animal feed cheaply enough to actually turn a profit?

One evening, scrolling through YouTube, that quiet university that has educated more African entrepreneurs than many institutions care to admit, Mugendi found his answer.

Someone, somewhere, was farming maggots and turning them into feed. He watched and then searched for where he could learn to do it properly.

He found ICIPE in Nairobi, which runs training programmes on Black Soldier Fly larvae farming. In 2024, at 28 years old, he signed up, got trained, and came to Kona Baridi in Kajiado to begin.

The Black Soldier Fly is not glamorous. But it is remarkably efficient. Eggs hatch into neonates within three days.

Those neonates grow through their larval stages over approximately three weeks, fast enough to make the operation commercially viable, slow enough to require consistent attention.

Mugendi set up his operation in a rented commercial space and began the process. It was working. And then the rains came. “Everything was flooded.

All the maggots dead. I did not know what to do. “He was ready to walk away.

Then his phone rang. A farmer he had never met had heard about what Mugendi was doing and called to ask if he could learn from him. Reluctantly, Mugendi agreed. He trained the farmer. It worked. And something shifted. “When I saw it work for someone else, my morale came back,” he says. “I thought maybe I should not give up so easily.” That phone call did not just save the Mugendi project.

It pointed him toward something he had not anticipated: that the real value of what he was building might not just be the maggots themselves but the knowledge he was carrying. Not everyone was immediately convinced. Not even the people closest to him.

When Mugendi first told his family what he was doing, the reaction was immediate and unanimous. Maggots, in most people’s minds, belong in one place. And it is not a farming operation.

“They thought it was disgusting,” he says with a quiet laugh. “Even my family.

They associated maggots with pit latrines. Nobody wanted to hear about it. But something changed. The same people who wrinkled their noses, family included, came back. Curious, then interested, then wanting to learn.”

Back in Karigini village in Tharaka Nithi, Mugendi has trained five farmers, all between 40 and 60 years old, who are now running their own independent operations. A 30-year-old teaching his parents’ generation. In a sector where knowledge usually flows downward through age, that reversal says something important about what Mugendi has built and how well it works.

Reinvigorated, Mugendi began looking for a larger space somewhere he could scale the operation properly. What he found was not what he expected. Tania Rehabilitation Centre, a rescue facility for children with disabilities based at Kona Baridi in Kajiado.

It had space. It had four unused fishponds, each 50 by 100 feet, sitting idle. And it had a team open to an unconventional idea. “They opened doors for me,” Mugendi says. “We joined hands.”

The partnership that emerged is quietly remarkable. Mugendi brought his maggot farming operation to the centre’s grounds. Together, they restocked two of the four fishponds with 500 fingerlings each.

The fish is now fed in part by Mugendi’s larvae. The maggot feed has reduced the centre’s fish feed costs significantly. The frass fertilises the centre’s gardens. And Mugendi has found not just a space but a purpose beyond profit.

The process Mugendi runs is fast and efficient. Between five and ten tonnes of market waste, vegetable scraps, fruit peels, and food leftovers are collected monthly and used as substrate for the larvae to feed on.

Eggs hatch within three days. Larvae grow to harvestable size in about three weeks. Dried and processed, they become high-protein feed for chicken, fish, and pigs.

The frass, the larvae’s byproduct, is packaged separately and sold as organic fertiliser. Mugendi sells eggs, frass, and pupae, generating a monthly income that ranges between Sh80,000 and Sh150,000, depending on sales volumes modest by corporate standards, but built entirely from waste that would otherwise rot in market stalls.

Poultry farmers

The maggots feed the fish in the Tania Centre ponds, and supplement feeds for local pig and poultry farmers.

They are sold to farmers who cannot afford commercial feeds. “Maggot farming is a game changer. The price is affordable. You can support your farming without the huge expenses of commercial feed,” he says. 

What started as one man trying to solve a pig feed problem in 2024 has quietly become something larger.

Mugendi has now trained over 50 farmers across Kenya in Meru, Kiambu, Busia, Mombasa, Nyeri, and Kajiado.

Of those, 20 are now operating independently, running their own Black Soldier Fly operations in their home counties. In less than two years, one training from ICIPE and one phone call from a stranger have multiplied into 20 independent operations across the country. 

Mugendi says the biggest constraint is transport. Collecting market waste, the raw material that feeds his operation, requires a vehicle he does not yet have.

Without a pickup truck, the five to ten tonnes he currently sources monthly is the ceiling of what he can manage.

“If I had a vehicle, I could collect more waste, breed more maggots, supply more farmers,” he says.

“That one thing would change everything.”

Beyond logistics, he points to a policy gap that affects an entire generation of young Kenyan farmers trying to do smart, sustainable agriculture.

“The government has not put policies in place to support young farmers engaging in this kind of farming,” he says. “You have to find the capital, find the resources, find the space all on your own. And sometimes those resources are simply not there.”

Mugendi does not use the phrase “circular economy.” But what he is building is exactly that. Organic waste becomes larval feed. Larvae become protein for fish, chicken, and pigs. 

Frass becomes a fertiliser that restores soil without synthetic chemicals. Fish grow in ponds that are sitting idle. A rehabilitation centre for children with disabilities becomes a node in a sustainable food system. “Maggot farming is one of the climate change solutions,” he says.

“It conserves the environment,” he is right. Black Soldier Fly farming reduces organic waste, cuts reliance on energy-intensive commercial feeds, and generates organic fertiliser that supports soil health.

In a country contending with rising input costs, unpredictable rainfall, and degraded farmland, it is not a fringe idea. It is a practical, scalable response to multiple crises at once.

Mugendi did not wait for perfect conditions or government support. He found the gap and filled it. “Venture into smart farming. Solve problems. The resources may not all be there — but the need is real, and the opportunity is too.”