“Oh, they sing! I love their sounds. I love being in a room full of crickets,” enthuses Esnath Divasoni, her eyes sparkling behind her large glasses. Wearing a blue and green dress and black jacket with her hair tied back, she smiles over the Zoom call. “I love what I am doing and why I am doing it,” she says.
The 33-year-old mother-of-one is an edible-insect farmer in rural East Zimbabwe. While people in her village and beyond have been eating insects and worms foraged in the forest or collected during crop harvest for generations, the young entrepreneur has found a way to breed them all year long and in quantities large enough to feed her community and help mitigate the effect of climate change.
A family of four or five people needs about 100g to 200g of insects for a nutritious meal. They are usually served with sadza, a staple dish made out of fine maize, which is rather bland, so the crispy, salty crickets add flavour.
Divasoni now has 20 tubs producing about 1,000 crickets each or about 1kg of high-quality protein every five to eight weeks. She says that producing the same quantity of chicken meat would require twice as much feed, four times more space and 10 times more water.
“Insects are a climate-smart way to produce proteins. They are the proteins of the future,” she says. Her plan is to create a large network of edible-insect farmers first across the community, then further afield.
She has already trained 15 women in her community and each has started to train an additional four women, so they can all feed their families and generate an income. “I am not just doing this for myself, to make a profit, but for other women as well, because fighting malnutrition is not a single person’s journey.”
‘The kids love the meal’
It is too early to assess the dietary and financial effect of edible insects on the community, as the women have just started growing them and their output is still limited. But many say they are grateful to have learned a new way to feed their families. “This is a welcome intervention,” says Judith, a 65-year-old who looks after four of her primary school-aged grandchildren. “We had lost all our chickens to a disease outbreak. But now, we have a source of animal protein and the kids love the meal with crickets.”
Divasoni believes that her model is replicable in other regions of the country and across Africa. There are already many cricket farmers in Kenya, she says, and the country’s Jaramogi Oginga Odinga University of Science and Technology in Bondo has an entire department dedicated to insect production and research for both human and animal consumption, funded by the World Bank.
She sees her edible insect farming and training as complementing her leadership role with CAMFED Agriculture Guides, showing women and young people how to improve the productivity and sustainability of their farms through climate-smart methods of soil conservation, irrigation, fertilisation, pest management and agroforestry.
“I am working with my community to mitigate the effects of things that have happened many generations from us and in many cases in places far away from us. With the little, but mighty things we are doing, we are able to reduce the impact of climate change in our own lives and build resilience for future generations,” she says.