Jovia Kisaakye

What do you do with spoiled milk? Most people pour it away. Jovia Kisaakye turns it into mosquito-repellent lotion. What do you do with rotting food waste? Most people bag it for the dump. Jovia runs it through black soldier fly colonies and out the other side as organic fertilizer and high-protein animal feed. The circular economy is not a framework she learned and applied, it is simply how she thinks. At Ecobed Biotech, waste is the raw material, and the question is never whether something can be used again, but how.

Six months after winning the WAYA Rising Star category award, that thinking had produced a business operating on several fronts at once, and doing so honestly, including about the parts that were hard.

The team had shrunk from twenty to ten. Jovia did not obscure this. Scaling a business with limited capital while simultaneously expanding into new products, new districts, and new technology is a pressure test, and headcount is often the first thing that bends. What held firm was the direction of travel. Revenue had grown by 35%. USD 28,000 in new investment had come in from local and international partners. The prize money had been divided deliberately, production equipment, packaging and branding, community outreach, and internal capacity building in roughly equal measure, each allocation targeting a different layer of the business she was constructing.

The NutriGrab app was the period’s most significant milestone. After three months of Google Play Store verification and testing, it launched, a platform designed to connect farmers to fair markets, give them access to equipment through rent or installment arrangements, and redistribute soon-to-expire food from supermarkets to low-income households at half price or free. Fifteen farmers were in the pilot. The infrastructure the app was trying to build, reliable market access, affordable equipment, reduced food waste, was infrastructure that Uganda’s agricultural system had not yet reliably provided. That was precisely the point.

On the ground, a five-day outreach across six districts trained farmers on producing organic fertilizer from their own farm waste. Three community-managed black soldier fly farms were set up with local leaders, now actively supporting over 400 farmers. A food waste collection drive gave households mosquito-repellent skincare products in return for their organic waste, a transaction that made environmental responsibility immediately practical rather than aspirational.

Beyond Uganda, Jovia had moved through a remarkable sequence of platforms in the six months since winning. The Vital Voices Global Fellowship. The One Young World Summit in Montreal, where she spoke. The Youth Business International Bootcamp in London. The Moonshot Awards, where she was named a changemaker. The Tony Elumelu Entrepreneurship award. A seat on the African Union Youth Reference Committee, where she now champions youth-led climate action and gender equality. The recognition was coming fast, and she was using each platform to extend Ecobed’s network rather than simply collect the credential.

A leaner team, a live app, six districts reached, three community farms established, and a founder who seemed constitutionally incapable of seeing a waste stream without imagining what it could become. Six months in, that was the Ecobed story, unfinished, under pressure, and moving forward.