Why the Future of African Infrastructure Might Be Alive

Why I Study Insects, and How They Changed the Way I See Infrastructure?

When I tell people I study insects, there is usually a pause. Not of disbelief , but curiosity. The kind that comes with a quiet question: why insects?
Why not pipes, treatment plants, or the kinds of infrastructure most engineers are trained to build? The short answer is that I did not set out to study insects. I set out to understand how waste systems fail, and how they might work better.

Where the question started

My training was in water and waste management. Like many engineers, I learned how to design systems that assume consistency: steady flows, predictable loads, controlled environments.

Those assumptions hold in some places. In many African contexts, they do not.

Waste streams are variable. Organic loads fluctuate. Infrastructure is often stretched beyond what it was designed for. What interested me was not the failure itself, but its pattern, why the same types of systems struggled repeatedly, across different settings.

That question stayed with me.

Why insects entered the picture

Insects were not an obvious answer. They entered the picture through a simple observation: much of what we struggle to manage in waste systems is organic, and much of nature is very good at processing organic material. Black soldier fly larvae, in particular, kept appearing in the literature and in practice, not as a silver bullet, but as a biological system with unusual properties. They grow quickly, tolerate variable feed, and convert organic matter into measurable outputs.

What interested me was not novelty. It was suitability.

Studying what fits, not what is fashionable

Insects are not elegant in the conventional engineering sense. They are living systems. They behave differently from tanks and pipes. They do not offer the same sense of control.

But they fit the problem in front of us. They operate well on mixed organic waste. They do not require highly refined inputs. They function in warm climates without energy-intensive controls. They can be localised. These are not abstract advantages. They are practical ones. Studying insects forced me to think differently about what “infrastructure” can look like, and who it is designed for.

Why this is still engineering

Working with insects is sometimes seen as stepping away from engineering. For me, it has meant the opposite. Biological systems still require careful design. They still need mass balances, performance limits, and clear assumptions. They still need to be integrated into broader treatment trains.

The difference is that the system itself is alive. That changes how you model it. It changes how you operate it. It changes how you think about failure.

What keeps me here

I continue to study insects not because they are unconventional, but because they raise better questions. They force us to ask whether our systems are designed for their environments, or in spite of them. They challenge the idea that progress must always look harder, larger, or more complex. Most importantly, they sit at the intersection of waste, biology, and people, where technical decisions have visible social and environmental consequences.

That is the kind of work I want to do.

A deliberate choice

Choosing to work with insects was not a rejection of conventional infrastructure. It was a decision to follow the problem where it led. Sometimes, the most useful systems are not the ones we are trained to build first,  but the ones we learn to take seriously later.

Insects were not my starting point. They became my focus because they made sense.