Our Story
Established in 2019 and incorporated in 2023, Beetle Edge Limited started as a graduate mentoring clinic to ensure mentees understood research and addressed relevant kwowledge gaps. From this position it recognized the opportunity to transfer science from shelves of research institutions to practises that impact society. Beetle Edge now bridges science and practice through bringing innovations to scale and training scaling professionals.
Areas of work:
Health through food and nutrition, life tailored education and skilling, inclusive employability, climate adaptability and resilient communities
Vision:
To roll science for the well-being of people and things.
Mission:
Growing people who move innovations for widespread social impact.
Core values:
Inform, Connect, Inspire
SPICE Africa program
Beetle Edge, through its, “Scaling for public impacts and communal end-use” i(SPICE) in Africa program aims to provide fresh agricultural and nutritional graduates an opportunity to apply their research, conserve knowledge and gain meaningful experience in the field while contributing to economic development.
We work with African graduates who are willing to volunteer their time to advance the science and practice of scaling for public impacts. Our flagship sector under SPICE is quail commercialization. Quails are versatile and virgin in Africa and involve a simple-short cycle that can offer multiple learning opportunities. Once associate researchers (graduates) master scaling concepts as they scale quail rearing, it would be easy to expand and replicate their experiences into scaling other projects and sectors. In addition quails are a fit-for-the-purpose of advancing agriculture for health and nutrition. In addition, regular consumption of animal products, including eggs, milk and meat is a proven way for attaining food security. For children, consistent consumption ensures normal growth and attainment of full cognitive potential needed for them to excel intellectually when they enter adulthood.
Quails eggs are particularly important because their supply can be consistently guaranteed, over a long time with limited initial capital and within a short time. Quail meat is white meat and its small size is proportionately fit for packing in processed food industry, the feathers serve as pressure absorbents in cushion industry whereas the droppings are proven feeds for other animals, including chicken. Schools offer an opportunity for ensuring food security because they are high population centers for children, where they stay for nine months every year. In many ways, quail egg consumption by children can be accelerated by targeting schools as units of productions. Improved diets of pre-primary, primary and post-primary learners through routine incorporation of high value animal foods can give children a good start in their life. Animal source foods such as quail eggs can reverse nutritional stunting as well as maintain a balanced access to natural micronutrients throughout learners’ academic trajectories.
Putting sustainability first, quail keeping is a low-cost business that can be adapted for education excellence, meaning that costs can be absorbed within schools’ operational expenses. Moreover, schools serve as protected niches and learning grounds from which the less experimental communities of farmers can be inspired to also rear quails for income.
An ideal ecosystem for accelerated quail production for Africa through schools will require resources and a network of supportive agricultural and nutrition scaling practitioners. We expect the implementation ecosystem to absorb a reasonable number of agricultural and nutritional graduates serving as advisers to a nest of nearby schools where educators in schools are also trained as scaling professionals for social impacts. The vision is to realize the health of children and the opportunities to enhance the capacities of core supportive teams in scaling agricultural innovations for health and nutrition through increased use of livestock to reduce hidden hunger.
We envision a SPICE Africa system where 10 to 20 schools constitute the “unit of analysis” that is made up of the targeted learners, and a team of adaptive scaling professionals including a section of relevant educators, a nutritionist and an agriculturalist. This will involve developing and delivering open access e-courses and manuals on quail farming for accelerated consumption of adequate amounts of quail eggs and for expanding into new value chains. The supply of quails and rearing inputs will be through partnership with the private sector whereas knowledge will be enhanced through activating research partnerships that will pursue research in grey areas, including about developing adapted breeds and more profitable sustainable feeding regimes and value chains.
We shall foster partnerships to harness the strengths of development, research and end-user delivery partners, including the private sector. We shall aim to test two hypotheses that is: 1) increased access to nutritious foods for children, can be achieved at scale by strengthening production and consumption of quail products in schools and; 2) Increased scaling of agriculture for health and nutrition can be achieved at scale through strengthening the knowledge of young men and women in the science and practice of scaling. Lessons generated in this program will give the proof of concept for broader use in regional and global scaling of social programs.
We will develop a) farmers’ handbook on quail farming and; 2) the contents for e-courses intended to: a) upgrade/introduce change agents to core knowledge about quails and; b) the core knowledge needed to advance the science and practice of scaling of quails. We shall deliver through partnerships and collaboration with the governments, non-governmental organizations and private sector. The motivation is to strengthen the ecosystems in which social innovations like quails are scaled. The specific over‐arching goal is to increase the production of quails to inclusively increase availability and accessibility of eggs to children of rich and poor backgrounds, in doing so, reduce nutritional insecurity and to spring human layer of accredited scaling professionals to support more complex scaling agendas.
Strengthen reference resources and human capacities to enable public and private sector actors to identify as well as exploit appropriate research and development gaps for expanding quail production and marketing systems that can provide equitable and inclusive benefits to men and women.
Establish an ecosystem to support sustainable production and marketing of quails, including facilitating the undertaking of research and learning and its communication for wider impact
Increase access to and consumption of quail products to enhance food and nutrition security for the poor, women, and children.
Enable inclusive participation and gender equitable production, marketing, and consumption of quail eggs through enhancing the capacities of women and youth in production and enhancing practices, knowledge, and innovations, with attention focused on addressing any engendered scaling gaps.
Secure supply of productive assets for sustained quail production and collect, upgrade, conserve and exchange quail biodiversity or genetic resource, and maintain it as public good that will provide genetic diversity for continued expansion and adaptation of quails on the continent and its sub-regions.
It is anticipated that the research products such as adapted breeds or feeding regime and formula and lessons generated will be applicable and, will adequately be promoted for wider use in Africa through the network of scaling professionals. Thus, while direct impacts are anticipated to benefit tens or hundreds of children in targeted schools, broader regional impacts can reach millions. SPICE Africa targets the egg, feather, meat as well as the use of quail dropping to close the production nutrition gap through developing them into ‘next-animal’s’ feeds before being used as manure. These will result in significant pathways for improving the livelihoods of tens of thousands of households and a larger number of consumers will enjoy increased access to cost-effective animal source foods.
Beetle Edge eLearning