Diana Orembe, Founder, NovFeed - Tanzania

Jun 03, 2026

The logic of a biological lens

Diana Orembe was raised in Northern Tanzania, where she watched her family’s aquaculture venture struggle under the compounding financial weight of imported fish feed. In a region where aquaculture holds the key to nutritional sovereignty, she observed a crippling paradox: farmers were forced to exhaust their margins on wild-caught fishmeal and soybean concentrates, while municipal markets simultaneously overflowed with thousands of tons of rotting organic waste. To the untrained eye, these were separate administrative crises. To Diana, a microbiologist training at the University of Dar es Salaam, they represented a singular, systemic breakdown. Rather than viewing waste as an environmental liability, she looked through a biological lens and saw an unmined source of complex nutrition waiting to be unlocked.

The architecture of NovFeed

Her response to this systemic inefficiency was the founding of NovFeed in 2020, an industrial biotechnology enterprise that has fundamentally redefined the inputs of African food security. NovFeed is not a standard feed mill; it is a high-yield circular economy engine that operates at the intersection of biochemical engineering and climate action. Under Diana’s executive leadership, the Dar es Salaam-based venture intercepts organic marketplace waste and processes it through a sophisticated, multi-stage fermentation matrix. By mastering the metabolic pathways of specific micro-organisms, NovFeed converts urban food waste into an ultra-high-grade protein source that matches or exceeds the nutritional performance of traditional commercial feeds.

Engineering a supply chain escape

The core breakthrough of NovFeed is how it completely bypasses the broken supply chains of traditional aquaculture. Usually, making fish feed requires harvesting massive amounts of wild ocean fish like sardines and anchovies, a practice that is both environmentally destructive and expensive. NovFeed has engineered a way out of this trap. Using a proprietary, all-natural bioprocess, they create a clean protein ingredient that boasts a protein content of over 70% (outperforming standard soy alternatives) in just 72 hours. By freeing feed production from unpredictable global markets and depleted oceans, Diana has delivered a stable, localised and climate-resilient alternative for Africa’s agricultural sector.

Commercial diplomacy and grassroots economics

Translating laboratory innovation into market dominance requires a sophisticated mastery of commercial diplomacy. Diana has structured NovFeed to solve a severe bottom-line crisis for smallholder farmers, delivering a premium product at a 30% cost reduction compared to traditional imports, while concurrently manufacturing highly concentrated organic fertilisers as a secondary, zero-waste revenue stream. This economic architecture has eliminated operational friction throughout the value chain, enabling small-scale fish farmers to accelerate their harvest cycles while expanding their margins. Her capacity to align deep technical R&D with investor-grade scalability has captured global institutional validation, securing the $1 million grand prize at the Milken-Motsepe Prize in Agritech and the top spot at the Africa’s Business Heroes competition.

A blueprint for sovereign industrial science

Today, Diana Orembe stands as a pioneer of African industrial science, offering a definitive blueprint for how domestic biotechnology can drive continental self-reliance. NovFeed’s operations currently divert thousands of tons of waste from urban landfills, transforming an environmental hazard into a catalyst for food security. Reflecting on this journey and the structural shift required across the continent, Diana noted during her acceptance speech at the Milken-Motsepe Innovation Prize ceremony, “We are not just producing feed, we are proving that Africa has the scientific capacity to heal its own ecosystems and feed its own people using the resources we already have.” For regional policymakers, her success is a mandate to invest heavily in local scientific infrastructure. For the African entrepreneur, it is a powerful reminder that our greatest commercial opportunities are often hidden within our most unglamorous problems. When deep academic discipline is applied to local realities, you don’t just build a venture, you construct the sovereign future for the entire African ecosystem.