Page 48 - World Airnews Magazine May Edition 2021

AFRICAN
DIGITAL

FIVE LESSONS FROM AFRICA

A staff member prepares a Zipline drone to deliver medical supplies in Omenako,
Ghana. Photographer: Ruth McDowall/AFP via Getty Images

• Making the economics of drone delivery work
The COVID-19 pandemic has made visible to the global Some of the biggest challenges identified are around the need to
community many of the health inequities that have long been evaluate the opportunity provided by drones at larger scale. Small
present. As we move through this crisis, it has become clear that pilot projects were a good way to learn initially, but we must move
the previous ways of doing things are no longer adequate. through the ‘valley of death’ between pilots and large deployments
This has led to innovation, such as the historic success of where the economics of drone delivery can make sense.
creating new vaccines in record time. Now attention is turning to The question is no longer whether the technology is ready,
how we can ensure equitable access to these types of essential but how to find sustainable business models for drone-enabled
health materials. healthcare provision.
Drones provide a potential avenue for ensuring that everyone, This is intimately connected to creating the right policy
no matter where they live, has access to high quality healthcare. environment and ecosystem for drones in Africa and beyond. The
Africa has been a global leader in the field of drones with needs of the current time are too urgent for us not to aggressively
the first national scale drone delivery programme launching in pursue how we can shape emerging technologies to meet the
Rwanda in 2016 and the world’s first drone delivery of a COVID needs of all people no matter where they live.
vaccine taking place in Ghana during March of this year. African • Routine to emergency infrastructure
countries are showing the rest of the world the social and A key lesson from the African experience is that drones can best be
economic value that can be provided by this technology. used as emergency infrastructure when they are already serving
Despite these successes, there remain many unanswered as routine infrastructure. In 2020, Zipline delivered over 1 million
questions about how to design a successful drone programme, doses of non-COVID vaccines, stepping up its delivery cadence
where the technology can be best applied, and how to measure significantly in response to limitations in healthcare access caused
the results. by pandemic restrictions.
The World Economic Forum has partnered with Deloitte Ghana then turned to Zipline in March 2021 to begin distribution
to develop a report that offers a framework for evaluating of COVID-19 vaccines to rural and ex-urban healthcare facilities.
these issues that are essential for taking full advantage of this Within 3 days, Zipline had distributed its entire initial allocation
technological revolution. of 11,000 doses of vaccine, representing 13% of Ghana’s total
The paper focuses on the African context, but many of the vaccines administered in that period.
lessons are universally applicable. • Sharing the data around drone use

World Airnews | May Extra 2021
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