The world’s largest drone delivery network launched in Ghana

On April 24, the Ghanaian Government, in partnership with American company Zipline, launched in the city of Omenako, the world’s largest medical drone delivery service.

The new service will use drones to make on-demand, emergency deliveries of 148 different vaccines, blood products, and life-saving medications.

Already hundreds of drones have started delivering life-saving vaccines, blood and medicines to patients in Ghana. It’s a network that will serve 2,000 health centers and 12 million people, making as many as 600 flights a day. The drones fly autonomously and can carry up to 1.8 kilograms of cargo, GAVI said.

Millions of people across the world, in both developed and developing countries, die each year because they can’t get the medicine they need in time. With this new initiative in Ghana, medics have the opportunity to place orders by text message when supplies run dry. Drones then fly in from four distribution centres, and drop deliveries using tiny parachutes. Deliveries can usually arrive within 30 minutes.

Zipline, a company that designs and operates an autonomous system for delivering lifesaving medicine to remote areas, began its first operation in Africa, in Rwanda in 2016. The company has since made more than 13,000 deliveries. Zipline now delivers more than 65% of Rwanda’s blood supply outside of the capital, Kigali.

The project in Ghana is backed by the non-profits GAVI and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as several companies including UPS and Pfizer.

Sources: Drone Life; Fast Company

Sources: Fast Company; Africa news
https://www.africanews.com/2019/04/24/ghana-starts-largest-medical-delivery-scheme-using-drones/