At the New Tafo Government Hospital in Ghana’s Eastern Region, community health nurse Gladys Dede Tetteh has run out of yellow fever vaccines. There is a long line of anxious mothers fanning themselves and their babies as they wait on benches. An order has been placed for more vaccines which would usually take two hours on a good day (sometimes more) for it to be delivered by road from the central medical stores. But 21 minutes later, a drone did the job—dropping off a parachuted box containing vaccines from a height of about 80 meters to a small lawn quadrangle inside the hospital as a group of journalists watch on. The drone doesn’t stop as it makes a delivery and returns to base. A junior nurse picked the box up and the vaccination for newborns is back on. Tafo hospital is the first in Ghana signed up to the government’s new medical drone delivery program which hopes to use unmanned aerial vehicles to deliver medical products to hard to reach communities in a timely manner. Zipline A child at New Tafo Hospital being given a yellow fever vaccine shot after a drone delivery The Ghana Health Service is working with Zipline, the drone company best known for starting blood delivery services in Rwanda. Ghana’s health policymakers hope faster drop-offs will improve its health outcomes including reducing its maternal and infant mortality rates. According to the World Health Organization, “severe bleeding during delivery or after childbirth is the commonest cause of maternal mortality and contributes to around 34% of maternal deaths in Africa.” The timely access to safe blood could save many lives. The medical drone program was officially launched on Wednesday Apr. 24 by Ghana’s vice president Mahamudu Bawumia, who first made the announcement a year ago. The launch at Zipline’s Omenako center in Ghana (70 kilometers north of the capital, Accra) is the first of four centers it hopes to complete by the end of 2019. The drones will be able to travel to 500 health facilities within an 80-kilometer-range from the Omenako center which is stocked with emergency medicines, vaccines, blood and blood products. The delivery program is also hoped will help reduce the incidence of wastage of medical products, a result of overstocking at hospitals. The company is targeting the “last mile delivery” challenge which many logistics operators face in African cities and rural area where road networks are either underdeveloped or poorly maintained. Zipline is describing the Ghana operation as the world’s largest drone delivery service. Zipline A map of Ghana showing Zipline’s four operation centers Ghana will become the base for training future Zipline flight operators as it hopes to expand to more countries in the coming years. There have been expressions of interest in a similar service from officials in Senegal and some states in Nigeria. Headquartered in San Francisco, Zipline, a for-profit company, was founded in 2014 and started operations in Rwanda in 2016 delivering blood and blood products during emergencies. It began delivering more health products including routine vaccines this year. Zipline claims it would be able to cover 2,000 health facilities that serve 12 million Ghanaians (of a population of just under 30 million)—from small community clinics and vaccination centers to larger general hospitals like Tafo – when all its four local centers become operational. The company has been contracted by the government of Ghana to make 600 deliveries a day (150 deliveries from each center) for four years and they will be paid per successful delivery. It would cost Ghana $12.5 million during the period. Critics have argued the government should have rather spent the money on more important and simpler things the health sector really needs such as the critical shortage of hospital beds, gloves, consistent supply of water and the improvement of hospital buildings. And yet the challenge for Ghana and indeed many other African governments is the cost and potential speed of using drone delivery to supplement or aid health services is significantly more effective in the short to medium term when compared with the required scale of investment and time for both logistics and healthcare infrastructure. This is why for nurses like Gladys Tetteh, the use of drones are very much a case of what’s not to like? “It makes us work faster and the mothers will not stay too long here trying to vaccinate their children.” Sign up to the Quartz Africa Weekly Brief here for news and analysis on African business, tech and innovation in your inbox<doc-sep>Today, Zipline the San Francisco based drone manufacturer and the logistical services company, launched a program in Ghana to deliver medical supplies by drone. In partnership with the government of the West African country, Zipline will fly 30 drones from four distribution centers to deliver medical supplies, such as vaccines, blood, and medication to 2,000 healthcare facilities across the country on a daily basis. Zipline also confirmed that it is looking to expand their services to other countries and to take their delivery service by drone from testing-phase to live-deliveries in the U.S., sometime this summer. Zipline starts deliveries of medical supplies by drone in Ghana Zipline CEO Keller Rinaudo told TechCrunch in a call that: “We’ll do 600 flights a day…and serve 12 million people. This is going to be the largest drone delivery network on the planet.” In a statement Ghana’s President Nana Akufo-Addo said: “No one in Ghana should die because they can’t access the medicine they need in an emergency. That’s why Ghana is launching the world’s largest drone delivery service… A major step towards giving everyone in this country universal access to lifesaving medicine.” Zipline was founded in 2014 and the company designs and manufactures its own drones as well as the launch and landing systems and logistical software. The company first started testing its delivery by drone service in partnership with the government of Rwanda. This service went officially life in 2016, claiming to be the first national large-scale drone delivery program in the world. The company has since successfully made thousands of flights delivering blood samples and medication across the country. Currently, Zipline is testing its beyond-line-of-sight drone delivery services in the US as part of the Department of Transportation’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration Pilot Program in North Carolina. Rinaudo said that the company is looking to expand its operations beyond Rwanda, Ghana and the US. Without disclosing any specifics he announced that: “We’ll be launching in several additional countries, not all of which are in Africa.” Apart from delivering blood samples and medication, the company is also considering to deliver otter products by drones. In addition to launching its drone delivery service in Ghana today, a spokesperson for Zipline also confirmed that the company is looking to start live-delivery of medical supplies in the US sometime this summer. Maybe Zipline will become the second company after Google’s Wing Aviation to start commercial drone deliveries in the US. Stay in touch! If you’d like to stay up to date with all the latest drone news, scoops, rumors and reviews, then follow us on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram or sign up for our daily email newsletter, that goes out every weekday at 6 pm. Buy your next drone through directly from manufacturers, such as DJI, Parrot, Yuneec or retailers like Amazon, B&H, BestBuy or eBay. By using our links, we will make a small commission, but it will not cost you anything extra. Thank you for helping DroneDJ grow! Photo: courtesy of Zipline. Subscribe to DroneDJ on YouTube for exclusive videos<doc-sep>A child at New Tafo Government Hospital in Ghana is being given the yellow fever vaccine, delivered by a Zipline drone. Zipline International On Wednesday, Zipline International — the health-tech drone-delivery company that launched its service in Rwanda just three years ago — announced it has officially expanded its operations to Ghana, making it the world's largest autonomous medical drone delivery service. Over the last six months Zipline has expanded from one distribution company in Rwanda delivering blood to 21 hospitals to operating six distribution centers in two countries, delivering more than 170 different vaccines, blood products and medications to 2,500 health facilities. Its reach now serves nearly 22 million people. Dedicated to providing every human on Earth with instant access to vital medical supplies, Zipline employs aerospace veterans from SpaceX, Google, Boeing and NASA to design and operate its autonomous systems, which can deliver a package within 30 minutes after a health-care worker places an order by text. Zipline's drones take off and land from its distribution centers. "So much of the conversation these days is about this growing idea that tech is not benefiting a vast majority of people," said Zipline CEO Keller Rinaudo. "We really want to show that the right technology company with the right mission can help every person on the planet." Access to vital health products worldwide has historically hampered the difficulty of supplying medicine from central storage to remotely located patients when and where they need it. In the U.S., this problem requires health systems to tolerate high medicine waste, expensive emergency trips and sub-optimal care strategies. In far too many other areas, the same problem means that people in need of lifesaving care do not get the medicine they need to survive. More from CNBC Disruptor 50: How Pinterest makes money: By filling your feed with promoted pins 'Game of Thrones' fans, this app teaches you how to speak in High Valyrian Ahead of IPO buzz, Robinhood introduces new premium trading features Increasing their reach 100-fold California-based Zipline International plans to change that. According to Zipline, the expansion of its operations in both Ghana and Rwanda will increase the number of health facilities the company serves 100-fold. Since the company launched in Rwanda in 2016, delivering blood to remote hospitals, Zipline's drones have flown more than 1 million km across Rwanda and has made over 13,000 deliveries there, a third of which have been emergencies. Zipline now delivers more than 65% of Rwanda's blood supply outside Kigali, the nation's capital, and through a partnership with the Rwandan government, it now has clearance to deliver vaccines and other essential medical supplies. In December 2018 Zipline opened a second distribution center there. In Ghana, the company will make on-demand, emergency deliveries of 148 different vaccines, blood products and medications and will operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week from four distribution centers. Each center will be equipped with 30 drones and deliver to 2,000 health facilities, serving 12 million people across the country. Each Zipline distribution center has the capacity to make up to 500 flights each day. Zipline, a drone company valued at over $1 billion and best-known for blood and vaccine deliveries in Africa, has a new deal in the U.S. with Walmart that will take it beyond its roots in the life-saving medical supply market. Zipline International "In the last year, we completed roughly 4,000 lifesaving emergency deliveries, but what we're launching in Ghana is about 20 times the scale of that," said Zipline's Rinaudo, who adds that the company currently serves 25 facilities in Rwanda and is on track to serve nearly 2,000 facilities in Ghana by the end of the year. "The exciting thing about this is that the technology has finally scaled to a point where we can talk about a country achieving universal access to health care," he said. "The thing that people have consistently underestimated about Zipline, and that which is most special about the company, is that we have been able to hire fully local teams — brilliant flight engineers and flight operators and fulfillment operators — who have been able to do what some of the richest technology companies in the world have set out to do and failed." The 'vibranium' of health care? Rinaudo likens Zipline's mission to the movie Black Panther. "Black Panther is a movie about a radical, technologically advanced African nation hiding in plain sight; And the whole concept behind that movie was meant to inspire a whole bunch of African-American kids, and kids growing up in developing countries, with regard to how they see the world in terms of technology — how they see these fictional superheroes that they can look up to," he said. "The reality is, that is happening right now in the real world… in Rwanda, and now in Ghana. There are now autonomous aircraft crisscrossing the skies, making deliveries and saving people's lives, and most people in the U.S. don't even know that that's technologically possible… let alone happening at national scale." Scaling way ahead of the tech giants<doc-sep>
Zipline, the San Francisco-based UAV manufacturer and logistics services provider, has launched a program in Ghana today for drone delivery of medical supplies. Working with the Ghanaian government, Zipline will operate 30 drones out of four distribution centers to distribute vaccines, blood and life-saving medications to 2,000 health facilities across the West African nation daily. “We’ll do 600 flights a day…and serve 12 million people. This is going to be the largest drone delivery network on the planet,” Zipline CEO Keller Rinaudo told TechCrunch on a call from Accra. “No one in Ghana should die because they can’t access the medicine they need in an emergency,” Ghana’s President Nana Akufo-Addo said in a statement. “That’s why Ghana is launching the world’s largest drone delivery service…a major step towards giving everyone in this country universal access to lifesaving medicine.” The Ghana program adds a second country to Zipline’s live operations. Zipline got off the ground in Rwanda and has leveraged its experience in East Africa to begin testing medical delivery services in the United States. Zipline has been making moves in Africa since at least 2016 — after it raised capital and solidified its mission to carve out a global revenue-generating business around UAV delivery of critical medical supplies. To date, the startup has raised $41 million from investors, including Sequoia Capital, Google Ventures, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang and Subtraction Capital. Founded in 2014, Zipline designs and manufactures its own UAVs, launch and landing systems and logistics software. After a testing period in coordination with the government of Rwanda, Zipline went live in the East African country in 2016, claiming the first national drone-delivery program at scale in the world. Through its nonprofit foundation, the logistics giant UPS came in to partner with Zipline on the Rwanda program, and that support continues. “They’re providing funding to build a lot of the infrastructure required, they are an adviser to us and they provide some logistical support in moving equipment,” Rinaudo said of Zipline’s collaboration with the UPS Foundation. Zipline has also received grants and support from The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Pfizer. Zipline then carried its experience in Africa to the U.S. In May 2018 the company was accepted into the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration Pilot Program (UAS IPP). Out of 149 applicants, the Africa-focused startup was one of 10 selected to participate in a drone pilot in the U.S. — and started testing beyond visual line of sight medical delivery services in North Carolina. “Healthcare logistics is a $70 billion global industry, and it’s still only serving a golden billion on the planet,” says Rinaudo. “The economics of our business is pretty simple. We’re using small, electric, fully autonomous vehicles…these kinds of systems are much more efficient than the analog way of delivering things.” Zipline is eyeing additional countries for delivery operations beyond Ghana, Rwanda and its pilot operations in the U.S. “We’ll be launching in several additional countries, not all of which are in Africa,” said Rinaudo, though he declined to disclose specifics. Zipline is well aware that its drone logistics systems have applications beyond medical supply chain services and Rinaudo confirmed moving cargo other than medical supplies is something Zipline has considered. If the company moves toward other commercial applications, it could leverage its programs and relationships in Africa. The continent has become a testbed for commercial drone delivery and regulatory structures. Over the last two years South Africa passed commercial drone legislation to train and license pilots, and Malawi opened a Drone Test Corridor to African and global partners. Over the same period, Kenya, Ghana and Tanzania have issued or updated drone regulatory guidelines and announced future UAV initiatives. The government of Tanzania launched a medical drone delivery program in 2018, with DHL as one of the main partners. In addition to its launch today in Ghana, Zipline plans to move from pilot-phase to live-delivery of medical supplies in the U.S. sometime this summer, a company spokesperson confirmed.