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The rise in drone adoption in Nigeria over the past year is reflecting a trend of accelerating interest in multiple sectors across Africa.
US drone maker Zipline and the Nigerian government announced a deal last week at the UN General Assembly that will see the company assume a central role in moving medical products including blood, medicines, and vaccines around the country. The partnership will “raise the quality of healthcare services available to all Nigerians,” Nigeria’s Health Minister Ali Pate said in a statement.
The deal comes two years after Zipline started a pilot in Nigeria’s northwestern state of Kaduna. A key part of the project is raising money to set up and staff multiple hubs with facilities for drone operations, including warehouses, and take-off and landing areas. Each hub will serve communities within a 38,000 sq km radius, Caitlin Burton, Zipline’s Senior Vice President for partnerships, told Semafor Africa. Gavi, the vaccine alliance, and the Elton John AIDS Foundation, have signed up as seed funders. Burton estimated the project would need to raise “millions of dollars.”
It is the latest mark in a nascent sector. In April, Terrahaptix, a startup in Nigeria’s capital Abuja, opened a 15,000 sq ft factory to begin producing drones. It is in the process of setting up a second plant in another West African country.
Nathan Nwachukwu, one of Terrahaptix’s two co-founders who are both aged 21, said the startup’s drones and operating software are mostly made in-house and that they have banked “over $1 million in revenue” from commercial customers in the oil, mining and agriculture industries in Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya. The companies that buy their drones use them mainly as part of their security hardware, he said.
“The only things we do not build are the sensors and cameras,” Nwachukwu told Semafor Africa. The startup pulled back from an initial focus on making military drones to avoid connections with violent conflicts, he said.
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Military use is arguably the most common use case for drones in Africa today. Last December, the Nigerian Navy added 12 drones by London-based engineering company Comstrac, to a fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles that the country has been growing in the past two decades.
The drones are deployed for surveillance of national assets, like pipelines, but also for combat operations particularly against militant insurgencies in the north. It mirrors similar use across Africa: drones from China, Iran, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates are influencing the intensity of warfare in a number of countries, including Ethiopia and Sudan.
On the commercial side, Zipline has broken through as one of the largest players in Africa. It has grown from one country to another by targeting national-scale partnerships with governments.
Valued by Silicon Valley at $4 billion, it began using drones for on-demand delivery of medical products in Rwanda in 2014 and has since extended its presence to Ghana, Kenya, and Côte d’Ivoire. Two years ago, it started delivering non-medical products for online retailer Jumia in Ghana.
Alexander’s view
By turning to drones, Nigeria joins other African governments leaping over on-the-ground problems in delivering healthcare.
Advocates of using drones as vehicles for healthcare say it boosts efficiency in reaching consumers in difficult terrains and offering lifesaving care to vulnerable populations. “The big gaps that drones will help solve in a Nigerian context are as infrastructure stop-gaps or supplements where they can bypass poor road networks especially in rural areas,” Ikemesit Effiong, a partner at Lagos-based consultancy SBM Intelligence, tells me.
Zipline’s value in particular would be in reducing delivery times of medical products to areas with limited cold storage technology “especially in times of national emergencies such as during floods or a security incident,” he said.
One of its targets in Nigeria is reducing maternal mortality, which at 1,047 deaths per 100,000 births is the third highest in the world — only Chad and South Sudan are worse, according to the World Health Organization. The company cites a paper, co-authored by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, that showed a 51% drop in excessive bleeding after childbirth for women in Rwanda, as evidence of its capacity to effect change.
But mainstream adoption of drones — to the scale that makes it integral to e-commerce companies — requires well-thought out regulations that take air traffic management, data privacy and public education into account. Effiong observes that greater drone use in Nigeria could increase the number of incidents where air traffic is hindered by bird strikes “or cattle wandering into provincial air fields.”
“There is a public trust question as drones are still perceived in some quarters as invasive or threatening,” he says.
Room for Disagreement
The low profit margins on using drones for commercial deliveries in Nigeria make it a non-viable logistics option for healthcare businesses, argues tech consultant Vivian Nwakah. She founded Medsaf, a company that tried to be a one-stop shop delivering medicines to hospitals and pharmacies mainly in Lagos and Abuja.
“We found that a commercial drone strategy needs to be subsidized by the government or some entity willing to take on the overhead costs,” Nwakah told Semafor Africa. And space constraints that make it difficult to host take-off and landing facilities in urban areas like Lagos limit the market opportunity. “If the ideal space to operate a drone service is in a rural area, how much can those people pay?”
The View From South Africa
Aerobotics, a startup in Cape Town, has had success in using drones for agriculture. Its main service is using drones to collect data on the quality of fruits to predict yield for large scale farmers.
The US is now the company’s biggest market, but it retains sizable operations in South Africa: a recent project involves using drones to drop wasps on a 130,000-hectare wine estate in order to keep it free of viruses and pesticides.
Notable
- Turkey’s military drone sales to Africa is a pillar of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s diplomatic play for influence, Le Monde reported earlier this year. “It is not looking for an immediate return on investment but sees it as part of a very long-term political project,” an analyst told the French paper.