Tanzania will soon be seeing drones flitting across its sky to deliver medicines to health facilities in locations across the East African country.
The Tanzania Ministry of Health and the country’s Medical Stores Department are working hand-in-hand with Zipline, a large logistics company in the USA, to launch what is reportedly going to be the largest drone service in the world, ABC News reports. The projects aims to provide the country with access to critical medical supplies.
In a statement on Thursday, Zipline said that Tanzania will begin using drones in the first quarter of 2018 to complete up to 2,000 deliveries daily to over 1,000 health facilities. Laurean Bwanakunu, director general of Tanzania’s national medical stores, said that the drones will be very important in times of bad weather, unexpected demand, or small but crucial orders.
Keller Rinaudo, co-founder and chief executive of Zipline, said in an interview that there will be four distribution centers to open in Tanzania in the next four years. Aside from distributing blood, the drone delivery service will likewise move emergency vaccines, HIV medicines, anti-malaria drugs and other necessary supploies.
Rinaudo said,
That’s the real goal, delivering all of these products. It’s been a problem for over a hundred years, but it’s a problem that global health experts have been trying to solve for the past 50 years.
Zipline has been running a similar drone delivery service in Rwanda since 2016 to send emergency blood supplies to transfusion clinics in the western regions, The Verge reports. Poor roads and meager healthcare facilities made it difficult for medical supplies to reach these remote areas, hence the use of drones. The project used custom-built drones called “Zips,” which can fly as far as 150 kilometers round-trip, and can carry up to 1.5 kilograms.
The robotics company is based in California, and has raised over $35 million in venture capital funding for its various projects.
