By Pascal Oparada (Social Media/Tech Reporter)
World’s largest medical drone delivery service is set to launch in Ghana.
It would operate in four drone delivery centres in the West African country and serves over 2,000 health centres and 12 million people. It will make as many as 600 flights daily on behalf of the government.
The service is operated by Zipline, one of the biggest drone delivery company in the world.
The company’s drone delivery service started in Rwanda in 2016 and has flown more than one million kilometres to date. Ghana is poised to have the same service at a larger scale.
“Ghana has an administration and government that are investing really heavily in infrastructure, healthcare and technology,” says Keller Rinaudo, CEO of Zipline.
“We’ve built this partnership with them where they want to provide universal access to health care nationally, and this is obviously a huge step in that direction–making sure that every single person in the country ideally can be within a 15-minute delivery of any essential medical product,” he said.
It is solving a challenge which exists globally as it is hard to get medicines and vaccines from central storage facilities to remote hospitals and health centres in remote areas.
When Zipline began working in Rwanda in 2016, it was the first drone service to operate in the world, and the team has continuously refined the system.
“We’ve had to iterate on every part of the system: The software, the distribution centre design, the way we design air traffic control, the way that we integrate with the healthcare system and with the regulator–all of that had to change to make it possible for us to operate at this scale,” says Rinaudo.
It took two years in Rwanda to go from serving one health centre to 25; in Ghana, the company will take nine months to go from one health centre to 2,000.