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.
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.
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.
"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.