What Sudan Can Learn From Rwanda’s National Drone Delivery Programme

For most developing countries, getting access to critical health-care products can be a real challenge. This is due to many factors including what is known as the last-mile problem, which is the inability to deliver necessary medicines from cities to rural or remote locations due to a lack of adequate transportation, communication and supply chain infrastructure.

In Sudan, there are many cases where the lack of a certain vaccine or blood type has led to an undesirable outcome. These incidents occur due to bad infrastructure (storage environment, electricity shortage, etc) or unavailability, which in turn could be due to distribution issues. 

There are many ways to tackle this and one of them is to increase the number of products provided to clinics and hospitals. But every centre does not require the same amount of resources, and usage could vary over time, causing certain products like blood to expire. 

Zipline, a California-based robotics company, provides an interesting solution to this issue by using drones to deliver health products such as vaccines and blood to hospitals and clinics in cities and rural areas. Zipline CEO, Keller Rinaudo, said:

‘The inability to deliver lifesaving medicines to the people who need them the most, causes millions of preventable deaths each year around the world.’

The way it works can be summarised in just a few steps: 

• Health workers in remote clinics and hospitals text orders to Zipline for the medical products they need, on demand.
• The products are centrally stored at a distribution centre built specifically to house these products. On receiving the order, items are packed and prepared for flight in a matter of minutes. 

In October 2018, Rwanda launched the world’s first national drone delivery system to deliver blood to patients in remote areas of the country. The drone, manufactured by Zipline, will deliver blood to 21 transfusion facilities in the western part of Rwanda. Rwanda’s National Drone Delivery Programme enables hospitals and clinics to place emergency orders by cell phone text message. The orders are then received and delivered using drones.

Each drone can fly up to 150 km on a round trip regardless of the weather, and carry 1.5 kg of blood, which is enough to save a person’s life. These drones can make 50-150 emergency flights a day.

Sudan can really benefit from this technology. An initiative like this will not only benefit the government by reducing the cost of infrastructure and personnel; but it will also save millions of lives. For example, when the chikungunya fever epidemic broke out in Kassala in September 2018, leaving 40 dead and at least 10,000 infected, the Ministry of Health failed to quickly respond to the crisis, and struggled to deliver and distributing the necessary medication and blood. In such a case of an epidemic, a drone delivery system or programme would have saved many lives.

Mohammed Jalad is a 24-year-old engineer, tech enthusiast and introvert currently living in Malaysia. Exploring writing for the first time, Mohammed will delve into topics of technology and education as well as self-help and motivation.