How it began
On October 14, 2016, President Paul Kagame launched what Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, described as the world's first national drone delivery service, at a ceremony in Muhanga District in central Rwanda. The Rwandan government began using drones to make emergency deliveries of blood to 21 transfusing facilities in the western half of the country. The aircraft and the service were built and operated by Zipline, a robotics company based in California, whose distribution center at Muhanga was constructed in four weeks.
Before it existed
Blood must be stored and moved at safe temperatures and spoils quickly, so remote clinics cannot hold every type they may need. Supplies went by road, by motorbike or ambulance, across rural and hilly country, which could take hours. Drone delivery had been demonstrated elsewhere by several companies, and a project in Madagascar had flown medical samples, but these were not regular services covering much of a country.
How it works
Health workers place an order by text message. At the base, staff load a fixed-wing, battery-powered drone called a Zip, which is launched from a catapult. It flies itself using GPS, below about 150 meters, and reports to its base and to Rwandan air traffic control over the cellular network. At the clinic it descends and drops the package by parachute without landing, then returns. Each Zip can carry 1.5 kg of blood and fly a round trip of up to 150 km, in wind and light rain.
Who pushed back
Some aid workers were wary of drones in general. One, quoted in a Swiss study cited by the BBC, said that the public confuses them with weaponized drones and with intelligence gathering, especially in places with conflict. An engineering expert at Imperial College London, by contrast, praised the design in which the aircraft never lands among people at the delivery point.
What changed first
The service started with a fleet of 15 drones planned to make 50 to 150 flights a day, and it could fill orders in about 30 minutes, cutting waits from hours to minutes. The health ministry paid per delivery, at a cost Zipline said was about equal to delivery by road. A partnership of UPS, Gavi and Zipline, with a 1.1 million dollar grant from the UPS Foundation, studied the operation with a view to adding vaccines and medicines.
Where it stands today
Zipline went on to operate distribution centers in other countries, with Muhanga as its first. The Rwandan launch is cited as the start of drone delivery at national scale, and the partners said at the time that they hoped to export what was learned there to other parts of the world.
