Boom or Buzz: Drones on the Rise

The drone market is on a growth trajectory. In rural Africa, they are being increasingly used for transporting life-saving drugs and for collecting data for geographic information systems, agriculture and even film-making.

- By Lillian Roberts

Dumisani Kaliati’s University was close to a hospital, and each time he would walk past it, he would meet women asking for money. He would later find out why – they were patients coming from far, from districts outside Blantyre, in Malawi, and needing transport to their homes in the rural parts.

He says deeper in the communities, there are no demarcated roads, in places, only foot paths exist through thick forests or up the mountains.

This led him to ask: how can he help people living in remote areas, remotely?

He first developed an SMS-based app to remind patients to take their medication.

“But that was not enough. I was still looking for ways to reach out to those in the rural areas with physical medication. And around 2016, I got news that Malawi was introducing a drone corridor in 2017, and I started to research how local startups or individuals like myself could benefit from the drone corridor,” says Kaliati, the founder of MicroMek, a Malawian hardware startup developing lowcost Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for remote medicine delivery.

This year, MicroMek was contracted by UNICEF to survey the damage done by tropical storm Ana.

Kalaiti says having only one main road up the escarpment in Blantyre creates challenges when there are disruptions in weather, and the arterial M1 road was destroyed in three places by the flooding. His drone helped.