Forget Pie In The Sky, Drones Are Saving Lives

Drones may one day make your life easier by delivering pizza, but today—in Rwanda—they are already playing a vital role in emergency medical services.

- Tom Jackson

BACK IN 2014 Keller Rinaudo met a gradu ate student at the Ifakara Health Institute in Tanzania. The student had built a mobile alert system for health workers to text emergency requests for medicine and vaccines. Health workers made thousands of emergency requests, which had never before been possible. Unfortunately, there was no way for the government to fulfil these requests.

“I realised then that I was looking at a database of death with thousands of names, ad­ dresses, ages, phone numbers,” says Rinaudo.

Having already founded Silicon Valley– based drone startup Zipline, Rinaudo had discovered its mission. “Zipline could build the other half of that system and save the majority of those people’s lives,” he says.

Better known for their use in warfare or for buzzing overhead in urban areas taking photo­ graphs, unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, are often tightly regulated. The small African nation of Rwanda, however, has taken a more positive attitude toward their application.

The country’s President, Paul Kagame, is feared and feted in equal quantities, accused of co­opting Rwanda’s democratic system but also praised for presiding over a regime that has put technology at the heart of the land­ locked country’s development.