American drone logistics company Zipline plans to scale its Kenya operations to reach 1,000 more health facilities in the wake of a $150 million funding commitment from the US government.

The California-based robotics firm designs, manufactures, and operates drones to deliver medical products such as blood and vaccines. It operates in Kenya, Rwanda, Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire and Nigeria.

Zipline entered Kenya in 2022 through partnerships with the Kisumu and Kericho County governments. It has established a distribution hub in Kisumu to distribute rabies post-exposure prophylaxis, measles and malaria vaccines.

With the new funding, the company seeks to construct new drone hubs staffed by Kenyans to improve its reach. It aims to cut Kenya’s under-immunisation rate, which was negatively affected by Covid-19 pandemic-related disruptions, by half.

Zipline says it has so far conducted over 26,000 deliveries to 500 health facilities, delivered 2,000 units of blood and nearly 600,000 vaccine doses, and reached over 125,000 patients with HIV interventions.“The partnership is still being formalised with the Kenyan government; the outcome of this will steer the investment approach and subsequent timelines,” the company told The EastAfrican via e-mail.

Under the financing agreement, African governments are expected to more than double the US government’s investment through long-term service payments.

The State Department’s financing will only be released when they sign service contracts and commit to paying utilisation fees, expected to reach up to $400 million over the programme’s lifespan.

The “pay-for-performance” mechanism is designed to ensure that African governments, not donors, are engaged in sustaining the medical logistics infrastructure system, especially in the wake of America’s drastic slash of foreign aid and support to health, humanitarian, and development programmes across Africa this year.

Kenya recently signed a $2.5 billion health deal with the US, becoming the first African country to sign the US Health MoUs. Several other countries, including neighbours East African Uganda and Rwanda, have signed similar deals in the past few days.

Meanwhile, a Nairobi court has suspended the Kenyan deal until a case challenging surrender of data to the US is determined.

If implemented, the health deal would see Nairobi get $1.6 billion over the next five years in exchange for health care data and specimens for the next 25 years.

In Rwanda, the company serves more than 800 health facilities through its distribution centres in the central city of Muhanga and the town of Kayonza in the eastern region."Our current focus is going tall in our existing markets, including Kenya. The grant support positions us to rapidly scale our proven model and accelerate the build-out of a comprehensive, autonomous drone delivery network,” Zipline said.“While we see long-term potential across Africa, our immediate priority is to deepen our impact and demonstrate the full scalability of instant delivery in the countries we already serve."President Donald Trump's government’s latest deals with African governments are potential replacements for the funding lost after the US Agency for International Development (USAid) folded.

Since he dismantled the agency earlier this year, thousands of health workers’ jobs have been cut, as have health agreements the agency has run in Africa for decades.

Across the continent, countries are increasingly adopting drone delivery to mitigate medical logistics challenges, especially in rural areas, driven mainly by poor infrastructure.

Zipline, founded in 2014, uses autonomous drones that launch from a hub, fly pre-planned routes, and deliver packages by lowering them via a tethered delivery pod called a ‘droid’ in less than an hour.

The drone remains airborne while the small droid descends to the drop-off point, releases the package, and then ascends back to the main aircraft before it returns to the hub.

© Copyright 2022 Nation Media Group. All Rights Reserved. Provided by SyndiGate Media Inc. (Syndigate.info).