CAN entrepreneurs make up for a lack of roads? In Rwanda, where most of the population live in cut-off villages, the government wants to skip straight to drones. Encouraged by Paul Kagame, the president and a darling of the development industry (if not of human-rights activists), some of Silicon Valley’s most prominent venture-capital firms, including Sequoia Capital and the investment arm of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, have bet that tiny, unmanned aircraft carrying medical supplies can simply hop over the rolling green hills and the mud tracks that barely connect people now.
It is the latest example of what businesspeople working across Africa call “leapfrogging”. Usually married to an almost evangelical belief in the power of startups, this is the notion that, having failed to adopt now-outdated technology, Africa can simply jump straight over it and go right to the latest thing. Just as drones can make up for poor roads, the theory goes, mobile phones can overcome a lack of well-functioning banks, portable solar panels can stand in for missing power stations and free learning apps can substitute for patchy education.
There is a compelling precedent. Fifteen years ago, only a tiny fraction of Africans had access to phones of any kind. Getting a landline installed meant waiting years. Then mobile telephony exploded. In some African countries, such as Uganda, the number of mobile phones came to surpass the total number of landlines in less time than the old state monopoly would take to install a single connection in your house (typically two years or more). When a telecoms mast goes up, other new businesses follow. Young men start selling airtime; farmers find new markets.
Now the hope is that drones could take over from mobile phones as the way to transform Africa. The project under way in Rwanda is courtesy of a startup based in Silicon Valley called Zipline. Its idea is to use small, fixed-wing drones to drop off packets of blood with parachutes from Rwanda’s five blood banks to hospitals and health-care centres, under a contract with the government. A lot of women die in childbirth because they cannot get blood quickly enough.
But the hype about machines saving African lives ought to elicit caution. No one can say how many people will benefit from Zipline, which has yet to begin operating, or whether there will be sufficient profits to continue over the long term. Another project is the world’s very first “drone port”, designed for Rwanda by Foster + Partners, a fancy British firm of architects that wants every small town in Africa to have its own drone port by 2030. Yet its Rwandan project won’t be completed for another four years. A separate initiative, in Malawi, to transport blood samples for HIV tests, received money from UNICEF, a branch of the UN, and testing is under way. The project is pricey—at $7,000 a drone. Paying drivers on motorbikes would be cheaper. FULL STORY