Drone delivery company Zipline has partnered with Nigeria’s Kaduna, a state in north western Nigeria to enable drone shipment of COVID-19 vaccines.
Drone
Kaduna’s collaboration with Zipline, which over the past year has distributed more than 1 million doses of other vaccines in Africa, will also enable blood products, medicines and other vaccines to be delivered on demand.
Zipline also said it is in talks with Nigeria’s other states.
From Delivering Blood to Delivering Pizza, Drones Have To Inspire New Generations of African Logistics Startups On Last Mile Delivery
According to a research report from Radiant Insight, “Unmanned aerial systems(UAS) markets (mostly dominated by drones) stood at $609 million in 2014. They are also expected to grow to $4.8 billion dollars, worldwide this year. The leading markets for drone use and sales include oil and gas mapping, utility line inspection, package delivery, and agricultural applications.
The American startup which delivers medical supplies, including blood, rabies vaccines and antivenom, to thousands of hard-to-reach health clinics in Rwanda and Ghana achieved a unicorn status in May 2019, having reached $1.2 billion in valuation.
The startup crossed the line in a $190 million new venture funding from top venture capitalists, including Baillie Gifford, The Rise Fund (which is TPG’s global impact fund), Temasek, Alphabet’s investment arm GV and Katalyst Ventures. The funding brought Zipline’s total capital raised to $225 million, before finally putting its market worth at $1.2 billion.
Charles Rapulu Udoh
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer who has advised startups across Africa on issues such as startup funding (Venture Capital, Debt financing, private equity, angel investing etc), taxation, strategies, etc. He also has special focus on the protection of business or brands’ intellectual property rights ( such as trademark, patent or design) across Africa and other foreign jurisdictions. He is well versed on issues of ESG (sustainability), media and entertainment law, corporate finance and governance. He is also an award-winning writer
The drone industry is sitting and waiting for regulations and guidance that make sense across the globe. Take Kenya for example. Currently, drone operations are illegal within Kenya for the average person and extremely limited otherwise, leaving both businesses and individuals in great need of practical and adequate drone regulations.
While drone use is allowed in many countries, even in these places where they are legal and regulations are in place, current drone laws are often woefully inadequate.
Businesses are waiting for adequate drone regulations in Kenya and around the world.
What many entrepreneurs are seeing is that when it comes to successful drone operations, it’s not the technology itself that matters most, it’s everything else.
But with current regulations, we’re stuck relying on regulations that for far too long have focused exclusively on the size of the drone!
Whether you’re investing your time and energy in developing a robust drone delivery operation to deliver blood and save lives, or you’re just looking to fly your off the shelf drone to capture data, the difference between success and failure is in how you approach the operation, not what type of drone you’re flying. Unfortunately, drone regulations in many countries fail to recognize this, costing entrepreneurs and the public greatly.
With the need for enhanced drone regulations so apparent, what is holding us back from implementing them?
The biggest limiting factor for drones all over the world is a lack of trust. Government safety authorities don’t trust you to fly safely nor in a way that doesn’t compromise security. Business leaders don’t trust the role you’ll play in their work. All this mistrust expresses itself in regulation, where “unknowns” become “proposal declined.”
Take another look at Kenya, though the Kenyan Civil Aviation Authority (KCAA) proposed drone regulations last year these efforts were shut down by parliament. This left entrepreneurs eager to integrate drones into their businesses still waiting.
What is it that an entrepreneur can do to overcome these barriers? Well, that question is precisely what the drone industry is trying to answer to drive adoption and change minds. Building trust is an outcome of spreading knowledge and successful community engagement, and building it is a core challenge in the fourth industrial revolution.
Despite the disappointment that previous regulations weren’t accepted, there has been recent progress on drones in the East African country. Kenya’s latest drone regulations are now out for comment, and they look promising. New regulation proposals from the KCAA consider more than just drone size but focus on operations and technology to get more drones in the sky; to save lives and create businesses without preventing any type of operation outright.
These are Performance-Based Regulations (PBR) and are much more robust than many other drone regulations currently in use today. First put into practice in Rwanda, Switzerland and then the EU more broadly, robust PBR implementation has found that your approach to the operation, not simply the technology, can open the sky to you.
Building Trust Through Performance-Based Regulations
Drone entrepreneurs and authorities all over the world are beginning to realize that technology maturation is not the silver bullet to regulatory blockage. Rather than focus on specific technology requirements certified through strict processes, governments are beginning to adopt and advance performance-based regulations (PBR).
This new approach to regulation turns the traditional aviation equation on its head; no longer is the certified technology the crucial element for approval, but rather it is one important component of the overall proposal to fly. How you approach a flight, the procedures you put in place, the training a pilot has, the environment for flight, and how you protect the privacy of the community involved are far greater variables that define overall success.
In other words, if all your thinking about is the drone, then you’re very likely to fail. Though PBR, as an operation centric framework, does recognize that if you create the right processes to protect safety and security you can find great success, it’s not a silver bullet. What’s often missing is the education, training, and business model that focuses on the operations, not the drone.
Drones provide a bird’s eye view with a low barrier of financial and technical entry. Business and government stakeholders must speak a similar language of access and ethics, where operational considerations balance technological ones.
Today, Kenya is set to reform its own regulatory approach to drone regulations in a way that is practical, yet visionary. The rules being considered will continue a harmonization effort across Africa that aligns with the performance-based approach that Rwanda pioneered, and now Europe and the US are beginning to implement.
At the World Economic Forum, we believe that countries with vision and agility can pursue and adopt new approaches to governance which will both protect its citizens from the darker outcomes of drone technology while enabling domestic market growth and the expertise necessary to lead.
Performance-based regulations, piloted in Rwanda and now scaling globally, supported by leaders from both established and emerging economies, promises to enable industries held back by overly restrictive procedures while mitigating risks to society more effectively.
POST WRITTEN BY
Harrison Wolf Lead, Drones and Tomorrow’s Airspace, World Economic Forum
Charles Rapulu Udoh
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based Lawyer with special focus on Business Law, Intellectual Property Rights, Entertainment and Technology Law. He is also an award-winning writer. Working for notable organizations so far has exposed him to some of industry best practices in business, finance strategies, law, dispute resolution, and data analytics both in Nigeria and across the world.
At only 26, William Elong has already written his name in the book of African geniuses by launching the first drone made in Cameroon. William Elong created this feat by launching the first civilian drone service made in Cameroon.
The promoter of the Cameroonian startup Will & Brothers and Algo Drone, whose holding company is based in Germany, wants to challenge the giants of the sector in the international sky. To achieve this, the young entrepreneur who graduated in strategy and economic intelligence from the Paris School of War announced last January that the startup had raised of 2 million euros, a little over 1.3 billion CFA francs in funding.
No Degree In Robotics
William Elong was categorical when he spoke with the French online magazine, Sputnik on the sidelines of the week digital innovation in Yaoundé recently, that he had no previous background in robotics.
“I have absolutely no degree in robotics or embedded system,’’ he said. ‘‘I did business studies instead. However, I worked for companies in the security sector for a few years: Nexter (a manufacturer of armored vehicles) where I was an economic intelligence consultant and Thales Cameroon that offers cyber security services. It is through these field experiences in the field of security that I understood what were the issues related to the issue of drones and the management of satellite data; which allowed me to start my own business.
When it comes to evoking his passion for robotics, William Elong said that:
“It’s like asking someone who loves the piano where his passion for the piano comes from. Sincerely, I do not know. The environment maybe, because I had a lot of chances to be interested very early in everything related to robotics. It was done alone. I would say its innate.“
The well-nourished passion allowed Elong to embark on entrepreneurship as early as 2015. To make his ambition happen, he created Will & Brothers, a startup specialized in economic intelligence and specialized technological innovation; then Drone Africa to realize his dream of developing drones 100% Cameroonian.
“Apart from the Startup Will and Brothers, there is another named Algo Drone which was originally called Drone Africa. It has become a company present in several countries. So we set up an office in Germany, which allowed us to reach Europe and not just focus on Africa, because we think the global market is large, “he said.
Thanks to the creation of these two structures, William Elong finally realized his dream of developing the Drone Africa app: launching the first civilian drone service in Cameroon. This innovation earned him a place as one of the most formidable African geniuses. In 2016, he was among the top 30 most promising young African entrepreneurs, in a ranking published by the famous American magazine Forbes.
“Drone Africa is a team work made up of young engineers recruited from some of the Faculties of Industrial Engineering in Douala and others in Yaounde. It is gets a lot of self-learning through lessons available on Youtube and Open Source. From this workforce and our skills, we have embarked on a production phase. We also knew a lot of failures, but we got up and today our service offer is functional, “he said.
The drone surveillance service offered by William Elong is increasingly adopted in various sectors of activity in Cameroon, particularly in agriculture, tourism, communication, meteorology, defense or mapping.
“More than 80% of our activity is carried out with institutional actors. For example, farmers who want to do mapping on several hectares with the drone. Others solicit us for the promotion of tourist sites. We have covered sites of some stages of the African Cup of Nations in Cameroon. I can mention the Olembe stadium, which we shot during the construction. We also have clients in Congo or Senegal. In Africa the solicitations are going well, “he said.
Concerning the components of his devices, the promoter however specified that all the parts are not manufactured in Cameroon.
“I am often asked if the components of my drones are made in Cameroon. No, of course. Even when you buy your phone made in France all components are not manufactured in France. We have components that come from different suppliers around the world and sometimes assembly is done in Cameroon. The important point is the know-how that we sell to our customers, “he reassured.
”The size of the market and the scale of the needs in Africa are elements that have attracted our first funders”
But William Elong is also an ace of crowdfunding. To succeed in these different challenges, Will & Brothers was able to mobilize $ 200,000 from various investors at the launch of his project. In January 2019, the young entrepreneur managed to raise 2 million euros (1.3 billion CFA francs) of funds announced in early 2018. Funds that come mainly from foreign investors even if William would have liked more involvement of Cameroonian partners
“I submitted my project to investment funds that could be interested in our sector of activity. It works pretty well. Unfortunately, we have very few local investors. Too bad. The size of the market and the scale of the needs in Africa are elements that have attracted our first funders and still attracting today, “he told Sputnik
Among the difficulties encountered by the young entrepreneur in the development of his drone and artificial intelligence services is the newness of this technology in Cameroon.
“Given that we are specialized in a high-tech sector like artificial intelligence and drones, the general public has a hard time really understanding what we are doing. To fight against this basic incomprehension, we organize information and awareness workshops to demystify the subject. Because of the technical complexity, we are often faced with misinformation. Each time, we have to go back over certain points to better enlighten them and make them understand,’’he said.
With this local experience, William Elong is now eyeing the international sky.
“We are actively preparing for the conquest of the international market with our drones. However, there are other areas of activity that we are aiming to explore. I can speak in particular about Finetech, it is an area that interests us particularly, cybersecurity especially. Because there is only one step between drones, data transmission and cybersecurity issues, “he said.
Besides his many activities, this geek also works to share his experience with young people in Cameroon.
“We accompany young people to encourage them to start their own businesses. In this sense we have set up an association called “Cameroon Flying Lab”, an association that promotes robotics among young people through actions in schools, universities and others. I can also talk about the “Phoenix Lab” a non-profit organization based in Douala that offers support to young entrepreneurs who are looking for capital, “he said.
As he continues his rise to conquer the international market, William Elong firmly believes that artificial intelligence can contribute to the digital transformation of Africa and its development.
Charles Rapulu Udoh
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based Lawyer with special focus on Business Law, Intellectual Property Rights, Entertainment and Technology Law. He is also an award-winning writer. Working for notable organizations so far has exposed him to some of industry best practices in business, finance strategies, law, dispute resolution, and data analytics both in Nigeria and across the world.
