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  • In most places in the world, when people think about going to hospitals or getting medical

  • supplies there, it is not a big problem, you can just get in a car.

  • In Rwanda, it's a little bit different.

  • With using a drone, you don't have to worry about whether the roads are slippery today,

  • whether it's nighttime or daytime.

  • My name is Joseph Ndagijimana.

  • I am the general manager for Zipline Rwanda. Zipline is a drone delivery service.

  • We deliver blood, medical products, vaccines to hospitals in remote areas in Rwanda and

  • in Ghana.

  • One of the hospitals that we serve just requested us to send two units of red blood cells.

  • So, Nicole over here is going to start packing it and make sure that units to get to the

  • hospitals, as soon as possible. The hospitals do not know when someone is going to come

  • up at the hospital with a new condition.

  • So, the pharmacist picks up the phone and calls Zipline.

  • So within five minutes the drone will be in the air going into the hospital.

  • So we aim to make it as fast as possible.

  • Some of the products that Zipline delivers are needed in critical situations like life

  • or death situations.

  • When the blood dropped here, then this lady will just pick it and take it to the laboratory.

  • It's coming, it's coming.

  • It is like lighting. It is very fast.

  • Zipline has done a lot to us.

  • They have reduced the cost that we are incurring in going to Kigali to pick up the blood.

  • If there is a woman at the hospital, they were going to deliver their baby, but then

  • something unexpected happened and they started to bleed, you don't have the luxury to do

  • a four-hour drive one way and then

  • four hours the other way to be able to treat that patient.

  • We asked the hospitals, like, does it take

  • to get supplies and they were like okay six hours sometimes a day when it has been raining.

  • And we were like okay yes we are going to beat that.

  • When Zipline started developing this technology, Rwanda was one of the first countries that

  • were interested, many other countries were interested, but Rwanda was willing to take the

  • Rwanda is embracing innovation in technology.

  • It's one of the competitive advantages over other places where there are many natural

  • resources or like more access to trade.

  • I have a drone coming brought from a hospital that

  • we are going to do recover.

  • So, the structure has motors, and they communicate with our server.

  • And when the drone gets within the vicinity of the distribution center.

  • They can already communicate.

  • There is a small hook on the tail of the drone that the recovery system is gonna catch.

  • Here we go.

  • The recovery system communicates with great precision with the drone to be able to catch

  • it mid-air.

  • It's small continuous improvements that we do that make a big difference.

  • The doors on the drones are kept here standby. Even the doors are open so you don't

  • want to even waste, those fractions of seconds Zipline Muhanga is the busiest airport in Rwanda.

  • It's busier than Kigali International Airport.

  • On a day-to-day basis we can do around 30

  • deliveries here.

  • And then another 20 from our second distribution center in the eastern part of Rwanda, we are

  • currently working with 44 hospitals, but we are working to also onboard more health facilities.

  • So our goal is to be able to service all 500 health facilities in Rwanda using our two

  • distribution centers. It's capacity is estimated to be around 150 deliveries a day.

  • Zipline works to give access to vital medical supplies to patients in rural areas.

  • I think if we have been delivering pizzas to people's homes, we would have a harder time

  • like convincing the government to take a risk and like be the first country to actually

  • have drone delivery service on a national scale.

In most places in the world, when people think about going to hospitals or getting medical

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