Conscious

CHAPTER 12Be Your Own Drone

There's a new buzz over the Mille Collines (“the land of a thousand hills”) of Rwanda. It's not the whispers of ethnic unrest, nor the sounds of gorillas in the jungle. It's the faint buzz of electric motors driving a drone's rotor blades. In rural Africa, it's the sound of good things to come.

Today, seven billion people inhabit the earth, nearly two billion of whom lack prompt access to essential medical supplies. Swollen rivers, political upheaval, and dirt roads are just a few of the obstructions that separate billions of rural people across the world from the medicines they need. Postpartum hemorrhaging, snake bites, and severe anemia due to malaria are a few maladies that turn deadly in the absence of prompt medical treatment. A start-up from California, Zipline, believes drone technology can solve this persistent infrastructure problem.

Rwanda is a country with 4700 km of road, yet only 1000 km are paved. There are two rainy seasons, February to April and November to January. During the wet months, travel in Rwanda is slowed to a near standstill when the roads turn from red earth tracks to impenetrable bogs. Transportation creates a unique challenge for a health care system that serves an estimated 11 million rural Rwandans. The problem is not a lack of doctors. The rains halt the resupply of blood plasma, antibiotics, HIV treatments, and medical supplies for a significant part of the year. As long as anyone can remember, millions of people ...