The nation of Ghana in west Africa defaulted on its foreign debt last year. It’s not very good at managing its finances or infrastructure. But thanks to drones, it is immunizing its children against potentially lethal or disabling diseases. It’s doing so even in the country’s most remote and backward regions — which is important, because Africa is the most disease-ridden continent on Earth. Drones can deliver vaccines in less than an hour to areas that would take 5 hours to reach by bumpy, unpaved roads:
Asawinso Health Centre, in Ghana’s forested, agrarian Western North region, is modest: four squeezed rooms and a veranda, the entire structure yearning for a fresh coat of paint.
On the veranda, which accommodates a table and two chairs, a vaccination clinic is proceeding at a practiced, comfortable rhythm. A nurse in a smart green-and-white uniform draws up an injection and deftly administers it to a baby cradled in its mother’s arms. Nearby, about a dozen more women and their infants wait for their turn, on rows of weathered benches sheltered beneath a tin roof.
The health center serves a community of 26,531 individuals, most of them from cocoa-farming families..The vaccine clinic is open daily, and most Sundays, the health workers bring cold boxes stocked with vaccine doses out to churches.
That consistency is striking, given the logistical challenges facing this region. The road from Sefwi Wiawso, just 43km away, is uninviting even in good weather: janky, meandering, untarred, soil-red. It typically takes locals five hours to travel from Asawinso to Kumasi, the region’s closest and biggest city.
“We live in a very difficult area when it comes to travel. Especially when it rains, how vaccines will get to facilities is a major challenge,” remarked Osei Sekyi, the regional director for Ghana’s Expanded Programme on Immunisation (EPI). “Each district has its own unique tale, as they all have remote and difficult-to-reach communities.”
Access hurdles like these can choke supply chains, halting preventive health care in its tracks. But Asawinso and other health clinics in this region have found a solution.
In the early afternoon, that solution – red-and-white, winged and not much bigger than a child’s kite – appears in the sky above Asawinso Senior High School’s football field. It’s a Zipline medical delivery drone, and without pausing on its flight path, it drops its cargo. A red box equipped with a tiny parachute gusts down onto a grassless portion of the sports pitch. Nurse Richard retrieves his package, inspects its contents, and turns to make his way back towards the health facility.
“It’s that simple,” he says with a smile. “Mothers feel at ease knowing they won’t endure hours of waiting. The vaccines arrive quickly, we care for their children, and they can quickly resume their daily routines.”
Enabling access to vaccination has never been more vital. Around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic forced an unprecedented drop-off in immunisation rates. Ghana was no exception: between 2019 and 2020, coverage with the third dose of diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus-containing vaccine (DTP3) plunged from 99% to 97%, leaving some 32,000 additional Ghanaian children vulnerable to vaccine-preventable illnesses.
Since then, Ghana’s health services have been making up lost ground across the country.
Compellingly, new research looking at clinics in Western North between 2017 and 2021 suggests the post-pandemic bounce-back has been quicker in those portions of the region where Zipline’s drones helped to keep vaccine clinics ticking over, as compared to areas reliant on traditional supply chains….”We saw a reduction of over 40% [44%] in missed opportunities to vaccinate children in Zipline-served Western North facilities [relative to facilities in the same region that were not served by the medical drones]. This means that a lot of children had access to the vaccines they needed because Zipline made them available…”
Zipline’s Western North hub – one of six such hubs in Ghana – is located at Sefwi Wiawso and serves 415 facilities, across 19 districts. For 217 of these facilities, Zipline is the sole distributor of vaccines.
On a blue-skied afternoon in mid-May, VaccinesWork visited Sefwi Wiawso to meet the team delivering life-saving vaccines by air to isolated communities….”With every package we send, we have it in mind that we’re saving someone’s life.”
The drones are fast enough that vaccines can be called for and delivered all within an afternoon’s clinic session. The journey from Sefwi-Wiawso to Asawinso Health Centre, for instance, takes about an hour at ground level in good weather. By drone it’s a serene 23 minutes. The furthest-away clinics take the drones an average of 55 minutes. By road, the same trip is an ordeal: “You’re looking at four hours and beyond,” said Keteku. “But that’s in an ideal situation where the road network is good. If we have bad weather conditions and stuff, we could be looking at five hours just to get to those facilities.”….
“Customers place orders through various channels, including WhatsApp, voice calls, and text messages, and the orders come in various forms: resupply requests, emergency requests, or scheduled orders.” The aim is to launch the laden drone within ten minutes. “When the package is five minutes away, we tell the customer so they can clear the drop zone and be on standby.”
…Zipline drones’ navigation systems allow them to autonomously avoid obstacles and make pinpoint deliveries. In cases of extreme weather or very bad wind, the drones are intelligent enough to signal that they can’t fly.
They are also hardy. “Our drones are made up of four replaceable units,” said Keteku. “If a particular unit is down, we’re able to replace it quickly with another one so we don’t delay the customer,” she added.
