Delivering Hope: Cargo Drones Bring Essential Medicines to Madagascar’s Remote Regions

Although this drone delivery technique is effective, the cost of delivering medicines is particularly high.

As Nambiniaina Rakotondrasolo, the pilot of the cargo drone, indicated to RFI, the goods from the machine will be delivered at an altitude of 120 meters. The precious cargo will land safely on earth thanks to a parachute.which will deploy automatically” before being received by the head of the health center.

A few hours versus several days of walking

As Johary Mamiarinosy, head of ground and data operations at this company, told l'Express de Madagascar, twenty-two drones are now functional. As the media relays, these drones can cover a distance of 200 kilometers and can travel for four hours.

A local business, local construction. ““It’s all Malagasy people who carry out the designs,” says Johary Mamiarinosy. Technicians are responsible for analyzing flight plans before all operations; The drones can carry a load of 3 to 10 kilos and cover radii of 100 kilometers.

Objective: save lives using drones

For the ground operations manager, this project “save lives”, since some areas within the East African island are completely landlocked and do not even provide access to two-wheeled vehicles. Therefore, delivering medicine to some areas would require five days of walking.

These cargo drones are from Aerial Metric, a company which relies on drone technology to offer “innovative solutions”, whether for delivering medicines, for agricultural spreading… It works in collaboration with several NGOs including PSI, which, as relayed by RFI, have already ordered “more than 6,000 deliveries of inputs across the island”.