Host: Hi I’m Claude Grunitzky, welcome to Limitless Africa
And I’m Dimpho Lekgeu. You may have noticed, foreign policy is experiencing a profound shift.
Last year, one of the US’s top diplomats said that Africa is the world’s largest untapped market… and Africa should be among the US’s largest trading partners. This time, it’s not just about aid. It’s about business. And we were wondering what that might mean in practice.
Well, in November last year, the US Department of State made an important announcement. The U.S. committed up to $150 million dollars to a partnership with Zipline.
What’s Zipline?
Zipline designs, manufactures, and operates delivery drones. Yes, drones. These drones currently fly in Cote d’Ivoire, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Ghana.
Caitlin Burton: Zipline today is the world’s largest physical deployment of AI anywhere in the world. And it’s saving lives. And that’s pretty extraordinary.
Host: There are medical emergencies and then… there are medical emergencies…
Dr Abraham: We have Antivenom. You have a snake bite and you need the drug right away. You have antirabies. Someone bitten by a rabbit dog, you need to start the treatment. Critical items which are needed in ICU, intensive care unit, for patients who come with multiple organ failure, patients coming to me with cardiac arrest.
Host: That’s Dr Loko Abraham – he knows the importance of the right treatment
Dr Abraham: I am a medical doctor. Specialized in Childhood and Pediatrics, spent the first half of my career treating patients and also leading big hospital.
Host: But now he does something slightly different… he heads up Rwanda Medical Supply.
Dr Abraham: So Rwanda Medical Supply is an institution tasked with the procurement, warehousing and delivery of all health commodities, which include medicines, medical supplies, medical technology and laboratory to all public health facilities in Rwanda.
Host: He’s in charge of making sure that every public hospital and clinic in Rwanda has the right medicines – and he knows how important this is.
Dr Abraham: So the culmination, the true end point of a client, a patient visiting a hospital or a clinic is to actually get the pills. Whatever you do before that is very important, but the most important part is actually getting that treatment.
Host: But sometimes that hospital or clinic doesn’t have the right medicine and they have to order it.
Dr Abraham: If we use a conventional truck delivery it might take four or five hours.
Host: And patients often don’t have four or five hours.
If they’ve just been bitten by a snake, or if they need blood after giving birth, it’s a matter of life and death.
Doctors must get so frustrated… they know they can save a life but they don’t have the right supplies to do so…
In Rwanda, the vulnerable were dying… But then the government hit on a solution.
Caitlin: Rwanda was our first customer. They saw the opportunity really early. They were tired of losing women in childbirth. the former minister of health told me that they would say every woman’s name who had died in childbirth the day before at the start of their like morning meetings each day. and that was sort of like a ritual that they were tired of doing and they wanted to solve it.
Host: That’s Caitlin Burton. She’s the CEO of ZIpline Africa. Zipline has managed to cut maternal deaths in Rwanda. We wanted to find out how – so Claude spoke to her.
Claude: We want to know about these drones, right? Where are they flying? How fast they travel? What are they carrying? How does it actually work?
Caitlin: “So Zipline, we design, build and manufacture, you know, the drones in the US and then we deploy them in five countries in Africa. The drone itself is, ah I think, a quite sophisticated piece of technology, but it’s it’s more probably the platform that is really fascinating here, the platform that allows allows it to fly 24 hours a day, seven days a week in all weather, in some of the most volatile weather and and and like high altitudes on Earth. So ah the drone itself, it’s wingspan is maybe 10 feet. It’s carrying a payload of about 10 pounds. And it is able to fly instantly on demand at about 160 kilometers an hour, up to 125 kilometers away.
So just to maybe to give you a little bit of context, ah what we do is we set up a warehouse and our drone right outside the warehouse is a drone port. The warehouse is holding medical products, blood, vaccines and medicines that belong to the government.
Outside is a drone port with maybe 30 to 50 drones, depending on how you know how many facilities we’re serving.
We make about one delivery, every 60 seconds in Africa today, somewhere somewhere in Africa, someone’s receiving a package.”
Claude: I’ve been following your story for a while. And it doesn’t seem to me… that the zipline story is a linear story. It didn’t seem like, okay, we’re going to just develop zipline in Africa.
Caitin: Well, in sense, Africa picked us. The government of Rwanda was our first customer. And fast forward almost a decade, we they have cut maternal mortality in half at Zipline serve facilities from postpartum hemorrhage.
Claude : But why don’t you tell us a little about the history of how you ended up becoming a player in Africa?
Caitin: It was not a linear story, you were right. The Rwandan government was willing to take bet on us. oh a bet on us and we started out small, delivering just blood to one hospital. And maybe like a year later, we we scaled to 21 hospitals.
And, you know, a few years later, we set up a second hub to cover the whole country. And we started introducing medicines. um Many years later, we introduced human vaccines. There’s research out there that shows if kids show up for something as routine as an immunization and they don’t get it, there’s a good chance that they’re not going to come back. you know like That kind of kills your confidence in the health system.
And um one of the you know one of the things we now know about Zipline is when we make a health system meet its mandate at every tier over and over and over again, people learn to use health care. I mentioned reducing maternal deaths in Rwanda by half; in Ghana we’ve seen the same effect.
And so I think you know just seeing that transformation and trust of a system, utilization of a system, you see patient visits go up, you see consumption of medicines go up, all these kinds of effects, and then you see population health change broadly.
Host: Back to Dr Abraham who explained why having a well-stocked clinic is key to a healthy community.
Dr Abraham: This means more client visits, it means more checkups, and this means you can catch complications early so that you avoid very costly treatments once diseases are advanced.
Host: If patients visit the clinic more frequently, the nurse or doctor can catch health issues before they become more serious.
And the new system has other benefits:
Dr Abraham : What Zipline has helped us is you don’t actually need to increase your stock-holding level because Zipline centralizes our inventory. It makes it easy to monitor the stock and it is accessible to everyone and so forth. So there is that huge factor that’s not usually costed, but it’s significant.
Host: So if I’m understanding correctly, with Zipline you don’t need extra supplies of expensive medicines and expensive cold storage facilities in every remote hospital or clinic in Rwanda. You can store drugs and equipment in one central place. It makes everything more efficient
It’s an example of how tech can be used to completely overhaul out-dated systems that don’t work for Africa.
We’re delighted to feature May Mbira, a musician from Mozambique. Follow him here and here.
This seems to be a good deal for African populations, but what about the American taxpayer? All good deals involve a bit of give and take. So how is this global health strategy putting America First? To find out, Claude spoke to Sarah Troutman, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of African Affairs in the US Department of State.
Claude: How do you justify this to American taxpayers when there’s so many budget negotiations in DC right now?
Sarah: So as far as just justifyih this investment to the American taxpayers, I would say that this investment demonstrates the State Department’s commitment to opening new markets for American companies. So it’s really promoting America’s unmatched innovation capabilities in technology, science and medicine, and it’s promoting resilient local health systems abroad.
Claude: One of the debates that we’ve been having with our guests here on the limitless Africa podcast is trade versus aid and and when I say that, I’m wondering how you would explain the benefits of this type of partnership to African governments and African populations, who, let’s face it, we’re used to receiving American aid and just free money..
Sarah: So I would say first, this partnership with zipline will help to address the underlying health infrastructure challenges that African governments and populations face, especially in rural areas. It’s bringing American innovation in AI robotics, autonomous logistics to the countries where zipline operates, including Cote d’Ivoire, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Ghana. So it’s improving health outcomes and enhancing emergency responses to disease outbreaks in these countries, and zipline already has such a strong partnership, with each of these governments So it’s an example of the US stepping in to enhance partnerships that are already well established and that we know these host governments want and have been asking for.
If African governments are choosing this solution, it’s trade not aid in action. Back to Claude and Caitlin:
Claude: What does success look like? How do you measure your success at this point?
Caitin: Yeah, so the goal of this grant is to go nationwide. We are operating regionally in all of these five countries, and these countries are realizing extraordinary impact on population health. Their supply chains are working well; they can use less inventory to treat more people because there’s less loss and theft and wastage in the system; they can track and trace everything. They know where every unit is going. and ah And they have a very responsive health system that’s responding to patient needs where they are.
So Zipline, success for us means replicating the gains that we’ve seen in population health metrics at a regional level to a national level where there are 377 million people in these five countries and i I just think that so many families trajectories, so many, like frankly, the economic trajectory and the the potential is going to look way different in two to five years from now when we have tackled maternal and child mortality, malnutrition, you know, things that we know how to tackle. We actually, from all the research we’ve done, we know how to engineer those impacts at a massive scale.
And that’s our goal. Get this infrastructure built out. The government will pay for it when they have it. And it will completely fundamentally change the profile of public health in these countries.
Claude: And is your idea that even if the government funding stops in a few years, you can just still keep going because you will have built this infrastructure and you can keep scaling? Is that your understanding?
Caitin: So once the infrastructure is there, thanks to the U.S. s government, the African governments pay for it as a component of their health system. And we expect that to continue. You know, it becomes a service that they pay for the same way they would pay for trucks or the same way they would pay for warehousing and storage and inventory management and data systems to trace everything.
Claude: What are you thinking when it comes to innovation in the next few years? I don’t what do even want to say for the next decade, I’ll just say in the next few years.”
Caitin: Yeah. So Zipline today is the world’s largest physical deployment of AI anywhere in the world. And it’s, and it’s saving lives. And that’s pretty, I think that’s pretty extraordinary that this is, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s, this tech stack is powering really large physical AI systems.
And it’s for a humanitarian purpose. It’s, it’s like, ah you know, to me that, what that fact strikes me as like, really tells you something about how forward looking these governments are. They have been in the lead here and they have been driving this for years, kind of under the radar.
Claude: And demand from African partners is key to making sure the partnership works for both parties.
Sarah Troutman: Here’s I think we’ve seen a really good response to our overall shift from aid to trade with partner governments in Africa, with a lot of them saying, Hey, we’ve been asking for you to treat us as equal capable partners. So we really want to make sure that our commercial diplomacy efforts, including in global health, are geared toward pursuing these types of sustainable partnerships.
Claude: Zipline is just one example of the types of partnership that are being created under the new America foreign policy agenda. These partnerships are meant to save lives, save money and create jobs in Africa and in America.
This is just one of the first examples of trade not aid in action. The opportunities could be Limitless.
