Ghana’s healthcare delivery system could benefit from treating drone logistics as national infrastructure, with Zipline saying its seven-year operation has demonstrated that on-demand aerial delivery can improve access to critical medical supplies while reducing wastage.

Daniel Kwaku Merki, Country Director of Zipline, said the company’s operations since 2019 had shown that drone delivery should not be viewed simply as an emergency service but as part of a broader healthcare logistics system.

“Zipline is an infrastructure. And I would call it national infrastructure,” Merki said on the Asaase Breakfast Show on Wednesday (12 August).

He said the system depended on collaboration among the Ministry of Health, Ghana Health Service, National Blood Service, Ghana Civil Aviation Authority, the military and other institutions.

According to Merki, independent research in the Ashanti Region found a 56.4 percent reduction in maternal mortality at facilities served by Zipline compared with non-Zipline facilities.

He said the impact went beyond the speed of individual drone deliveries, arguing that the system allowed health authorities to centralise medical commodities and distribute them on demand.

For example, he said, keeping anti-snake venom at every health facility could result in significant wastage because some facilities may record very few snakebite cases.

“With Zipline, what you have is the opportunity to centralise it. So you have no wastage, you have full visibility and then you can share it across that whole catchment area,” he said.

Merki said conventional road-based distribution largely operates as a “push system”, where medical supplies are distributed according to forecasts.

Drone delivery, he said, allows for a “pull system” in which facilities request commodities according to actual demand.

“This means you don’t just store it at a different health facility. You don’t distribute it based on forecast, but it’s an actual pull system,” he said.

He said such an approach could improve availability while reducing wastage, although it would require changes to the systems and performance indicators used to manage healthcare logistics.

Merki said a health facility could place an order through Zipline’s call centre or WhatsApp, after which the request would be checked against the facility’s credentials and available stock.

The order is then processed at a warehouse, packaged and transferred to a flight station, where an autonomous drone delivers it to the health facility along a predetermined route.

Merki said the technology could also be applied to agriculture and disaster response.

He cited Rwanda, where Zipline has been used to deliver material for artificial insemination to farmers, saying independent research had found a 52 percent decline in failure rates because the material could be transported quickly without prolonged interruptions to the cold chain.

He said Ghana’s seven years of experience with the technology also created an opportunity to develop local engineering capacity and high-quality jobs.

“Ghana has done a significant portion of it,” Merki said, arguing that the country should take advantage of its position to explore opportunities in education, engineering and technology.

Looking ahead, Merki said Zipline wanted to see its services integrated and scaled nationally rather than being deployed selectively.

He said this could support the government’s objective of expanding universal healthcare coverage, particularly for people living in rural areas.

“Ultimately, whether it’s government, whether it’s Zipline, we all have the same objective. We want to ensure that any Ghanaian can have access, irrespective of where he lives, to medical commodities and quality services,” he said.