U.S. invests $150m through Zipline to boost drone delivery of blood, medicines in Africa

The United States Government has announced an investment of up to $150 million to expand access to life-saving medical supplies, including blood and essential medicines.

The investment to as many as 15,000 health facilities across Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and Rwanda is under a new partnership with Zipline, the American drone-delivery company.

The initiative, according to Zipline, forms part of a broader transformation of health logistics across Africa
At full scale, the expanded drone network is projected to serve up to 130 million people, while creating an estimated 1,000 local jobs and contributing roughly $1 billion in annual economic activity in the participating countries.

The announcement was made during a digital press conference hosted by the U.S. State Department’s Africa Regional Media Hub, where Mr. Jeffrey Graham, Senior Bureau 0fficial for the Bureau of Global Health Security and Diplomacy, and Ms Caitlin Burton, Chief Executive Officer of Zipline Africa, briefed journalists across the continent on the initiative.

Mr. Graham said the investment formed part of Washington’s America First Global Health Strategy, unveiled in September. It aims to “enhance return on U.S. taxpayer dollars while reducing waste, eliminating a culture of dependency in the aid system, and ensuring assistance is strategically aligned with our foreign policy goals,” he said.
Mr. Graham said the partnership with Zipline was necessary for delivering life-saving medical products to people in need, especially in hard-to-reach areas where traditional supply chains often fail.

According to him, the collaboration would strengthen local health systems, improve emergency outbreak response and open new global markets for American innovations while simultaneously creating manufacturing jobs in the United States and local jobs across Africa.

Mr. Graham added that the initiative aligned with a broader shift in U.S. foreign assistance, which seeks to help African governments build self-sufficient health systems. He noted that “upfront, short-term investments” by the United States were intended to transition into “long-term, sustainable projects” run and funded locally.
“We’re moving from a system of staying engaged for decades and decades where there was no endgame,” he told the press.

Zipline, which operates autonomous drones capable of flying in all weather conditions, has over the years revolutionised emergency medical delivery across Africa, particularly in rural settings Ghana was one of the earliest adopters of the technology, integrating drone delivery networks into the national health supply chain since 2019.

Ms Caitlin Burton recounted a recent incident in Rwanda in which a pregnant woman suffering a placental abruption was saved after Zipline delivered nearly seven pounds of blood within 40 minutes, a supply that would have taken six hours by road While the case was dramatic, she said such situations were commonplace across the company’s operations, noting that maternal deaths had dropped by more than half in Zipline-serviced facilities in Rwanda, with significant improvements also recorded in other countries.

She explained that Zipline’s technology allowed African health systems to “skip the 19th-century infrastructure” of road- dependent distribution and adopt modern, responsive logistics capable of guaranteeing on-time deliveries.

The system, she said, eliminated waste, reduced administrative burdens and ensured that critically needed products reach patients regardless of location.

Beyond logistics, Ms Burton emphasised the wider health gains achieved by countries partnering with Zipline.
She said the company had helped reduce zero-dose prevalence by 42 per cent in a year, cut missed severe-malaria treatments by 66 per cent, and improved health outcomes on a scale national programmes had previously struggled to achieve.

She stressed that the expansion funded by the United States would accelerate nationwide access in the five beneficiary countries.

“We now have the chance to bring this impact to countries nationwide thanks to this partnership with the State Department,” she said.

On questions related to long-term sustainability, Ms Burton said Zipline’s operations in Africa were already largely in funded by national budgets, not donors, describing the countries involved as “a self-selecting group” that adopted the service even when other supply chain support was offered free.

She said, “They have been saying for a decade they want trade, not aid. They want technology; they want jobs; they wan entrepreneurship; they want growth.”

Responding to a Ghanaian journalist’s question on what the new partnership meant for public spending, she said each government would determine how the service integrated into its health mandate. She explained that domestic funds used to pay for Zipline’s operations remained in the local economy, supporting salaries, utilities, taxes and other recurrent costs.

Ms. Burton added that future expansion would depend on requests from African governments, many of whom had expressed interest.

Source: GNA