The Magnificent Medical Drones of Muhanga
Africa Annals #2!
On April 24, I woke up to my second day of this reporting journey, left my Airbnb, had breakfast, and set off with great excitement to visit one of the most fascinating projects I’d ever gotten to write about: Rwanda’s world-leading network of life-saving Zipline medical delivery drones!
But on the way, Kigali presented new occasions that demanded to be written about first. Literally while waiting for a city-crossing electric bus at the bus stop, I saw a guy on an electric motorcycle from pioneering Rwandan startup Ampersand, right in front of a sign selling solar panels, and just had to snap a photo.
Soon after getting into that bus, we passed a Spiro solar-powered battery-swap station for electric motorbikes and a little independent repair shop advertising itself as an EV mechanic.
I got off at the teeming vortex of Nyabugogo Bus Station, Kigali’s central whirl of transport. There, I saw a multitude of electric buses amid the throng of people, yet found that the new bus that I wanted was still an old diesel model — for now. Kigali bus fleet electrification is moving fast.
As I bought my ticket and then waited for my bus to fill and leave, three middle-aged men came and asked for money. One was missing a leg, one a hand, and one an arm up to his shoulder. I thought it all too probable that they were survivors of the 1994 genocide, and gave each one a small sum in Rwandan francs.
As we traversed the urban periphery, I spotted many signs of Chinese culture: hanzi characters on the buses themselves and villagers’ T-shirts, a truck branded CHENG TONG, a wall with painted Chinese and Rwandan flags announcing that Chinese company StarTimes had provided satellite TV access to 10,000 villages. (This last is controversial). Once out beyond the city, the general landscape was like a rural version of the Kigali street scene: developing country on the way up, with sturdy metal-roofed buildings dotting the green fields.
Upon arrival at the bus stop in the Muhonga district, I got off into a thriving little town and started walking towards the Zipline point on Google Maps. Throughout today’s bus journey into rural Rwanda, I’d had consistent 4G cellular data coverage. Along the way, I smiled at the sight of a piece of American culture: a little photo-printing business with a sign reading WAKANDA STUDIO.
I also noticed a compound with a rooftop solar array where the only English words on the signs I saw were “Rwandan Ministry of Health” and “Reception” in front of a line of visitors. I concluded that I had just passed, by happenstance, a solar-powered rural hospital.
A tour group from the University of Rwanda was departing via bus just as I arrived at the Zipline Muhanga drone base. A van in the parking lot bore the Zipline logo and the quote “The Best Delivery Service Not On Earth.” I said hi to the security folks at the gate, explained why I was there and showed my email thread with the Zipline office in the U.S., and they called out the director, an awesome guy named Prosper. I said that I didn’t wish to disturb his work and that I would be happy just to be let in to take some pictures of drone launches, but he kindly offered to give me a full tour!
First, we went to “mission control,” a room of screens and maps. One huge wall map showed all flight routes from this base, and one screen showed live tracking of all the drones currently in the air. This one Zipline base sends drones to over 1,000 health center drop points, hospitals and clinics across the western half of Rwanda. Their longest regularly supply flight is to Mibilizi, near the Congolese border. Before Zipline, it had taken seven to eight hours for someone to drive to Mibilizi to resupply their medical center. (And then, of course, that person had to drive seven to eight hours back). Now, Zipline drones have cut resupply time to Mibilizi, from order to delivery, to just 45 minutes. Less for everywhere else.
The map room also answered my half-thought question of why the major Zipline drone bases were hours away from Kigali: the international airport in the capital had a no-fly zone around it. Zipline coordinates closely with Rwanda’s civil aviation authority, and new low-altitude options are being planned for future Kigali flights.
I asked Prosper if storms could ground their flights, and he simply replied “We fly in any conditions. That is why we are here.” I could hear the buzz of drones taking off on the other side of the building as we talked.
Next, we visited a brief airlock-like antechamber where we covered our shoes with disposable stockings to avoid contamination, then entered the base’s medical supplies warehouse. There were medications for malaria, HIV, and many other ailments, a fridge full of blood plasma, a fridge full of red blood cells, a fridge full of platelets with little agitator racks to keep them constantly moving. Many fridges full of vaccines. Neatly stacked piles of empty Zipline drone packages ready to be filled at one of the workstations.
Zipline Muhanga now stocked over 300 different medical products and supplies, and was ready to send them zooming over the countryside to provide succor to those in need at a moment’s notice. Prosper held one example up for my inspection: a carton of Lumerax, a 3-day course malaria treatment for children. He told me that he had first joined a newly-launched Zipline intending to only work there for two years, but that he had found the work deeply meaningful and he had now been on the team for ten years. “At launch, there’s someone lying on a bed waiting for this drone. The idea is simple but the impact is huge.”
As we walked on, Prosper rattled off the statistics with justified pride. Since the Muhanga drone base had begun its work in this region of Rwanda, maternal deaths from postpartum hemorrhage were reduced by 51% in just the first three years, thanks to Zipline rapid blood delivery.
Blood expiry, the wastage of precious donor transfusions because they expired before a hospital had an occasional to use them, was down by 67%. Immunization rates were up. They’ve expanded into animal health as well as human health, benefiting farmers in the region1.
Rwandan immunization officials could now track the roll-out of new human (and animal) vaccination campaigns in real time with Zipline data, and no longer had to improvise a cold chain by piggybacking on restaurant freezers. In their early days, Zipline delivered special fortified food supplements to fight malnutrition, but malnutrition in Rwanda has declined so much that that’s no longer considered a necessary delivery item. And the existence of Zipline was a broad-spectrum boost to the economics of rural health centers. By avoiding waste, it also avoided redundancy, reduced the need to maintain expensive and fast-expiring stockpiles thanks to the certainty you could get what you needed quickly, and freed up money for clinics to invest in facility upgrades or more hires.
Zipline has 220 full-time employees in Rwanda, with 70 at the Muhanga base alone. (It’s a U.S. company, but all the employees I met were local Rwandans). That’s the directly drone-focused folks, not counting the large network of nurses and pharmacists involved in their supply chain and recipients. Jobs with Zipline were unsurprisingly prestigious, and Prosper told me they often hired young recent graduates with engineering experience. They’d also found it necessary to design their own internal “academy” system to train new hires in the many brand-new procedures Zipline had developed for their world-leading work. There was no such thing as gaining prior work experience in the rural African medical drone delivery field from another company (yet): Zipline had invented all this as they went along. Prosper explained that the entire operations area was optimized for efficiency. “One second per order saves hundreds of seconds per day.”
In the warehouse, I saw a Zipline technician lady (I think I caught her name as “Crystal”) receive an order and start the process of filling a drone package, which she graciously allowed me to record. They had two kinds of packages: a smaller one that carried two kilograms (about 4.4 pounds), and a larger one that carried 3.3 kilograms (about 7.3 pounds), the maximum recommended carrying capacity for their current drone models. Prosper told me that for the direst emergencies, like mothers’ postpartum hemorrhages or venomous snakebites, where someone was screaming in agony right now on a bed of pain and the drone was their only lifeline, they would always use the smaller package to shave even more precious seconds off the travel time for the drone carrying the sorely-needed blood plasma or antivenom serum. The loading I was watching now was not one of these cases; it was a resupply of treatment to counter H. pylori, the bacteria that caused stomach ulcers.
When she was done, Crystal placed the package in one of the two red hoppers (“Emergency” and “Resupply”) leading to the outdoors drone launch area, and a robotic voice started announcing “New shipment ready. New shipment ready.” On a loop, across the base, until the package was collected to be loaded onto a drone. Prosper led me back out of the warehouse zone and outside to follow.
I saw a landing before I saw a launch. A Zipline drone zoomed in from over the horizon, then its “tail” caught in a long catch-line stretched between two poles, and it fell like a hooked fish. Two Zipline employees rushed out to retrieve it and clear that landing area, reminding me of the racing car pit crews in the movie F1.
The launch was even more impressive. A crew member performed some final checks, set a drone on a catapult angled upwards, engaged the propellers with a deep thrumming sound, and then fired the drone into the sky to give it a head start on its journey. I saw a digital dashboard of daily flights in the area tick up from 249 to 250. Check out the video I took of the launches and landing!
The Zipline Muhanga operational baseline is launching a drone within five minutes of receiving an order for medical supplies! What I was seeing was nothing less than a fully functional just-in-time delivery system for blood transfusions and antivenom, reducing wastage and annihilating unavailability. Amazon Prime for saving human lives.
The drones themselves could go 210 kilometers round-trip on one full charge. Much of their fuselage was foam: cheap, light, and surprisingly resilient at high speeds. These “Zips” had a transient individual existence: they were all were made of interchangeable parts that snapped together like Legos, and were actually partially dismantled after every single landing and reassembled before every launch to check for and replace any potential damage.
Rows and rows of batteries were charging, to be swapped in with new wings, head, and tail pieces to form a new Zip drone when needed. The Electrotech Revolution at its finest. Maybe I’ve spent too much time thinking about energy technologies, but even though the batteries were far less visual striking than the drones, simply rows of cubes in charging cubbies with glowing LEDs, they entranced me. It positively warmed my heart to see all those electrons getting stored to power live-saving flight.
In addition to the batteries within each drone, Prosper explained that the facility is built for resilient energy supply in disasters. The Zipline Muhanga drone base is connected to the Rwandan grid, but also has a backup generator, and also also has a backup building-scale battery pack that can supply full power for six hours. There’s a third Zipline drone base set to open in Rwanda in Q3 2026, and that new one will be much more heavily solarized. For context, Prosper added that as a mode of transport for medical supplies, Zipline drones emit 97% less carbon dioxide than last-mile delivery using trucks. In addition, of course, to being unbothered by traffic or flooding and more than ten times faster to arrive, saving multitudes of human lives.
Since my arrival, the Muhanga base had seen drone launches and landings happening about once every two minutes, a dizzying progression of achievement. The air-speed velocity of an unladen drone was positively phenomenal: several times I tried to take pictures of an income drone just before its landing and literally couldn’t press the button fast enough to capture an image in the second-long window after the drone became visible but before it had already been “hooked.”
Prosper described this blistering pace of work as “slow.” There were apparently relatively few orders being placed at this time (early afternoon), with a speed-up apparently likely in a few hours’ time.
Eventually, Prosper was called away to another aspect of his work, and the tour was over. I stayed on the fringes of the building just watching and photographing the drone takeoffs and landings for a while, until the security guard politely but firmly told me that it was time for me to leave.
Humanity has created achieved many feats long believed to be only possible in the domain of myth and legend: flying across oceans, eradicating plagues, landing on the moon. Now, we’re building fleets of flying protectors that can carry the materials needed to save your life right to your sickbed in less than an hour. Perhaps the most salient difference I see between these drones and, say, the angels described in many religions, is that if you pray for one of these drones to help, there’s a high probability that you’ll soon see one coming with the help you asked for. The Zips are true “machines of loving grace,” operated by a crew of big damn heroes. I feel honored to have had this chance to help share the story of their noble endeavor.
Prosper also told me that the Zipline Muhanga base stocks pig semen from five different breeds, and has so far delivered a total of over 70,000 units of pig semen to farmers across Rwanda. Each delivered unit could father eight to sixteen piglets.
Previously, Rwandan pig farmers wishing to improve their swine stock had to go fetch it themselves on motorcycles, which took hours and hours and often resulted in their sow going out of heat before they returned. The ripple effects for agricultural productivity - and thus, very directly, human health - must be enormous by now.
I’m personally a committed vegetarian, and I’ve long worked to promote plant-based and cell-based meat in developed countries, but until those cruelty-free protein sources follow the renewables track of becoming cheaper than the alternative, I would consider it deeply unethical to oppose improved access to vital macronutrients for human children in sub-Saharan Africa.
The reporting/work you are doing is simply amazing. Thanks for informing us.
Wow!! This just such great reporting on smart, tech driven life saving work!!! Rwandans are brilliant !!!