Zipline scales Nigeria to 100M people as Ghana operations decline
Zipline is expanding its medical drone delivery network in Nigeria through 12 new hubs, extending coverage to 100 million people, while its Ghana operations are contracting. The Nigeria rollout represents one of the largest drone logistics expansions recorded on the African continent.
Drone Medicine: the country that built the world's best network and then walked away from it
Ghana pioneered this. Five years ago it had the largest medical drone delivery network on earth — a thousand urgent health supplies a day reaching communities that roads couldn't serve.
Then its government stopped paying for three of the six hubs. Half the coverage, gone.
Nigeria watched Ghana's model work, ran a small pilot, saw the results, and is now committing to 12 new hubs serving 100 million people by 2028. The lesson travelled. The funding didn't.
The technology was never the hard part. Keeping a government writing cheques for something that works quietly in the background — that's where these things die.