The Drones Doing Good Alliance (DDG) in partnership with the Smart Africa Digital Academy (SADA) hosted a workshop exploring ways to unlock the full potential of drone technology in Africa through local manufacturing and smart regulations.
The capacity building workshop, hosted on June 8th, included representatives from government bodies such as African Civil Aviation Authorities and ICT Ministries.
The workshop provided an overview of the state of the drone sector in Africa. It highlighted why cost-effectiveness is one of the key challenges today and how identifying smart solutions that promote localisation is pivotal to achieve this. Three levers were identified to achieve this:
- Supporting local operators that are already well embedded in local ecosystems
- Catalysing local manufacturing
- Developing smart regulations that go beyond cut and paste solutions and are well adapted to country needs
The workshop had an excellent line up of speakers including Dr. Hans Peter Thamm who has close to 20 years experience flying drones in Africa, Markus Farner and Lorenzo Murzilli who have worked extensively at the Swiss Civil Aviation Authority, a world leader in drone regulation, Tendai Pasipanodya a systems change expert experienced in developing catalytic multi-stakeholder partnerships and Temie Giwa-Tubosun, founder of Lifebank a health tech and logistics company.
Follow-up sessions will be organized for curated partners on three key topics: drone regulation, drone services and hardware. The DDG Alliance works to address ecosystem challenges and identify cost-efficient African-driven solutions while increasing local capacity. The DDG Alliance is led by Dr Hans Peter Thamm, founder of Geo-Technic, and Tendai Pasipanodya, Director at Endeva.
