The Director-General for Ghana Health Service, Dr Anthony Nsiah Asare, has said drone services introduced by the Akufo-Addo led government will create more job opportunities for the Ghanaian youth.

According to him, the drones services will be delivering critical vaccines, blood, and other life-saving medicines to remote parts of Ghana via a startup through Zipline.

Drones will then fly in from four distribution centers, hover over health posts and drop deliveries using tiny parachutes.

“Drone service is a good idea by the government it will help in ensuring health care and is accessible everywhere in the country and also creates job opportunities for many Ghanaian Youth,” Dr. Nsiah Asare exclusively told Lawyer Ohene Gyan, host of ‘Pae Mu Ka‘ on Accra based Kingdom FM 107.7

“There are some hospitals, including health centers and maternity homes, that are also piloting electronic healthcare delivery in their facilities; we want to ensure that all health facilities move from manual to electronic service delivery by 2020,” he added.

According to him, the drones services introduced by the government will create more employment opportunities in areas of Technicians, and IT expert which will help in the management of drones services to be accessible in Ghana.

In the effort, the California-based company, which is expanding its existing network of unmanned aerial vehicles beyond Rwanda to Ghana, is also partnering with global vaccine alliance company Gavi, the social arm of UPS, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and bio-pharmaceutical giant Pfizer.

The Omenako Service Centre, the first of four planned centres, will supply these products to facilities located in the whole of the Eastern Region, and parts of the Volta, Ashanti, Central, and Greater Accra Regions. Three other centres are expected to be completed this year to cover most of Ghana.

The centre, which will start operations by the end of October 2019, brings to two the number of distribution centres in the country.

The ‘Fly-To-Save-A-Life Project’, a collaboration between the Ministry of Health and Zipline Technologies, will provide a rapid response to medical emergencies, especially in hard to reach areas, through the flying of unmanned drones to supply 12 routine and emergency services as well as 148 lifesaving medical products selected by the Ministry of Health.

Up to 12 routine and emergency vaccines will be available, including shots for yellow fever, polio, measles, meningitis, and tetanus, as well as 148 blood products and other critical medicines. The drones fly autonomously and can carry up to 1.8 kilograms of cargo, GAVI said.

Zipline said a similar but smaller project had made more than 13,000 deliveries of blood products since it was launched in Rwanda in 2016 – about a third of them for emergency life-saving treatment.

Background

The President of the Republic, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, has commissioned the country’s second medical drone distribution center in Mpanya, in Asante Mampong, in the Ashanti Region.

At the commissioning ceremony on Thursday, 10th October, 2019, on day 2 of his 3-day tour of the Ashanti Region, President Akufo-Addo stated that the second distribution center is part of Government’s broader commitment to expanding the reach of the medical drone delivery service, and ensuring that no Ghanaian is left behind in access to essential medicines.

Since the commencement of the operations of the first medical drone distribution center in Omenako, in the Eastern Region, over 1,000 flights have been made, with over five thousand (5,000) products delivered.