Zipline has been delivering medical supplies to health clinics in Rwanda since October of 2016. 

 

The company has had to co-ordinate closely with governments and health ministries in Africa to achieve their desired targets. They have also hired the help of Llamasoft, whose global impact team have provided them with detailed studies on supply chains in Africa. This has played a big role in further cost-cutting based on factors such as the humanitarian nature of Zipline’s cause among many others.

 

Founder and COO of Zipline, Will Hetzler described the company’s goal in Rwanda to be maximizing the budget available to the nation to achieve maximum impact of their supply chain. This is where he credits the work done by Llamasoft to determine how goods should flow to patients, where they should be stored, and how much should be stored at each node in the supply chain.

 

Zipline extensively researched the ins and outs of taking up a project up of this magnitude in Africa before the project took flight in 2016. Several officials visited Rwanda and Tanzania to gain firsthand knowledge about what medical products are most needed in these regions and why they were not available already.

 

This information was then communicated to Zipline’s central warehouse. This helped create a tailor-made service to meet the medical needs of Rwanda. The next stage of development will see Zipline’s operations expand further into Tanzania.

 

Source : Business News Africa