Africa Leads the World on Drone Delivery: Flights to Begin in Tanzania in 2018

Drone delivery is finally getting off the ground. And the action is happening in East Africa. Zipline, a pioneering drone startup that began delivering blood packs to Rwanda's remote hospitals in October 2016, today announced a major expansion into Tanzania. In early 2018 the company will begin flying its delivery drones to more than 1000 health care facilities around Tanzania, bringing urgently needed medicines and supplies to big hospitals and tiny rural clinics alike. Keller Rinaudo, founder and CEO of Zipline, says that "the richest companies in the world" are still trying to figure out how to make instant drone delivery work as a commercial service (as IEEE Spectrum has noted in it's coverage of Google's Project Wing and Amazon's Prime Air).