Fighting Locusts and Conspiracies, Africa’s New Use Cases for Drones

Drones are solving real-life problems

East Africa is currently experiencing its worst locust infestation in decades.

Under normal circumstances, that would be headline news. But ‘normal’ is so last year and the region is now having to manage through a crisis within a crisis.

Locusts are very dangerous on a good day but at a time when a pandemic is already threatening food security around the continent, the last thing you need is a crop-destroying pest with a voracious appetite.

Earlier in the year BC (before corona), Mauritania tested drones to fight its own desert locust infestation. Now the Kenyan government has announced that it has relaxed restrictions and is deploying new weapons in its fight against an old enemy.

Nobody’s ever done this with desert locusts before. So we have no proven methodology for using drones for spraying on locusts.

A statement attributed to Keith Cressman, senior locust forecasting officer at the FAO.

Drones are great for doing mundane, data-rich jobs that may also be dangerous. To cope with its locust infestation, Kenya will be deploying drones equipped with cameras and mapping sensors. The goal is to feed the data back to what researchers are calling supercomputers. The data will be modelled and used to monitor the movement of swarms and the damage they inflict.

Kenya is having to use drones to cater for a shortfall in e aeroplanes typically deployed for aerial missions. Soon, drones big enough to be equipped with atomizers will spray pesticides on crops known to have locust infestations.

In nearby Rwanda, another exciting, albeit simpler, use case has been unearthed. From malaria cures to 5G causes, to religious immunity, COVID-19 has helped to birth a bucket-load of conspiracy theories. Last month, I wrote about how African governments could fight this level of disinformation with the use of reliable, low-tech information channels.

Rwanda’s government has started fitting drones with megaphones to pass reliable facts and information to the people. The drones will act like modern-day town criers. It’s a clever solution in a country where misinformation through word of mouth and traditional media is a bigger problem than through social media, only around 5% of the population uses Facebook.

Rwanda is at the forefront of drone technology in Africa. The secret is a progressive regulatory framework. Rather than the heavy-handed approach to drone regulation that exists in many parts of the continent, the Rwandan government has taken the sandbox approach by sharing a set of safety standards for operators to comply with and giving them a free hand on how to meet them.

This approach has already seen the use of drones in intriguing use cases such as drug delivery and blood delivery, as well as in the government policing the compliance to its strict social distancing guidelines.

Rwanda is dubbed the land of a thousand hills, so drones are particularly effective for its terrain. And, with a willing government, you can expect more adoption of the technology beyond logistics and surveillance.

The megaphone use case isn’t as complicated as the ones before it, but it’ll probably be no less impactful. Now if we can all come together to ensure that the technology doesn’t fall into the hands of your neighbourhood preacher.

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