Drones take flight to aid humanitarian work in Ethiopia
Training equips government partners with skills to deploy latest technology
The World Food Programme (WFP) is training government partners how to apply drone technology in humanitarian and development work in Ethiopia.
The training includes flight skills, and how to capture and interpret data that will in turn inform the design of aid projects.
This is the first training of its kind in Ethiopia, and it is being run in conjunction with the Information Network Security Agency, the government body that regulates the use of drones in the country.
Saving time and money
One of the key partners seeking to start using drones is the National Disaster Risk Management Commission (NDRMC), the government body that issues disaster warnings and coordinates emergency responses in the country.
“We are responsible for assessing the damage to crops, for instance when flooding occurs or forest fires or landslides, and we coordinate the response and rescue activities,” says Sahle Tefera, the Geographic Information System and Remote Sensing expert at NDRMC.
“Drones can make our assessments, response and rescue operations faster and more cost effective,” says Tefera.
Plans are underway for WFP and NDRMC to start deploying drones to map flood-risk zones in the country.
“This technology is particularly important for Ethiopia due to the vastness of the country,” says Pierre Lucas, Chief Air Transport Officer at WFP Ethiopia. “You can cover large amounts of ground within a short period of time.”
Using drones reduces costs for government and humanitarian actors while making precise data available to decision-makers almost in real-time.
Facing down the tsetse fly
One key issue they can tackle is the scourge of tsetse flies, which cause sleeping sickness across the southern and western parts of Ethiopia.
Aschenaki Kalssa, head of the National Institute for Control and Eradication of Tsetse Fly centre in Oromia and the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples’ Region, has a clear plan on how to use the drones that he already has.
First stop. Controlling the spread of tsetse flies in Deme valley in the south of the country. The institute breeds sterile males and releases them in infested areas. When they mate with females they do not reproduce, thus reducing the growth of the tsetse population.
“Over the last six years, we have used aircraft to release sterile males over infested areas,” says Kalssa. “This is very costly. If we use drones, we will save cash, we will save time, and be more efficient because drones can easily access valleys or mountainous areas, unlike the aircraft. With a drone, we can also quickly expand the area of coverage.”
A potential game-changer
Adisu Debele is an Agricultural Engineer with the Ministry of Agriculture. His area of expertise is “agrometeorology,” or the application of weather and climate information to increase crop production
He says that the agricultural sector can use drones in many ways including pest control, planning irrigation schemes and assessing droughts or flooding.
Food security assessments are perhaps the biggest area where drones can be a real game changer. With vast amounts of ground to cover, often riddled with infrastructural challenges, turning to technology is a clear option.
“If we had a drone in our region, we would use it to monitor livestock movement and crop production, and to map soil types and land use,” says Ubah Ahmed, Safety Net Officer for the Somali Region Agriculture Bureau.
“Currently, we drive long distances to conduct assessments, and where cars cannot access we go by foot,” says Ahmed. “A food security assessment in one woreda [district] takes about five days. With a drone, it can be done in a day or two.”
Ethiopia is the third country in Africa to benefit from this training following Madagascar and Mozambique.
Click here to learn more about WFP in Ethiopia
