Ten years ago, drones were largely absent from development conversations on the continent. Where they did appear, it was often with suspicion: drones were seen as expensive, foreign, hard to regulate, and disconnected from local  realities.

Today, the narrative has changed. Use cases have expanded to development and impact fields, and the technology is being leveraged by innovators in Africa to help shape a more sustainable and inclusive future.

In agriculture, a sector that employs roughly two-thirds of Africa’s workforce, drones are not just flying cameras but key decision tools. They’re opening doors previously only open to large commercial farms. Previously, crop health diagnostics, irrigation mapping, and yield forecasting were abstract concepts for many. Drones can make these inputs more accessible, so even small-scale farmers can make better decisions with fewer resources.

In climate action and environmental monitoring, drones are becoming extensions of human decision-making, relieving limited capacity. They don’t replace human judgment; they widen it. From land-use mapping to conservation tracking and disaster early-warning systems, they allow governments and communities to see faster, respond earlier, and plan with evidence instead of estimates.

In healthcare, the shift has perhaps been the most impactful. When Rwanda-based Zipline began delivering blood and medical supplies to remote facilities in 2016, it reframed drones as critical infrastructure capable of saving lives. Delivery times to emergencies dropped from hours to minutes, lives followed and the status of drones shifted from experimental to systemic. Now they’ve expanded across the continent, scaling their impact with every flight.

For innovation to be local and impactful, support must be intentional and collaborative.

That’s the logic of the support we’ve been providing as part of the Innovate Africa Challenge on Civil Drones — a multi-phase initiative supporting civil drone solutions for agriculture, green infrastructure, and climate action. 

Intention and collaboration are its core. The challenge is part of the Triangular Cooperation for Digital Innovation Made in Africa programme, funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), and delivered in collaboration with Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH and the Smart Africa African Union Development Agency-NEPAD, with support from Impact Hub Kigali and Impact Hub Abidjan.

These startups are now refining systems meant to work in real conditions: technologies that can be maintained locally, integrated into existing workflows, and deployed where outcomes are measurable. 

This is true for both target countries for the implementation phase: Rwanda and Côte d’Ivoire — two countries that have deliberately aligned policy, innovation, and private sector participation.

Rwanda’s performance-based regulatory environment has already shown what’s possible when governments remove friction instead of adding it. Côte d’Ivoire’s pro-business reforms and openness to private-sector solutions have created similar conditions. Neither context is perfect. Both are instructive.

Their ventures are now approaching the final stage of the Innovate Africa Challenge on Civil Drones, where one solution will  receive up to €50,000 in funding to implement their solution.