Blood and vaccines by air: Côte d’Ivoire expands its Zipline bet 🇨🇮🚁

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Ivorian health logistics is about to change scale. On September 9, the Council of Ministers approved a public-private partnership with Zipline-SARL to build a national network of drones dedicated to transporting health products — a direct extension of the pilot program running since 2023.

A fully autonomous fleet ⚙️

Zipline’s aircraft are fixed-wing drones, GPS-guided and flown entirely by onboard software, with no human intervention mid-flight. Once launched from a distribution center, they drop their cargo by parachute directly over health facilities, then return to base on their own. That autonomy is designed to route around the country’s patchy road network and keep delivery times under an hour, even during the rainy season.

Ten hubs to cover the country 🛰️

The public-private partnership, which the government acknowledged on September 9, calls for building ten storage and distribution centers. The first phase, spread over 27 months, will activate sites in Daloa, Biankouma, San Pedro, and Kouto. A second wave of six centers is set to follow in the Autonomous District of Abidjan and in the Indénié-Djuablin, Gbêkê, Kabadougou, Bélier, and Gontougo regions. The goal is to secure the flow of strategic supplies and blood products to the country’s hardest-to-reach areas.

A pilot program already proven in Daloa 📦

Since March 2023, the Daloa hub has reportedly served up to 300 health facilities within a roughly 100-kilometer radius. According to figures Zipline shared about a year ago, the company had already completed more than 20,000 deliveries in Côte d’Ivoire, with over 150 hard-to-reach facilities receiving vaccines through the service. Back in 2022, the Ministry of Health had already floated the Daloa site as a pilot, promising three more cities would get Zipline’s « mini-airports » — a promise that’s now been more than tripled.

Shared funding, regional ambitions 🌍

The infrastructure is funded by a grant from the U.S. government, with Côte d’Ivoire covering operating costs. Washington had announced, back in November 2025, a program that could mobilize up to $150 million to support Zipline’s expansion across the continent — a sign this automated air-logistics model now reaches well beyond Côte d’Ivoire alone.

So, can drones genuinely solve healthcare access in remote areas, or are they a tech band-aid on a road-infrastructure problem? Let us know in the comments.