The government of Bayelsa State, South-South Nigeria has entered into a strategic partnership with Zipline, a logistic service provider to accelerate the movement of health equipment across the state leveraging its unmanned aerial vehicles.
Announcing this, the Governor of Bayelsa State, Douye Diri said the partnership aimed at leveraging Zipline’s drone technology to deliver essential medicines, blood and other medical commodities to health facilities within the state.
The Governor disclosed that Zipline will establish a distribution hub in Bayelsa State for the introduction, operation, and maintenance of a just-in-time instant logistics solutions to ensure that essential drugs, blood and a selection of other life-saving medical supplies are available to the State health facilities in Bayelsa State.
“We remain well committed to delivering an aggressive agenda of building a dependable health delivery system in Bayelsa, part of which has given birth to this partnership. We envisage that this partnership will remain one of the most significant ways of removing the access barriers that mitigates easy delivery of medical commodities to our health facilities;” he assured.
He added that when the distribution hub is completed, the service will operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, day or night, from the distribution center which will be equipped with Zipline’s proprietary fleet of drones.
Even distribution of on-demand medical commodities to remote and hard-to-reach areas do not only safe lives but also become a significant way of managing waste that happens as a result of expiry of medicines.
Thus, Zipline is pleased to partner with the people and Government of Bayelsa to advance instant, autonomous healthcare delivery across the state.
“This partnership is an important milestone for Zipline as we scale smart, safe and just-in-time delivery technology and transform how goods move around the globe,” said Zipline CEO, Keller Rinaudo.
The process for the construction of the distribution hub has began so as to stay stay within the agreed timelines.
“We are committed to rapidly meeting our side of this agreement, part of which entails building of a distribution hub from where we will store and deliver the medical commodities and employ hundreds local team members from Bayelsa. Our system is well tested across Africa and the United States, and there is no doubt that it is a giant step in expanding universal healthcare access in Nigeria,” Zipline CEO promised.