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The 1965 film comedy Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, centres on a fictional air race between Paris and London in 1910 that offered competitors the chance to become "number one in the air" and win a £10,000 prize.

More than a century later, there is another race to be "number one in the air", but it has nothing to do with British crackpot pilots flying across the English Channel. The new arena for aerial supremacy is Africa, where drone developers are fighting in the skies.


Whether it's tracking poachers, monitoring potential terrorists or patrolling pirate-run waters, governments from Ghana to Ethiopia to Uganda are using drones as an economic alternative to a fully equipped air force.

Commercial drone technology has strong potential here to help overcome the limitations of the continent's transportation infrastructure and deliver goods and services in remote or regions Kamal Bhattacharya, IBM Research

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The militarisation of African skies comes with the full backing of the US, which provides advisers and sells drones, but it is another aspect of African life that provides a more uplifting story of how drones are beginning to revolutionise everyday life.

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The potential of drones in the West and out of Africa has been defined by Amazon's Jeff Bezos. At the end of 2013 he announced "Amazon Prime Air", a programme that promised deliveries of 2.5kg within 30 minutes if customers were within 10 miles of the Amazon fulfilment centre.

While there is divided opinion about whether Bezos' statement was Amazon's immediate strategy or future-gazing that owed more to PR than reality, in Africa the notion of delivery by drones is being taken very seriously indeed.

The extraordinary acceleration of mobile phone ownership in Africa has transformed the continent. According to a December 2013 report by TA Telecom, mobile phone penetration is now more than 80 percent and means that fixed-line internet infrastructure is unlikely to happen.

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The same is likely to go for transportation. Why build expensive roads to remote rural locations when drones can do the job just as well? The market is there if this can be achieved. In Nigeria, where there is no postal service, ecommerce companies such as Konga and Jumia are undergoing explosive growth in a country of almost 170 million people.


This growth is likely to be further accelerated if these companies, or one that nobody has heard of, can harness drone delivery and become the "Amazon of Africa". The African trade routes of the near-future are almost certainly going to be in the air, not on unreliable roads or routes that have yet to be built.

Jonathan Ledgard is the Director of Future Africa at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology based in Lausanne. As an ex-correspondent of The Economist for nearly 20 years, of which the last ten were in Africa, Ledgard understands Africa.

He cites previous mobile user predictions as evidence of how quickly things move there. Safaricom is one of the biggest operators on the continent and now has more than 17 million subscribers, a number that nobody predicted. "The most optimistic figures of the Safaricom business model in 2002 were 400,000 users in the next decade and while drone delivery won't solve the question of land rights, food security or water rights, it could have a huge influence. "Africa's population will double in our working lives and its economy will quadruple in that time and while a $15-20 (£9-12) basic mobile phone is a powerful piece of technology, the future for Africans is robotics. Precision mechanical engineering is not Africa's forte, but there is something about Africa that takes a relatively normal set of mechanisms, then hacks and improves them," he says.

Robotic drone delivery in Africa is likely to be accelerated by this year's Flying Donkey Challenge, an escalating series of sub-challenges held annually in Africa. World-leading roboticists, engineers, regulators, entrepreneurs, logisticians, and designers win substantial grants by advancing the safety, durability, legality, profitability and friendliness of cargo robots.

These sub-challenges will culminate in a race of these "flying donkeys" around Mount Kenya in under 24 hours, delivering and collecting 20 kilo payloads along the way. The winner(s) will collect a multi-million dollar prize and a helping hand up the ladder to ecommerce domination. "Africa is fast becoming an adopter of cutting-edge technologies to overcome its infrastructure gap. Commercial drone technology has strong potential here to help overcome the limitations of the continent's transportation infrastructure and deliver goods and services in remote or regions -- spurring new models for business and service delivery," explained Kamal Bhattacharya, Director, IBM Research, Africa. "But for drone technology to meet its potential in Africa, we need thorough understanding of the impact of factors such as weather, terrain, demographics and transportation networks; an area that IBM is researching with its latest cognitive computing systems."


Interestingly, it is not the technology of flying donkey robotics that is demanding, rather getting reliability, expectations and price points right. One way of doing this is by comparing drones with the fleets of motorbikes that serve African health ministries, a strong bellwether for a drone business model.

According to Ledgard at Future Africa, in 2020 the purchase price of a flying donkey will be less than $2,500 (£1,500). Running costs including training, logistics, fuel, spare parts will be under 40 cents per kilometre and able to travel 50,000 kilometres over five years without a major breakdown. This model compares favourably to the number of health ministry motorbikes that are ruined by the state of African roads. "Infrastructure is without a doubt one of the greatest challenges facing the continent. Commerce each and every day is held back by poor infrastructure, from roads and rail, to water systems and ICT networks, costing Africa an estimated $40 billion (£24.3 billion) in lost GDP every year," said Angolan philanthropist Álvaro Sobrinho, chairman of UK charity Planet Earth Institute. "No idea should be off the table, delivery drones have the potential to offer a significant boost to African commerce. Delivering and receiving goods in this way could offer a crucial, all year round lifeline to business."

More than a century later, the race to be "number one in the air" will create an ecommerce behemoth and bring many changes to business in Africa. Drones may not be magnificent machines compared to the flying machines at the beginning of last century, but their influence will be felt for the rest of the 21st Century.