A vision of 2020 Afrotech
“Roads! Where we’re going we don’t need roads!”—Back to the Future
I’m in Somalia, interviewing an al-Qaeda Shabab commander on a stretch of the malarial Jubba River. It is 2009, famine has swept the country and people are starving. Girls sent to the river to fetch water are being eaten by crocodiles. Waterborne diseases are killing malnourished infants. The Shabab are decapitating their enemies in surrounding villages. It is impossible to imagine a society more broken down, yet the jihadist before me sits in his plastic chair with several mobile phones operating off separate towers.
This is the first time I clearly understand how important mobile phone technology has become in Africa. The value of the system gives the technology a resilience that machinery has historically lacked here.
Five years later, I’m in Samburu, Kenya, to create another resilient technology in Africa: The world’s first commercial cargo drone route, to be operational by 2016. It will be about 80 kilometers long and will connect several towns and villages. The first cargo drones will carry small payloads—probably units of blood to keep alive children who otherwise would perish. But they will quickly evolve into larger and heavier craft until they can carry 20 kilos or more over distances of several hundred kilometers. The purpose of the first route will be to show the value of cargo drones in Africa and beyond—and to raise money to build other routes. This first route is a spectral version of the Liverpool and Manchester railway.
J.M. Ledgard
J.M. Ledgard is director of a future Africa initiative at EPFL and a longtime Africa correspondent of The Economist. His novel Submergence was a New York Times Book of 2013.
I am a novelist, but I am also director of a future Africa initiative at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and for the last decade I traveled Africa as a foreign correspondent for The Economist. I was among those who reported that Africa is rising, not falling. I came to see that the most important stories in Africa are not news stories at all. Rather, it is the story of explosive human population growth and extermination of other species on the one hand; and on the other, the introduction of advanced technologies capable of reordering time and space. Indeed, the mobile phone is the reason I now spend time in robotics, computing, and mathematics labs.
The mobile phone contributed more to anti-poverty efforts than any single development intervention. Some were slow to see the technology’s possibilities in Africa. They argued handsets always would be too expensive for the poor and besides, how could a village incapable of taking care of a grain silo ever look after a mobile phone tower? But the price of handsets came down and investments in towers showed that a system valuable enough will protect itself.
Even telecoms underestimated the market. The business plan for the Kenyan telecom Safaricom in 2003 was to have 500,000 mobile phone subscribers by 2013: traders, priests, taxi drivers, prostitutes—people willing to pay a premium to stay in touch. Safaricom now has 21 million users. To emphasize: The uptake of advanced technology was 42 times greater than Safaricom expected.
I know that even if we deride change, even if we stand still, shielding our eyes, covering our ears, the future will be radical.
When I think of what cargo drones can, and should, be, I think of the Nokia 1100 mobile phone. More than 50 million Nokia 1100s were sold in Africa. Smart, rugged and cheap, the handset was known as the Kalashnikov of communication. But where the machine gun tore at the fabric of society the handset created new possibilities.
J.M. Ledgard
I keep a picture of the Nokia 1100 pinned up by my desk as proof of the paradox of advanced technologies that undergirds cargo drones and the early 21st century: A community will have access to a flying robot even though it will not have access to clean water, or security, or the ability to keep its girls in school. What is technically scalable will be scaled, what is not will have to be fought for, household by household. What will improve lives in Africa most easily is a technology intervention that is massively expandable.
Let me detail here what I mean by cargo drones and why I think hoisting time-dependent goods into the sky and moving them about with a flying robot is, like the mobile phone before it, a good idea in Africa—and beyond.
“You Want to Put My Donkey in the Sky!”
“What I required was something cheap and small and hardy, and of a stolid and peaceful temper, and all these requisites pointed to a donkey.”— Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes
For many people, drone is an ugly word. It evokes a whining sound, something insectile. The general dislike of drones is understandable. It is a new technology, used largely for killing or peeping. But these early negative feelings will shift as we embrace more constructive, positive uses for the technology. Within eight years, drones will take over search operations at sea. Never again will a coast guard helicopter go blindly into the night in search of a sinking ship. Instead, it will be guided by a drone sent ahead. Drones will monitor the well-being of crops and animals. They will be used in mapping, counting, policing, and sports. And they will lift things.
I spent a moonlit evening last year around a campfire in a Samburu manyatta in northern Kenya. The stars wheeled above us, and we could trace the course of the satellites. The manyatta was circled with a wall of thorns to keep out the lions and hyenas. The nearest road was several hours drive away by Land Cruiser. We were trying to explain to a Samburu elder the concept of a flying robot programmed to deliver whatever you wanted. The Samburu was straining to understand the term robot. A mechanical creature, I said, not a beast, not a camel. It was slow going. At last he leaned back and laughed. “I see! You want to put my donkey in the sky!” He had many donkeys. The Samburu like to load them with water and firewood. They walk steadily down dried up river beds, over mountains, through brush. My colleague, Simon, and I knew instantly he was right. We really did want to put his donkey in the sky.
The donkeys of Samburu. Simon Johnson
The qualities of a donkey resemble what is required of a cargo drone: surefooted, dependable, intelligent, able to deal with dust and heat, cheap, uncomplaining. My choice of the name donkey for cargo drones is deliberate. A donkey is not a Pegasus, associated with speed. It does not bomb, it does not monitor. It carries stuff from here to there, and that is all. The first donkey routes presage the future spectral railways in the sky, but they also are the equivalent of the donkey paths that wend the wooded mountains in some parts of the world, crest at a remote village, then wind down the other side.
Why We Need Cargo Donkeys
There will never be enough cash for Africa to build out its roads. The continent’s sparse road network reflects the newness of place and the utter failure of colonial and post-colonial rule, which was conceived to export treasure to richer markets, hardly considering of a community to trade over the next hill. Africa is vast.
The Economist, with permission
There is still no road spanning the continent east to west. Existing roads have deteriorated so much that, by some estimates, an hour’s travel in Congo at independence in 1960 is the equivalent of a day’s travel today. The continent cannot speak to itself economically: only 15 percent of trade is inter-African. Donkeys will call the bluff of governments committed to regional free trade by overflying borders.
Although there will be contraband, thieving, the tracking of donkey cargo will be more transparent and the tax revenues more certain than road transport. The continent’s shortfall on annual public infrastructure spending is $50 billion and rising. There is no money for tunnels and not enough for bridges and bypasses, let alone simple road maintenance. Paving secondary roads is more expensive per kilometer than paving longer arterials and costs have risen sharply in the last decade, with frequent budget overruns of 100 percent or more. Economists have estimated that $1 spent on roads in Africa returns $4 in productivity. How much better value would $1 spent on cargo drone routes be?
Google Project X
Fear of drones falling from the sky should be set against the carnage on African roads. Donkeys can save lives by flying instead of driving. Admittedly, this is a somewhat cold and actuarial argument, since it is likely that some people eventually will be killed by falling, skidding, or exploding drones. Nevertheless, deaths from transporting the goods by drone will be a fraction of those occurring on the roads. Death by motor vehicle is the third highest cause of death in Africa after malaria and HIV-Aids. The continent has 2 percent of the world’s motor vehicles, but 16 percent the world’s traffic deaths.
The Time Is Now
CG rendering of Project Icarus by Mark Rademaker of Matt Jefferies
The next decade will be among the most decisive in Africa’s history. With present fertility rates, the continent will have 2.7 billion people by 2050, up from 228 million in 1950. To have a chance, African economies must quickly turn that growth into manufacturing jobs. The problem is that though these economies are growing (albeit too slowly), they are not transforming. In key economies like Nigeria, Kenya, and Senegal, manufacturing is dominated by small, informal firms. The poorest countries seem to be de-industrialising. New factories, as in Ethiopia, will not offset the dumping on Africa of cheap finished goods. There never has been an African automaker of any size. Almost every motor vehicle on the continent was built elsewhere. 1
Simply put, Africa is not catching up.
The biggest risk for Africa is the unmet expectations of its youth. Half the population is under 19. The ratio of African youth to European youth will increase from 2.2:1 to 4:1 before 2025. The World Bank suggests that 75 percent of these young Africans will fail to find a salaried job in the next decade. Most will survive on day labor or subsistence farming. They will not know where their next paycheck is coming from. They will be easily knocked flat by mishaps or illnesses. Yet this generation of Africans will be more educated than any before. Most will have access to wearable and implanted computing devices more powerful than any smartphone. They will tap into an almost free stream of information and entertainment that, for some, will effectively merge the physical and virtual worlds.
The persistence of youth unemployment coupled with an understanding of what they are missing will produce a rise in radical political and religious groups across Africa, of which Boko Haram in northern Nigeria is both proof and forewarning. Other elements will exacerbate this general insecurity, including widespread mental and physical stunting as a result of childhood malnutrition and the depressive economic effects of hopelessness. This will be compounded by the risks caused by soil exhaustion and desertification, the elimination of insects needed for pollination, and the impact of climate change on food security.
Yet, the cities new Africans will inhabit have yet to be built. And in many ways Africa is rich. It harbors treasures of food, water, and minerals. It has more genetic diversity of our own and other species than anywhere else on the planet. It is the mother continent. It is central to the past and future of our species. And it is coming online alongside new technologies.
As fast as Africa grows, robotics will grow still faster. The planetary application of advanced technology will necessarily reach, and empower, Africa. Project Icarus plans to launch the first interstellar spacecraft by 2060, probably from a launchpad in Africa. If we recalibrate donkeys according to the ambitions of Icarus, they appear modest and self-explanatory.
How Donkeys Will Work
Afrotech
In the early years there will be different airframes, each with their advantages. The most common probably will be drones that can take off vertically like a helicopter and fly like airplanes to save energy like Google’s experimental drones. But there also will be fixed- and soft-wing designs, parasails, zeppelins, and super-sized quad- and octocopters. Eventually, they will carry donkey-sized loads at more than 80 kilometers an hour.
Cargo drones are a supplementary transport system, not a disruptive one. You cannot yet move people by drone. They aren’t for very small, or very large loads. Drones are a medium-sized vehicle moving medium-sized loads a medium distances between communities of medium size. To be seen as valuable to these communities, drones must help create jobs—and not just through the productivity gains they afford, but through their construction, use, and maintenance.
To match the scale of the Nokia 1100, donkeys must be built with fewer parts, easier maintenance and lower cost than any aerial vehicle yet conceived. The unit cost must be on par with a decent motorbike, around $4,000. Several trends have converged to make this possible: Mass production of parts for the smartphone industry foremost, but also pervasive cloud computing, wireless data links, open-source design along with new powertrain technologies and local manufacturing. Nevertheless, combining low purchase and operating costs with the performance needed for such an endeavor remains a huge engineering challenge.
Some assumptions must be met. The first is donkeys can be made safer than manned flight. Cargo drones must be capable of flying entirely unmanned, without even a ground-based pilot, and landing instantly and safely in an emergency. They must be able to deploy airbags and parachutes in the event of failure. And they must do all of this while matching the performance of organizations like British charity Riders.org, which has in five years ridden African health ministry motorbikes 50,000 kilometers without a preventable breakdown. The second assumption is that these drones will be silent and attractive so people seeing them overhead will regard them neutrally or with pleasure. And they must be quiet.
What is it to be an attractive drone? They might have a sheen and colors that camouflage them against the sky, or cause them to shimmer like a shard of the firmament. They might draw on biorobotics to imitate birds, dragonflies, or the movement of an octopus under water. In all cases, they would avoid settlements, flying instead over rivers and jungles. On every route, they will be less intrusive on the landscape than electric pylons and wind turbines.
This will take time and experimentation, and as tall an order as it seems, Google and others are working toward it. Industry standards for donkeys will rely on technology transfer from industry as well as on invention and tinkering by young African engineers and hardware hackers. For the first routes, donkeys will be flown in groups to better deliver multiple units of blood, vaccines, and medical diagnostics. Their initial size will be limited by the battery technology and the need to prove donkeys can be both safe and secure. The regulatory, security and insurance risks are significant. Government will have to maintain oversight of loading and the ability to bring a drone down in an emergency. But the biggest hurdle to the widespread adoption of this technology is the emotional demand of having it flying overhead.
Here, I find it helpful to think about sky.
What Is Sky Anyway?
As a species we have hardly begun to consider what is overhead. We have no word to describe the volumetric space above us. Whatever the language, sky invariably is not about sky at all. We see only what is on it, like stage scenery. Virgil speaks of sky as an extended void through which you shoot a fleet arrow. This approaches our modern sense of sky as something to move through, to foreshorten, and our vertiginous fear of it.
We talk about atmosphere, stratosphere, airspace.
But none of the words say much about the porousness between the rooftops and the clouds, the bit of the sky we breathe, walk through, and look out upon. The English word sky comes from the Old Norse word sky meaning cloud. In Old English the word became scio, meaning region of clouds. For those living in England, this made sense. The English sky is heavy, invariably overcast and dramatic, the clouds low and dark. In Old English heofon, meaning heaven, was interchangeable with sky. We still talk about the heavens opening. In German, the word himmel means both sky and heaven. That reinforces the view of the clouds as the home of the gods, latterly of Christ, his angels, and hell being in the magma below our feet, and the ground being the present realm of volition and purpose. There is some discomfort in us, of not wanting to get anything between our heads and the source of light and ascension.
But the point is there is plenty of space up there. There are entire continents up there for drones to traverse. The sky above Sudan is stacked with virtual Sudans.
Afrotech
How might a donkey route look? The easiest way to picture it is to take the Eiffel Tower and draw a line from the top of the tower. Donkeys will fly roughly at that Eiffel height, in what I call the lower sky. The routes will be geofenced: donkeys will only be able to fly in an air corridor about 200 meters wide and 150 meters high. Busier routes will resemble a high-speed ski gondola, without cables or supporting structures.
Every small town will have its own clean energy donkey station like the one pictured below. Traffic to and from it will be largely on foot or bicycle. These stations will serve as the petrol station of the near future. They will incorporate postal and courier services. They will provide business opportunities for African startups and for architects. In contrast to the concrete petrol stations of the colonial period, donkey stations could nudge communities away from settlements strung out alongside roads to something safer and quieter. Since donkeys eventually will operate on batteries, the renewable energy arrays needed for clean recharging also will power surrounding homes and businesses.
The Donkey Has a Killer App
Afrotech
I have identified 80 kilometer routes in Tanzania, Uganda, and Rwanda. Other prospective countries for early routes are Angola, Zambia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Namibia, and South Africa. Routes can be strung together to extend range. For example, Rwanda could set up a route from the town of Gitarama over the Nyungwe forest to Lake Kivu and down to Bukavu, Congo. A country as compact and hilly as Rwanda can quickly draw routes across its lower sky and intersect them to most improve health and economic outcomes. My future Africa initiative will get the first route going. An associated fund based in Africa and Switzerland will push for research into the robotics, engineering, logistics, and law related to donkeys. It also will push for the establishment of an international agency that will set global norms for the use of donkeys and other civilian drones.
I anticipate three phases to the technology.
In Phase 1, starting in 2016, drones will serve hospitals and humanitarian emergencies. Other early adopters will deliver small payloads to government offices, mines, oil and gas installations, ranches and conservancies. In Phase 2, industrial sweetspots such as the spare parts industry in southeast Nigeria will be connected to cities by donkey routes—just as the Liverpool and Manchester railway connected the first city of the industrial age with the Atlantic. Companies of building and mining equipment will stock their large inventory of spare parts using donkeys carrying 10 kilo payloads.
Phase 1 and 2 would be enough to make donkeys useful contributors. But the real reason for the technology is Phase 3, when donkeys will better connect businesses with customers across Africa.
Donkeys will help small companies grow through e-commerce. Wherever you have impecunious young people ubiquitously connected to the internet, e-commerce is desperate to happen. This is even more true in Africa, where, for various reasons, the retail high street will never be built out and where existing sales of electronics, appliances and most other imported goods are dominated by supermarkets with limited stocks and high margins. Donkeys can extend the range of e-commerce beyond big cities. Amazon, in seeking government approval to test the latest iteration of its Prime Air drones, said 86 percent of the packages it delivers weigh less than 2.3 kilos. While the instant gratification and last mile delivery proposed by Amazon is not as relevant in poorer countries, the coupling of drones with warehouses is. Within a decade, donkey stations will have shops where people might purchase goods on a tablet or mobile phone and have them delivered by donkey from a distant warehouse. In effect, the back room of the village shop will stretch out of sight, with unlimited choices and low prices.
All of this is possible because the donkey has a killer app: Repetition. A donkey can make many journeys through the day and into the night. The most populated portion of Africa is Equatorial so every day, and every night, is the same length. Donkeys will fly through the night, over land no truck could ever cross, soaring through dark, bearing goods for the new day. We’ll soon have 9 billion people on the planet, all of them vying for limited resources. Unmanned flight is inevitable.
This future will be radical. And yes, cargo drones will be useful in wealthy countries with dispersed populations. But the biggest opportunity is in Africa. Many people are going to save a lot of lives and make a lot of money putting the donkey there first.
1Dani Rodrik NBER paper: w 20188—“Industrialisation in low income countries is running out of steam considerably earlier than has traditionally been the case.”
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