Kenya: Drones to Improve Agriculture

 

Technology experts from across the globe gathered on Tuesday at the University of Nairobi under the programme Google Solve for X where the use of drones was highlighted as one way of boosting agriculture and distribution of medicines to remote areas.
Solve for X is a think tank project launched by Google in 2012 to incite collaboration to solve global issues.
During the presentations, Kola Masha, the managing director of Doreo Partners, an agriculture focused African impact investing firm explained how technology could be used to create 1 million jobs in agriculture by 2025.

He noted that the growing number of unemployed youths requires innovative ways of creating employment. He suggested advanced satellite mapping and use of drones as a solution to the problem.
Royal Society University Research Fellow Asel Sartbaeva said use of technology will boost health services especially in remote areas where medicines take long time to reach due to transportation hitches.

She said due to the fact that vaccines must be refrigerated during transportation, approximately 40 per cent of vaccines are deactivated while on the way to their destination.
Because of this, a big number of children are dying from preventable illnesses. Her solution for this problem is to coat vaccines with Silica, which is a new technology of preserving medicines being transported especially to remote areas.
Sara Menker, the founder and CEO of Gro Intelligence, a business that uses big data to enable global food security in her presentation noted the need to use algorithmic data platforms to make food globally cheap and abundant.
Markos Lemma, Iceaddis, a university-based technology hub in Addis Ababa advised on the use hyper local applied learning solutions through the organisation AfriLabs to solve the illiteracy problem.