E-commerce platform Jumia has partnered with Zipline International, a San Francisco drone delivery company, in rolling out time-specific cyber-shopping drop-offs to a Pan-African network which the Lagos service provider says will eventually extend to 11 countries.
Yesterday’s Spring Day announcement follows an initial pilot phase of the collaboration from one of Jumia’s West African operational hubs in Omenako, about 72 kilometres north of Accra.
The test phase in Ghana is said to have included 2 500 kilometres of combined flight distance, delivering a diverse range of e-com goods in a radius spanning 85 kilometres from the Omenako hub.
The pilot phase also focused on monitoring real-time tracking of dispatches and deliveries in an hour or less, an objective that was apparently successfully concluded.
First on the joint venture’s (JV) expansion radar is Nigeria and Cote d'Ivoire, with possible rollouts including Egypt, Morocco, Kenya, South Africa, Tunisia, Tanzania, Cameroon, Algeria and Uganda.
Apart from its facility in Omenako, Jumia says its 11-country network comprises a further 29 warehouses and more than 3 000 drop-off and pick-up stations. If all goes according to plan, this could become Africa’s most immediate e-com delivery network featuring automated technology.
The latest development is another feather in the cap for Africa’s fast-growing cyber-delivery environment after July’s announcement that Nigeria would be using drones to get medical and consumer goods to consumers living in its troubled northern state of Kaduna, a project that also involves Zipline International.
Another development out of West Africa, which confirms progressive efforts to overcome e-com-related delivery challenges for the world’s biggest continental concentration of people without physical addresses was the announcement in May that Continental Drones in Accra had entered into a JV with German drone developer Wingcopter.
The JV was described as an “ambitious partnership aimed at establishing an autonomous flying network across Africa, with express delivery as its main aim.” It could see 12 000 fixed-wing drones deployed to 49 countries over the next five years" (read this for context: https://tinyurl.com/y6kwpzmf).
