Drones to improve agriculture #africa

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.