Wingcopter announced as one of the winners of German Government’s €24 million COVID-19 hackathon

Wing­copter has been named one of nine win­ners of the Ger­man Gov­ern­men­t’s €24 mil­lion COVID-19 hackathon, the #Smart­De­vel­op­men­tHack.

Through this glob­al hackathon, the Ger­man Min­istry for Eco­nom­ic Coop­er­a­tion and Devel­op­ment (BMZ) solicit­ed inno­v­a­tive dig­i­tal solu­tions to tack­le the chal­lenges caused by the coro­n­avirus out­break in low- and mid­dle-income coun­tries.

After two intense days of hack­ing, Wing­copter with its part­ners UNICEF and the African Drone & Data Acad­e­my (ADDA) impressed the jury with the con­cept to use Wing­copter drones to improve health sup­ply chains dur­ing COVID-19 and to open up new long-term oppor­tu­ni­ties for youth in Africa. The funds grant­ed will be split between Wing­copter and UNICEF/ADDA.

The line­up of sup­port­ers includ­ed the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion (through Euro­peAid), GIZ, the Bill & Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion, Smart Africa, Tech­ni­cal Uni­ver­si­ty Munich, Ora­cle, SAP, and oth­ers. Each win­ning team will be award­ed up to €3 mil­lion to imple­ment their projects in-coun­try.

“Wingcopter’s long-term strat­e­gy involves devel­op­ing a sus­tain­able edu­ca­tion plat­form for youth to enable them to par­tic­i­pate in the rapid­ly grow­ing drone mar­ket, offer­ing new job and income oppor­tu­ni­ties and ulti­mate­ly improv­ing their qual­i­ty of life”, explains Tom Plüm­mer, the com­pa­ny’s Co-Founder and CEO.

“By pro­vid­ing both the­o­ret­i­cal and prac­ti­cal train­ing on our drones, we will help young peo­ple to enter the indus­tri­al drone sec­tor faster and bet­ter equipped. This con­cept is ful­ly in line with our vision and we are hap­py that the award recog­nis­es and sup­ports this approach.”

Wingcopter’s pro­posed con­cept was select­ed from thou­sands of appli­ca­tions, and envi­sions set­ting up a local­ly oper­at­ed deliv­ery drone net­work in Malawi to sup­port the local health­care sys­tem, giv­ing on-demand access to med­ical sup­plies such as COVID-19 test kits or vac­cines (once avail­able).

In par­al­lel, the part­ners will build local capac­i­ty through two dis­tinct train­ing pro­grams for 160 Malaw­ian youth. Wing­copter will devel­op a vir­tu­al edu­ca­tion­al plat­form and pro­vide select­ed stu­dents with applic­a­ble tech­ni­cal equip­ment and pre-installed soft­ware that requires no inter­net con­nec­tion.

By learn­ing to assem­ble, oper­ate, and main­tain Wing­copter drones accom­pa­nied with data ana­lyt­ics skills pro­vid­ed by ADDA, Malaw­ians will be equipped with the tools to pur­sue new entre­pre­neur­ial or job oppor­tu­ni­ties, grant­i­ng them new eco­nom­ic per­spec­tives.

After prov­ing the concept’s via­bil­i­ty and suc­cess­ful imple­men­ta­tion in Malawi, Wing­copter and UNICEF plan to adapt the con­cept and scale to Rwan­da. 

As one of the poor­est coun­tries in the world, a wide­spread coro­na-induced lock­down would cause a sub­stan­tial loss of eco­nom­ic activ­i­ties in Malawi, cost­ing mil­lions of peo­ple their liveli­hoods, while expo­sure to the virus could ulti­mate­ly cost a sub­stan­tial num­ber their lives.

So far, African coun­tries have rather few con­firmed COVID-19 infec­tions, but med­ical experts are con­cerned that the num­ber could be high­er giv­en the lack of test­ing. A wide­spread out­break would have a severe impact on the already strained African health­care sys­tems as well as major eco­nom­ic reper­cus­sions.

Wing­copter has been active in Malawi and oth­er African coun­tries before, sig­nif­i­cant­ly short­en­ing patients’ wait­ing times by deliv­er­ing med­ical com­modi­ties to hard-to-reach areas by drone. The eVTOL drones com­bine the advan­tages of mul­ti­copters (VTOL) and fixed-wing air­planes (fast and effi­cient for­ward flight) due to its patent­ed tilt-rotor tech­nol­o­gy.

At the point of des­ti­na­tion, the drones can low­er the trans­port­ed goods through a winch mech­a­nism, requir­ing no land­ing infra­struc­ture, before autonomous­ly return­ing to the point of depar­ture.

Only recent­ly, Wing­copter won first place in the Emer­gency Deliv­ery cat­e­go­ry at the World Bank-spon­sored Lake Kivu Chal­lenge in Rwan­da, open­ing up fur­ther pos­si­bil­i­ties for future coop­er­a­tion on the African con­ti­nent.