Zipline and Jumia collaborate to pioneer drone delivery of thousands of products to millions of homes across Africa

Zipline, a lead­ing drone deliv­ery com­pa­ny and Jumia, a major African e‑commerce plat­form, announced last week a part­ner­ship to deliv­er many thou­sands of dif­fer­ent prod­ucts by drone to people’s homes across Africa, reports a press release. A pilot pro­gram was launched a few months ago in Ghana. The tri­al has proven very suc­cess­ful.

The release states, “This col­lab­o­ra­tion will inte­grate Zipline’s auto­mat­ed, on-demand deliv­ery sys­tem with Jumia’s exist­ing dis­tri­b­u­tion net­work to enable cus­tomers to receive instant trans­porta­tion of exact­ly the prod­ucts they want, exact­ly when they want them and from the com­fort of their homes.”

Apoor­va Kumar, COO of Jumia, commented,“The part­ner­ship allows us to offer our con­sumers on-demand deliv­ery of the prod­ucts they need… instant­ly. Whether they’re order­ing elec­tron­ics, fash­ion, health and beau­ty, or oth­er cat­e­gories, Zipline will pro­vide a fast and con­ve­nient ser­vice.”

Apoor­va Kumar

He con­tin­ued, “This will sup­port Jumia’s com­mit­ment to sus­tain­abil­i­ty and inno­va­tion and pro­vide much-need­ed access to rur­al and remote areas where con­ven­tion­al deliv­ery ser­vices face chal­lenges”.

The release explains the orig­i­nal tri­al logged up close to 2,500km. This includ­ed deliv­er­ies to out­ly­ing Jumia hubs as far as 85 km from the take-off loca­tion at the Zipline oper­a­tional hub in Ome­nako (Ghana). These were com­plet­ed in less than one hour. Plans are to expand to Cote d’Ivoire and Nige­ria, fol­lowed by oth­er African coun­tries.

Daniel Mar­fo, Senior Vice Pres­i­dent of Zipline Africa, remarked, “This col­lab­o­ra­tion will increase access to goods for cus­tomers and help small and medi­um sized busi­ness­es grow. Zipline’s safe and effi­cient drone deliv­ery sys­tem will make shop­ping on Jumia even more con­ve­nient, sus­tain­able and acces­si­ble for its cus­tomers.”

Jumia’s logis­tics net­work includes more than 30 ware­hous­es and over 3,000 drop-off and pick-up sta­tions, locat­ed across the company’s 11-coun­try African mar­ket. There are over 1 bil­lion peo­ple and 500 mil­lion inter­net users in Africa.

The part­ner­ship is designed to enable all con­sumers, from the most urban to most remote, to access the prod­ucts they need in 45-min­utes or less while reduc­ing the car­bon emis­sions of last-mile deliv­ery up to 98 per­cent com­pared to tra­di­tion­al vehi­cles.

In addi­tion to its part­ner­ship with Zipline, Jumia works with Solar Taxi in Ghana and eBee in Kenya to achieve a ful­ly green foot­print.

Back­ground

Jumia’s e‑commerce plat­form is built around Jumia Logis­tics and Jumi­a­Pay. This mar­ket­place helps mil­lions of con­sumers and sell­ers to con­nect and trans­act. Jumia Logis­tics enables the deliv­ery of mil­lions of pack­ages through a net­work of local part­ners. Jumi­a­Pay facil­i­tates the pay­ments of online trans­ac­tions.

Mean­while, Zipline has flown over 370,897 com­mer­cial deliv­er­ies con­tain­ing more than five mil­lion units of vac­cines and oth­er med­ical prod­ucts. The com­pa­ny is the trust­ed part­ner for gov­ern­ments, glob­al brands and lead­ing health­care sys­tems.

For more infor­ma­tion

https://www.flyzipline.com/

https://group.jumia.com/