Leapfrogging Healthcare Technology in Africa: What can we learn from Drones in Healthcare Service Delivery

• In Event: Methods, AI Tools, and Measurement

Abstract

Technologies that work around missing infrastructure can reshape how public services are delivered in low-resource settings. In healthcare, the central problem is often not a lack of medical knowledge, but failures in logistics: poor roads, unreliable transport, stockouts, and the persistent last-mile challenge of getting time-sensitive supplies to facilities when they are needed. Medical drones are one response to these constraints. By transporting blood, vaccines, and emergency medical products directly to health facilities, drones can bypass transport bottlenecks that routinely delay care. Yet there is still limited causal evidence on whether these delivery improvements translate into measurable gains in population health rather than simply better operational performance. This paper studies Rwanda’s medical drone program, the first large-scale effort to integrate drone delivery into a public health supply chain. The program began in 2016 and expanded across districts over time, creating quasi-experimental variation in exposure to drone services. I combine two waves of the Rwanda Demographic and Health Surveys with facility-side information from the Health Management Information System to examine the effects of drone exposure on maternal and child health outcomes. I exploit the staggered rollout in a difference-in-differences framework with district fixed effects and relevant controls. Because treatment timing differs across districts and treatment effects may evolve, I complement the baseline specification with the Sun and Abraham event-study estimator, which is appropriate under staggered adoption and heterogeneous effects. The results show that drone exposure increased institutional deliveries and reduced home births, consistent with improved access to timely obstetric care. I also find suggestive evidence of improvements in antenatal care use. For child health, the estimates point to lower infant mortality and higher vaccination coverage in areas exposed to drone delivery, although precision varies across outcomes. These findings suggest that frontier delivery technologies can do more than improve supply chain efficiency: they can also strengthen service utilization and improve population health in settings where geography and infrastructure limit access to care. The paper contributes to the literature on technological leapfrogging, health systems, and development economics by providing causal evidence on whether a frontier logistics technology can generate meaningful health gains. More broadly, it offers policy-relevant evidence that investments in drone-based delivery systems may help low-income countries overcome infrastructure constraints and improve maternal and child health.

Author

• GODWIN AIPOH, Georgia State University
  Presenting Author