UAV Portfolio Review
Since 2016 the Frontier Technology (FT) Hub has supported seven teams to test the potential of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) in international development contexts, through the UKAid funded Livestreaming programme.
Recently, the Hub, along with our UAV expert Nigel Breyley, has been reflecting on what we’ve learned about UAVs, their application in international development contexts, and what this means for the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). Through a review of pilot documentation and interviews with pilot implementers and pioneers, the FT Hub has gathered learning from across our UAV pilots (ranging from using UAV imagery and machine learning to automatically classify road conditions in Tanzania, to Deploying drones to tackle desert locust swarms in East Africa and multi-purpose UAV operations in Malawi) and identified a set of good practices for utilisation of UAVs in development sector use cases.