At USAID's Center for Accelerating Innovation and Impact (CII), we believe that innovation is only meaningful if it leads to impact. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have a great potential to lead to impact in global health. To test the efficacy of UAVs, several donors, including USAID, have invested in numerous pilot projects that apply various types of use cases in many different countries.
To build upon past efforts and unlock UAVs' future potential in global health, a broad community of users, funders, innovators and implementers must work together to identify the most pressing needs as well as prioritize and coordinate future efforts to ensure that resources are efficiently deployed with maximum benefit.
This report applies our Idea to Impact framework to identify opportunities and challenges for UAVs to develop and scale in the global health context, and it lays out a proposed investment roadmap for donors to coordinate their investments strategically to shape and accelerate this market.
UAVs in Global Health:
- Features three use case examples to illustrate some of the many ways UAVs can be applied in global health
- Describes key opportunities for near-term investments and predicts long-term challenges as UAVs scale
- Provides an investment roadmap with four stages: 1) establish coordinating mechanism; 2) conduct foundational analysis; 3) support promising use cases; and 4) address sector roadblocks