We Had Drones Ready to Save Lives; The Government Said No.

By Tanzania Flying Labs and Zimbabwe Flying Labs

When Cyclone Idai tore through Zimbabwe in 2019, the team at Zimbabwe Flying Labs had drones, thermal cameras, and the skills to help with search and rescue. What they didn't have was government clearance — and by the time it would have come through, it would have been too late. When disaster strikes, human life is often the high price we pay for delay.

In this episode of the Ground Truth Podcast, host Leka sits down with Tawanda, Coordinator at Zimbabwe Flying Labs, to unpack that story and everything that's followed since. It's a conversation about disaster response, bureaucracy, and what it takes to build trust with government institutions.  But it’s also about the bigger picture: how Zimbabwe Flying Labs turned a setback into a seat on the National Disaster Committee, alongside the military, police, and civil protection teams they once could not get clearance to work with. 

From there, the conversation moves into Zimbabwe Flying Labs’ education work, which has grown from a simple drone program into a full emerging technology curriculum covering drones, AI, coding, and robotics. Tawanda explains how a paid model in private schools helps fund a sponsored model that brings the same training, free of charge, to public and rural schools, and how partnerships with Precision Aerial, DataCamp, and Lenovo's Robo Girls program have helped them reach more than 4,500 young learners over the past few years — almost halfway to their goal of 10,000 by 2028.

Leka and Tawanda also dig into the messier realities of running a drone business on the continent, from the patchwork of aviation regulations across different countries, to why Tawanda believes the minimum age for commercial drone certification should be lower than 18, to whether drone spraying is actually a profitable path for a young entrepreneur to pursue. 

Tawanda closes out by reflecting on what he's changed his mind about after a decade in the industry: that the real value was never in the drone itself, but in the data, insight, and outcomes it makes possible.

Watch the episode now on YouTube or listen to it on Spotify. 

Ground Truth is a podcast from the Flying Labs Network, where the people building local drone, data, and AI ecosystems share unscripted, local-to-local conversations about what actually works.