The Sky Is the
Supply Chain:
How Kenya Is
About to Change
Everything

A Nation Divided by Distance

Kenya's Arid and Semi-Arid Lands cover 89% of the country's land area and are home to 13 million people — marked by some of the most extreme healthcare access gaps on the continent.

Picture a line drawn across a map of Kenya. To one side: the highlands and coast, relatively well-served by roads, where the average person lives within 30 minutes of a public clinic. To the other: Turkana, Marsabit, Garissa, Mandera, Wajir, Samburu, Isiolo — vast territories where travel time to the nearest facility can exceed three hours.

But the ASAL challenge does not define the entirety of Kenya's supply chain crisis. Even in the central highlands — Murang'a County — over 1,300 km of earth roads, seasonal flooding, and the Aberdare terrain create last-mile delivery failures with life-or-death consequences. A county can have its medicines on a shelf in Nairobi and still fail to deliver them to a dispensary 50 kilometres away.

This is the problem that Geoid Technologies Limited and Gadfin Aero-Logistics Systems are building a network to solve — not a small-scale pilot, but a scalable aerial infrastructure designed to become the physical backbone of Kenya's national health supply chain.

From Israel Aerospace Industries to the world's longest operational drone delivery line — Gadfin's medical drone heritage is unmatched.

Gadfin was founded in 2018 in Rehovot, Israel by a team drawn directly from Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) — a state-owned defence and aerospace giant with a global reputation for producing some of the most capable unmanned aircraft systems ever built.

Gadfin's founder and CEO, Eyal Regev, was a senior manager at IAI who headed the VTOL and multi-rotor programmes. In 2006 — twelve years before founding Gadfin — he was the first person to propose and implement the concept of delivery drones at IAI. The name "Gadfin" is drawn from Aramaic: it means "two wings."

We brought together the best team in Israel, possibly the world — the best plane builders, experts in complex materials, top professors of aerodynamics, flight control and avionics — and managed to get to a platform that can stand up to strong winds, and be the only vehicle in the world in this category that takes off vertically like a UAV before folding out wings and flying like a plane, for hundreds of miles. This is the Spirit-One. No other UAV does this.

Eyal Regev, Founder & CEO, Gadfin Aero-Logistics Systems

KEMSA serves over 10,000 health facilities across all 47 counties — but its quarterly road-based distribution creates critical stockout windows with life-or-death consequences.

Level 2 and Level 3 facilities — dispensaries and health centres — often lack storage capacity for large quarterly deliveries, leaving them chronically exposed. President Ruto's 2025 directive places last-mile responsibility squarely on KEMSA — and requires infrastructure KEMSA does not yet possess.

We don't want to hear stories of a lack of drugs in our health facilities.

President William Ruto, Marsabit County, November 2025 — directing KEMSA to shift to direct door-step delivery to all hospitals and dispensaries

The aerial network Geoid is building with Gadfin is that missing layer: an on-demand system dispatched the moment a facility identifies a stockout risk, bypassing road constraints and arriving within the golden hour.

Of all medical commodities, blood products are the most time-sensitive, temperature-critical, and consequential when they fail to arrive.

The KNBTS operates six Regional Blood Transfusion Centres in Nairobi, Embu, Nakuru, Eldoret, Kisumu, and Mombasa. Packed red cells must be kept at 2–6°C; fresh frozen plasma requires below -25°C. Emergency cases — postpartum haemorrhage (PPH), the leading cause of maternal mortality in Kenya — demand blood within the golden hour. Current road transport routinely fails this window.

Research shows drone blood delivery can reduce maternal deaths by up to 56%. The Spirit-One's temperature-controlled cargo maintains the required cold chain throughout flight, without the vibration, heat, or handling risk of motorcycle or vehicle transport. A drone dispatched from an RBTC reaches a Level 4 hospital 80 km away in under 50 minutes — versus three hours or more by road.

Incorporated in Nairobi in December 2013, Geoid holds the complete regulatory trifecta no other drone operator in Kenya possesses — the legal, training, and distribution authority to operate at national scale.

In twelve years of operations, the company has built certifications covering commercial BVLOS operations, pilot training, and exclusive Gadfin distribution. Our track record includes successful delivery for government ministries, UN agencies, research institutions, and leading private sector firms. In twelve years, we have never failed to deliver a contracted project.

We are not building a delivery service. We are building the physical infrastructure that makes Universal Health Coverage a reality — from the Aberdare highlands to the shores of Lake Turkana.

Solomon Kariuki Wanjiru, Executive Director, Geoid Technologies Limited

As a KCAA Approved UAS Training Organisation, every remote pilot, maintenance technician, and hub operations manager placed in this project is Kenyan — building domestic aerospace capacity the continent has never before had at this scale.

This is a proven Israeli medical drone operation, deployed through a Kenyan-owned, KCAA-certified operator, designed for Kenya's specific geography, clinical challenges, and long-term sovereignty.