Insights from Africa’s Leading Drone Founders

African drone entrepreneurs are proving that with grit, innovation, and collaboration, it’s possible to build thriving businesses that take to the skies. In fact, Africa’s drone market is on a sharp growth trajectory, expected to reach about US$49 million in revenue by 2025, with 6% annual growth. Yet behind those numbers lie real challenges. How do you navigate strict regulations, win skeptical customers, find skilled talent, or even build drones locally? 

In a recent African Drone Forum webinar titled “Built in Africa: The State of the African Drone Ecosystem in 2025,” four of the continent’s leading drone founders shared candid insights into these questions. Drawing from their journeys in Rwanda, Tanzania, Nigeria, and Senegal, they offered proven strategies for success. Here, we distill their key lessons – from focusing on true customer value to forging partnerships across the continent – that can help drone entrepreneurs and policymakers alike in advancing Africa’s drone industry.

From Idea to Impact: Founders at a Glance

Eric Rutayisire Muziga

Each panelist’s story illustrated the power of persistence and problem-solving. Eric Rutayisire Muziga launched Rwanda’s first drone company, Charis UAS, back in 2014 – when most in the region hadn’t even seen a drone. Starting with just a handful of engineers, he spent years educating clients about drone data. Fast forward to today, and Charis operates in 8 countries with over 45 full-time staff, providing aerial mapping and analytics for construction, agriculture, mining and more. Charis even built the first made-in-Rwanda drone in 2020, positioning itself as Africa’s first commercial drone manufacturer. Muziga’s decade-long journey underscores that success doesn’t happen overnight – it’s built project by project, problem by problem.

Rose Funja

Rose Funja, founder of Altitude X in Tanzania, pivoted into drones from academia. In the mid-2010s she was helping farmers map their land with handheld GPS units, until a chance encounter at a tech hub introduced her to drones. Sensing a smarter way to survey farms, Rose had a “lightbulb moment” and started using drones to create digital maps of fields. But as she recalls, “we were quite early in that space… and this came with a lot of misunderstanding,” which meant spending heavily on educating customers while revenue was minimal. Altitude X (formerly Agrinfo) survived those lean years by diversifying – from crop mapping into telecom tower inspections and power line monitoring – essentially any sector where drone data added value. Today, her company not only helps farmers boost yields with aerial insights, but also provides drone spraying services (even deploying larvicides to fight malaria in rice fields). Rose’s story shows the importance of adapting your business model to sustain growth in nascent markets.

Nathan Nwachukwu

In Nigeria, Nathan Nwachukwu co-founded Terra (formerly Terrahaptix) at just 21 years old, with a bold vision to make Africa a global leader in drone tech. Seeing an opportunity in infrastructure security, Terra focused on building autonomous surveillance drones to protect mines, oil pipelines and power plants. In 2023, Nwachukwu and his team opened a 15,000 sq. ft. facility in Abuja – celebrated as Africa’s largest drone factory capable of producing 10,000 drones per year. Remarkably, they design and manufacture 75%+ of their drone components in-house, from airframes and flight controllers to an AI-powered operating system. In just its first year, Terra secured over $12 million in contracts across 9 countries, a testament to the demand for home-grown solutions when they solve real problems. Nwachukwu’s rapid rise underscores Africa’s potential to leapfrog in high-tech manufacturing – and the value of aligning your product with market needs (in his case, the security of critical infrastructure).

Tiamiyou (Tam) Radji 

Tiamiyou (Tam) Radji took a different route, from humanitarian and development work into building local drone capacity. Based in Senegal, he founded Kranth and partnered with the Flying Labs network to address one of the ecosystem’s biggest gaps: skilled human resources. “One of the most challenging issues was finding qualified, honest professionals to recruit… there was no playbook, so we had to build everything from scratch,” Tam explained. Since 2016, he has trained over 500 drone pilots across Africa, both Francophone and Anglophone. In 2019, Kranth’s Dakar office hosted Africa’s first ever drone pilot certification course taught by an African instructor, enabling students from Benin to Nigeria to earn a UK CAA-accredited license locally. This was a groundbreaking step – proving that African operators can meet international safety standards without leaving the continent. Tam’s company now also provides drone services in sectors like oil & gas, telecoms and mining, often hiring the very talent he helped train. His journey highlights how investing in local capacity building is not just a social good but also a business opportunity in itself.

Top Lessons From The Founders

Though each founder works in a different domain, their stories echoed common themes. Building a successful drone business in Africa requires far more than piloting skills or cool gadgets. It demands a relentless focus on solving real customer problems, creative approaches to regulation and talent, flexible business models, and a community mindset. Below, we unpack the top lessons and strategies that emerged from the discussion.

1. Solve Real Problems and Deliver Tangible Value

A clear takeaway was that drones are a means to an end, not the end itself. Successful startups focus on the outcomes their drones enable, be it faster surveys, safer inspections, or better crop yields – rather than the novelty of the tech. As Eric Muziga put it, you must avoid the “drone hype” and “cut the noise” to zero in on services clients will actually pay for. In Charis’s early days, that meant recognizing construction and mapping projects that were willing to pay for high-quality aerial data, whereas some flashy uses people praised on social media brought in no revenue. Identifying a willing market and delivering clear ROI was crucial. “You are not the hero of the story – the client is,” Eric said, emphasizing that drone entrepreneurs should speak the language of client benefits, not drone specs. In practice, this could mean promising a mine operator that your drone survey will cut their inspection time by 80%, or showing a farm co-op how aerial maps can reduce fertilizer waste by 30%. When clients see concrete value – saving time, cutting costs, increasing safety – they become willing to champion and pay for drone services.

Rose learned this by literally walking fields with farmers before she ever flew a drone. Her team realized that what farmers cared about was getting reliable data on crop health and farm size, not the drone itself. So Altitude X packaged its services to answer those needs – providing actionable crop analytics and advisory – and even introduced drone spraying to tackle pests that farmers struggled to control. “It’s all about value,” Rose noted; in agriculture, that might be higher yields or lower costs per hectare. In telecom, it might be a detailed 3D model of a tower delivered faster and safer than a climber could do. By speaking the customer’s language and solving their pain points, these businesses turned skepticism into demand.

2. Educate The Market

Several founders also mentioned the importance of educating the market as part of proving value. In new markets, clients often don’t know what’s possible with drones. Rose’s company spent considerable time (and money) on demonstrations and pilot projects, essentially free proof-of-concept flights,  to show big agribusinesses and government agencies how drone data works. “The cost of education was high,” she admitted, as they sometimes mapped a few plots for free to convince a client of the efficiency gain. Eric faced a similar challenge in Rwanda when introducing drones for anti-malaria interventions; he had to work closely with health officials to validate that aerial spraying could indeed reduce mosquito breeding (it did, dramatically, in a number of villages). The lesson is that in emerging industries, business development often starts with awareness-building. Founders should budget time for workshops, demos, and even training sessions for clients – it’s an investment in creating your future market.

For policymakers, this underscores a key point: supporting public pilot projects and knowledge-sharing can accelerate adoption. When governments fund a few trial uses (e.g. mapping one city’s farmland by drone, or testing drones for medical deliveries), it gives local companies a chance to prove value at scale. Those success stories then spur wider demand. In short, the first step is opening stakeholders’ eyes to “what’s in it for them.” Once customers experience the benefits – richer data, quicker decisions, safer operations – the technology essentially sells itself.

3. Build Trust by Working With Regulators on Safety and Standards

It’s no secret that drone regulations in many African countries can be complex and restrictive. Every panelist agreed that navigating the regulatory landscape is a make-or-break aspect of the business. Their consensus strategy? Proactively engage regulators as partners, not adversaries. Rose, for example, made a point to develop a close working relationship with the Tanzania Civil Aviation Authority (TCAA). Instead of hiding her operations, she regularly invited officials to her office and demo flights, shared her flight logs, and sought their input on safety processes. This transparency paid off: “They know we’re not running a shady business,” she said, which has sometimes led to faster permit approvals. When a client contract was on the line and a permit delayed, Rose could ask the agency for a support letter, because she had built personal rapport and trust. The takeaway for entrepreneurs is to treat regulators as key stakeholders – keep them informed, comply with requirements diligently, and even help educate them about new drone uses. Regulators are much more likely to accommodate innovations like beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) flights or night operations if they’ve seen your professionalism over time.

Safety culture was another major theme. Aviation authorities, coming from traditional manned aviation, have an ingrained safety mindset – and drone operators need to match it. Nathan gave an example: his company deliberately avoids selling armed drones or any combat use systems, to stay on the right side of defense and aviation authorities’ comfort zone. Terra focuses purely on surveillance and inspection drones, and even built in technical safeguards – their drones cannot easily be repurposed or modified for unsafe uses without proprietary software. This approach reassured the Nigerian government enough to grant Terra permissions to operate and export their drones, despite no pre-existing category for a “drone manufacturer” in the regulations. Furthermore, self-regulation is critical: as Eno Umoh (the webinar host) noted, reputable operators will self-report any incidents or crashes rather than cover them up, because honesty builds credibility. One accident can set the whole industry back if mishandled. The panel urged peers to follow standard operating procedures (SOPs), conduct crew training, and document everything. Over time, a track record of safe operations by local companies helps convince authorities to relax onerous rules.

4. Invest in Local Talent and Team Capacity

If you ask any African drone CEO what keeps them up at night, a common answer is talent. Cutting-edge tech companies need skilled engineers and pilots, but such professionals are scarce locally. The founders all tackled this gap head-on by growing their own talent pipelines. Tam perhaps exemplifies this best: unable to find experienced drone pilots to hire in 2016, he took six young interns (three women and three men) and trained them from the ground up. Many of those interns are now among the top drone experts on the continent, he noted with pride. This experience led him to formalize training programs and even launch Senegal Flying Labs, so that other companies (like Rose’s or Eric’s) could eventually hire local pilots and analysts instead of having to import talent. It’s a long-term approach, but it’s paying dividends as the community of certified African drone professionals steadily grows. In Tam’s view, “if we don’t build a strong foundation of human capacity, we’ll forever be dependent”. His advice to startups is to include training in your business model – whether by partnering with initiatives like Flying Labs or running an in-house academy for new recruits. This not only fills your own staffing needs but also builds goodwill (and potential future clients) through community workforce development.

5. Adapt Your Business Model: Recurring Revenue and Diversification

Drones are high-tech hardware, but a purely hardware or one-off project approach can be a trap for startups. The panelists stressed thinking creatively about your business model to ensure sustainability. One lesson was to seek recurrent revenue streams rather than just chasing one project after another. Eric gave the example of how Charis UAS evolved: after years of doing drone surveys and handing off raw data, they noticed clients struggling to make sense of the information. Sensing an opportunity, Charis developed “Charis Analytics,” a cloud-based platform where clients can log in to see maps, models, and insights from drone data anytime. Instead of delivering data on a hard drive and moving on, Charis now offers this platform on a subscription basis – meaning monthly SaaS revenue and stickier client relationships. This pivot has started to stabilize their cash flow and even attracts other drone operators as users of the platform. In other words, they turned a one-off service into a productized service. Eric encouraged fellow operators to consider similar moves: “look at how you can deliver data in a way that’s easily usable by the client… that makes you stand out”. Whether it’s an analytics dashboard, a maintenance contract, or a managed services retainer, having some form of ongoing value proposition de-risks the business significantly.

6. Collaborate to Build an Ecosystem (You Can’t Succeed Alone)

Perhaps the most passionate appeals from the panelists were about working together – as companies, as a community, and with government – to unlock the continent’s drone potential. “We have to build the strongest community of operators on this continent,” Tam urged, “one that protects itself and leads the debate”. All four founders agreed that African drone entrepreneurs will go farther united than divided. Why? For one, the regulatory and market barriers are too large to tackle solo. By forming associations and coalitions, operators can present a unified voice to regulators to advocate for sensible rules (or to push back against overly harsh ones). A great example is how a group of Nigerian drone companies formed a WhatsApp group to share knowledge and collectively engage the aviation authority – which eventually opened the door for more inclusive discussions at a national UAV conference. Such collective action gets the attention of policymakers in ways an individual company might not. As Nathan summed up, “we need a Pan-African coalition of some sort… we can’t build the industry in silos”. 

Collaboration also prevents wasted effort. Instead of ten small companies each duplicating the same lobbying or educational materials, an industry association can create common guidelines and share them widely. We’re already seeing early moves in this direction. The African Drone Forum (ADF) itself has launched an organizational membership program to bring together serious drone entrepreneurs from across the continent to share resources and partnerships. During the webinar, it was noted that many of the panelists are part of this ADF network, which hosts monthly mastermind calls to troubleshoot issues like importing drones or pricing services. “It’s very powerful when we can talk to each other and learn what’s worked,” Rose said, adding that it cuts down the trial-and-error that each company would go through alone.

Taking Flight Together - Join the Movement

The stories shared by Africa’s leading drone founders reveal that Africa’s drone future is already being built by Africans, for Africa. From locally manufactured drones to community-led training hubs, these pioneers are proving that innovation doesn’t need to be imported; it can be nurtured right here at home.

But no founder, company, or policymaker can do it alone. The challenges of regulation, financing, and market education are best tackled together as a united ecosystem. That’s why the African Drone Forum (ADF) exists: to connect visionaries, align stakeholders, and scale the systems that make Africa’s low-altitude economy thrive.

Now, for the first time, ADF is opening its Organizational Membership Community, a space designed for startups, NGOs, regulators, and private operators working to shape the future of drone technology in Africa.

By joining, you’ll gain:
✅ Access to a Pan-African network of innovators and decision-makers
✅ Visibility across ADF events, programs, and media channels
✅ Opportunities to co-create policy frameworks and projects
✅ Exclusive insights, masterclasses, and growth support

Africa’s drone ecosystem is ready for lift-off  and your organization can help pilot the next chapter.

👉 Become a founding member today at africandroneforum.org
Let’s build the skies of tomorrow, together.