Paper short abstract:

My paper is an ethnography of temporalities of Zipline’s drone center in Vobsi, Ghana, exploring how daily delivery practices are shaped by technologies, aiming to satisfy the customer’s needs in terms of facilitating on-time procedures, desired quality and nominal operational outcomes.

Paper long abstract:

Since 2019, the U.S. company Zipline employs autonomous aerial vehicles (i.e., drones) to deliver blood products and other essential medical goods to communities in Ghana. For this purpose, Zipline is operating six distribution centers in Ghana whose catchment areas cover most of the country. The use of drones is supposed to supply areas that are hard-to-reach as well as expected to support the medical supply chains of the Last Mile Distribution scheme which solely rely on ground transportation. Existing research has paid little attention to the role of temporality within the scope of Zipline’s operations, which notably involve emergency deliveries, and how the promise of on-time deliveries structures their daily routines and practices. My paper examines this gap by analyzing manifestations of temporality in Zipline’s distribution center in Vobsi, North East Region, and how these temporalities are shaped by an assemblage of human operators, digital technologies, the West-African seasons, and standard operating procedures. To do so, my paper draws on more than two months of ethnographic research in Zipline’s distribution center in Vobsi in 2022 and 2023, during which I conducted participant observation and extensive semi-structured interviews with fulfillment operators, flight operators, community managers, facility administrators, and support staff. The aim of my research is to explore how daily practices in Vobsi are shaped by technologies, in particular the fulfillment system, and how the use of technologies is intended to satisfy the customer’s needs in terms of facilitating on-time procedures, desired quality and nominal operational outcomes.