Newly certified Ghana Armed Forces operators are now qualified to fly the AeriusPro, an indigenously designed VTOL drone that has been doing real operational work over the country’s volatile northern border since January — the latest step in a military-industry training relationship that stretches back nearly a decade.
A new cohort of Ghana Armed Forces personnel has completed training on the AeriusPro platform, adding to the pool of certified operators available to fly a drone that Ghana now designs, builds and deploys almost entirely on its own terms. The pilots finish the programme at a moment when the aircraft they’ve been trained on is already doing serious work: since January, the Ghana Armed Forces has flown the locally designed and manufactured AeriusPro operationally over Bawku and Binduri, two districts in the country’s Upper East Region, making Ghana one of a still-small group of African states that can design, manufacture, deploy and operationally sustain an indigenous unmanned aerial vehicle.
A partnership years in the making
The training is best understood as the continuation of a relationship rather than a one-off event. Accra-based SoKo Aerial Robotics, the company behind the AeriusPro’s design, was first invited into the Ghana Armed Forces in 2018 to train personnel from the Signal Regiment, at the time under the command of an officer who has since risen to major general. In the years since, that training relationship has expanded well beyond a single unit: SoKo puts the number of army and navy personnel it has trained at close to 200, alongside operators from Nigeria’s Defence Space Agency and staff from Ghana’s Forestry and Boundary Commissions. Along the way, the company built some of the Ghana Armed Forces’ earliest indigenous surveillance drones — aircraft named Nkonim, Chichis 1P and Mercury 1/2 — well before the AeriusPro existed as a programme.
That history matters for understanding January’s deployment. Facing entrenched chieftaincy-linked communal tensions in Bawku and Binduri, along with cross-border security threats and illegal mining activity across Ghana’s Upper East Region, commanders needed persistent aerial coverage over terrain that ground patrols struggle to cover safely. The 93 Signal Regiment runs the technical backbone of the operation — the data pipelines and command integration that turn raw drone footage into usable intelligence — working alongside the Army’s Special Brigade and Northern Command. The AeriusPro now flies as part of a mixed fleet that includes the ZMO-120, DeltaQuad Pro and FIXAR 007, but it is the only one of the group designed and built inside Ghana.
Hybrid design, AI-assisted flight
The AeriusPro’s core engineering trick is the same hybrid approach used by comparable VTOL platforms elsewhere: four vertical-lift propellers mounted on under-wing pylons get it off the ground without a runway, then a rear-mounted pusher propeller takes over for efficient forward flight once it transitions to fixed-wing mode. That combination suits northern Ghana’s terrain well, letting the aircraft launch from remote, unprepared sites while still covering distance efficiently once airborne. The backpack-portable, V-tailed airframe offers up to three hours of endurance, a 40-kilometre control range and a service ceiling of around 4,000 metres, carries a gimbal-stabilised 4K camera, and is built to the IP43 ingress-protection standard for operation in poor weather. AI-assisted navigation adds obstacle avoidance and automated flight paths on top of manual control, reducing the operator workload during long surveillance legs.
On its own, though, an aircraft like the AeriusPro is only half the picture. Its operational value depends on Sigtrack, SoKo’s own situational-awareness and data-coordination platform, which pulls live drone video, ground-based reporting and sensor data into a single operating picture that commanders and field teams can view in real time. Sigtrack was built specifically to keep working in the kind of remote, bandwidth-constrained conditions common across northern Ghana — an explicit point of difference from imported command-and-control systems designed around reliable broadband connections — caching data locally and syncing automatically once a connection is restored. That resilience, as much as the airframe itself, is what lets a single AeriusPro sortie feed directly into decisions about where to route a patrol or which mining site to flag for enforcement.
The company behind the aircraft
SoKo Aerial Robotics was founded in 2017 by Kofi Owusu-Adusei, a Ghanaian engineer with a telecoms and security background who also directs the Centre for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Research and Education (CUAVRE), which functions as the company’s in-house research arm. The AeriusPro itself is now built by a related manufacturing partner, Aerius UAS, while SoKo continues to develop the surrounding software and sensor ecosystem, including Sigtrack. Owusu-Adusei has described the company’s edge as coming less from any single piece of hardware than from treating drones as one part of a full operational system — flying the aircraft, but also owning the data processing, analytics and safety layers around it, an approach he argues lets SoKo tailor solutions that larger foreign vendors tend to overlook. “It’s this blend of local relevance and operational rigour that defines our competitive edge,” he has said of the company’s approach. He has credited two Ghana Armed Forces officers in particular with shaping the programme’s direction early on — Major General Matthew Essien, a former commandant of the Ghana Armed Forces Command and Staff College, who Owusu-Adusei says impressed on him early just how much the Signal Corps and the country were counting on the programme succeeding, and Brigadier General Anthony Ntem, credited with backing the programme’s expansion and protecting it as a matter of national interest.
Part of a much larger build-up
The AeriusPro programme is a small piece of a considerably larger shift in Ghana’s defence spending. The Ministry of Defence’s budget rose sharply in 2025 and is set to climb again in 2026, to roughly GHS 10.8 billion — an increase government officials have attributed to a deliberate “retooling” of the armed forces, moving spending away from wages and toward capital investment in equipment and infrastructure. Alongside new surveillance and mobility assets and efforts to retool the Air Force, the government has also been funding new forward operating bases, an expansion at the Command and Staff College, and thousands of new housing units intended to improve troop welfare and readiness. Set against that backdrop, a homegrown VTOL drone flying real missions over one of the country’s most sensitive border regions is a small but visible proof point for a much larger argument the Ghanaian government is making: that sustained investment in its own defence-industrial base, rather than continued reliance on imported systems alone, is where the armed forces’ modernisation is ultimately headed.
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