Unmanned Africa

Category: Procurement & Defence Deals

Track African military drone procurement — acquisitions, contracts and government deals shaping the continent’s unmanned systems arsenals.

  • Al-Shabaab’s Drones Comes Out of Yemen

    Al-Shabaab’s Drones Comes Out of Yemen

    United Nations monitors have documented a Houthi weapons and training pipeline into Somalia that goes well beyond informal contact between two allied militant groups, according to a series of UN Security Council reports released over the past year, evidence analysts say points toward a structured, strategic partnership rather than a one-off arms deal.

    The foundation for that assessment was laid in mid-2024. The UN found that al-Shabaab received technical instruction from the Houthis and weapons shipments from Yemen between June and September of that year, according to an analysis by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, which tracks the reporting closely. Those weapons were subsequently used in al-Shabaab attacks on African Union forces in September and November 2024. In August that year, Puntland authorities arrested seven suspected al-Shabaab members and seized five suicide drones, physical evidence that the group was moving weapons, not just fighters, through the pipeline. Separately, Yemeni National Resistance Forces, the anti-Houthi coalition, intercepted a vessel that same month carrying hydrogen fuel cells, technology experts believe was intended to extend Houthi drones’ payload capacity and range, according to a report on the escalating ties between the two sides.

    What is actually moving through that pipeline has become clearer with time. Some of the equipment and components traced back to Iran appear to be domestically assembled Samad-series drones, according to Taimur Khan, head of Gulf operations at Conflict Armament Research, cited by ISS Africa. The same analysis notes that UN monitors documented al-Shabaab’s leadership directly requesting “advanced weapons and training” from Ansar Allah, the Houthis’ formal name, in meetings held in 2024, a request that goes beyond passive technology transfer and suggests al-Shabaab is actively shopping for a weaponised capability it does not yet have.

    The relationship deepened further in 2025. A UN Security Council Panel of Experts report on Yemen, presented on 15 October 2025, found that cooperation between the Houthis and al-Shabaab had “intensified to unprecedented levels,” involving weapons smuggling, military training and logistical support, according to coverage of the report. The panel documented that two Houthi military engineers were dispatched specifically to Jilib, in southern Somalia, to train al-Shabaab members on drone modification and weapons maintenance, a level of hands-on technical support that goes well past shipping hardware across the Gulf of Aden. A separate November 2025 UN Panel of Experts report monitoring al-Shabaab directly, reported by Africa Defense Forum, found that al-Shabaab sent four groups of roughly 30 fighters each to Yemen for training over the preceding year, with one group departing Somalia’s Lower Shabelle coast by boat in late October 2024. A separate estimate from Century International, cited by regional broadcaster Kaab TV, put the total number of al-Shabaab fighters trained in Yemen at somewhere between 120 and several hundred.

    Analysts monitoring the relationship are increasingly explicit that this is not a simple transactional arrangement. The UN panel’s own report states the cooperation is “part of a Houthi strategy to wield increasing influence in the region,” and Houthi leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi said as early as March 2024 that he intended to expand maritime operations toward the Indian Ocean, a statement the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has read as a tacit signal that the Houthis are willing to use Somali territory to project power beyond Yemen, treating the country partly as a testing ground for tactics before deploying them closer to home. A retired US Navy rear admiral summarised the resulting arrangement bluntly in comments carried by Africa Defense Forum: the Houthis supply advanced, Iranian-backed weaponry, al-Shabaab uses it to escalate piracy and battlefield pressure inside Somalia, and each group’s reach grows as a result.

    What has not yet happened, despite two years of documented training, hardware transfers and seized suicide drones, is a confirmed weaponised drone strike by al-Shabaab itself. Unmanned Africa reported separately that al-Shabaab’s smaller rival, Islamic State Somalia, crossed that line first, in January 2025, in Puntland’s Cali Miskat mountains, months after the same Houthi-linked smuggling networks were disrupted at Bosaso port. Al-Shabaab, better funded and more cautious with its equipment, has so far kept its own drones in a surveillance and propaganda role even as its access to weaponised technology has visibly grown. Analysts describe that gap, between capability and use, as the reason Somalia remains one of the most closely watched proliferation risks on the continent: everything a weaponised al-Shabaab drone campaign would require, training, hardware, a willing supplier and a documented request for exactly that capability, already appears to be in place. The only missing piece, so far, is the attack itself.

  • Africa’s Drone Indigenization Numbers Hide More Than They Show

    Africa’s Drone Indigenization Numbers Hide More Than They Show

    The African defense sector is undergoing a pivotal shift as nations transition from a heavy reliance on foreign military imports toward indigenous drone manufacturing and security sovereignty. While nations like Nigeria, Ethiopia, Morocco, and Kenya have historically been major procurement hubs—utilizing foreign technology for counter-terrorism, border patrol, and intelligence operations—the regional dynamic is evolving from purchasing equipment to building domestic aerospace capabilities. This transition is increasingly critical as supply chain vulnerabilities and the high cost of maintaining foreign hardware push governments to look inward.

    Although South Africa remains the continent’s most advanced traditional defense producer with established aerospace engineering infrastructure, its legacy firms largely operate outside the modern, venture-capital-driven tech ecosystem. Consequently, a new wave of pioneering startups and state-backed facilities is emerging to fill the gap, aiming to bridge the technological divide by integrating cutting-edge advancements like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and autonomous software directly into locally manufactured unmanned aerial vehicles.

    In our analysis, Eight countries, eight very different stories, and one number that on its own tells you almost nothing useful: the share of each country’s military drone fleet that it built itself. South Africa sits at 95 percent. Morocco sits at 2. If you stopped reading there, you might conclude South Africa has cracked something Morocco hasn’t even attempted, and that Egypt, at 3 percent, is barely trying either. Look at what’s actually driving each number, though, and a more interesting and more useful story emerges, one where a country’s percentage often says more about how long it has been buying drones from other people than about how seriously it is building its own.

    Start with the outlier, because South Africa really is different in kind, not just degree. Denel Dynamics has built reconnaissance drones since the Seeker series entered service in the late 1980s, nearly four decades of accumulated aerospace engineering that predates almost every other domestic drone programme on this list by a generation. Add Milkor’s 380, the largest indigenously designed drone currently flying anywhere on the continent, and South Africa’s 94 domestic units against just 5 imported ones reflects a country that has spent fifty years building the industrial base to make its own hardware, not a recent policy win. That distinction matters for reading everything else on this list, because most of the countries below it have not had fifty years, and their percentages should be read accordingly.

    Egypt and Morocco make the least intuitive pairing on this list, and they deserve to be read together, because both post the lowest indigenization rates here despite both running genuinely active domestic drone programmes. Egypt’s Ministry of Military Production and the Arab Organisation for Industrialisation have spent years building toward exactly this kind of capability, culminating in 2025 with the Jabbar family, Egypt’s first fully locally designed UAS line rather than a licensed or transferred design, built in variants for surveillance, threat emulation, and long-range strike. That is a real, meaningful step forward for Egyptian engineering. It is also nine units against a fleet of 313, because Egypt has been importing drones at scale from the United States and elsewhere for decades, and a handful of new domestic airframes cannot meaningfully move a denominator that large in the space of a year or two. Morocco’s case is even more pointed, because Rabat did something genuinely clever that this dataset doesn’t capture at all: it used local-content regulation to force Baykar, the Turkish manufacturer, to establish a production and servicing facility on Moroccan soil before it could sell Morocco a single TB2. That leverage has real value, faster maintenance, technology transfer, a domestic workforce learning to build drones, but none of it shows up as a “domestic unit” in a count like this one if the aircraft coming off that production line are still fundamentally Turkish-designed. Morocco’s 2 percent and Egypt’s 3 percent are not describing two countries that haven’t tried. They are describing two countries whose import history is so large, and in Morocco’s case whose real progress is structured in a way this particular metric can’t see, that genuine recent effort barely registers against it.

    Ghana, Algeria, and Tunisia cluster together in the low twenties, and the closeness of their numbers hides how differently each got there. Ghana’s case is the most straightforward and, in some ways, the most impressive given how little international attention it has received: the AeriusPro, a Ghanaian-designed VTOL fixed-wing hybrid that needs no runway, has been operationally deployed since around January 2026 in the Bawku and Binduri border regions, flown by the Ghana Armed Forces’ own 93 Signal Regiment and feeding into a locally built command-and-control system. That is six units built specifically for Ghana’s own military, not licensed, not assembled under a foreign brand. It’s worth noting this is a separate story from the much larger drone factory the Nigerian startup Terra Industries has built in Accra, which manufactures for export across the region rather than for the Ghana Armed Forces specifically; conflating the two would credit Ghana’s indigenization score with capacity that isn’t actually Ghana’s own. Algeria’s 29 domestic units come from a longer but less certain lineage, the state’s Amel series, developed since 2013 through several design generations, though independent trackers including the open-source monitor Oryx have assessed that most Amel variants are unlikely to ever reach genuine operational service, and some of what Algeria counts as domestic production is closer to licensed local assembly of Emirati designs than original engineering. Tunisia’s 13 units come from the smallest and most diversified programme of the three, and sit alongside a broader unmanned-systems sector, the Tunisian firm ENOVA Robotics has exported ground-security robots to the United States, that suggests real if modest engineering capability beyond just aerial drones. All three numbers land in roughly the same place. None of them got there the same way.

    Nigeria and Ethiopia sit in the middle at 14 and 15 percent, and Nigeria’s case shows the same dynamic as Egypt’s playing out at a smaller scale. Nigeria is currently running three separate domestic drone efforts at once, the Air Force’s own Tsaigumi platform out of its Research and Development Centre, the venture-backed Terra Industries with its Archer and Kama product lines, and Babasky Technologies’ state-partnered counter-drone system, an unusually broad domestic effort for any African country to be running simultaneously. And it still adds up to only 36 units against 220 imported ones, because Nigeria’s imported fleet spans dozens of foreign platforms accumulated over years of buying from whoever would sell, Chinese, Turkish, American, and others. Three active domestic programmes and a 14 percent indigenization rate can both be true at the same time, and neither fact cancels the other out.

    Taken together, these eight numbers point to a limitation in the metric itself as much as anything about the countries it describes. Indigenization rate, measured this way, is a lagging indicator: it tells you what has already been bought and built, not what is currently being built or how fast. A country could be adding domestic units faster than anyone else on this continent right now, and if its imported fleet was accumulated over thirty years, that progress would still barely move its percentage for years to come. The more useful question for each of these eight countries isn’t where its indigenization rate sits today, but what is happening to the numerator, the actual count of domestic units, right now: Ghana’s went from presumably zero to six in about a year. Egypt’s is adding a genuinely new aircraft family rather than incremental units. Nigeria’s is being built by three different kinds of institutions at once. Those trajectories, not the percentages sitting next to them, are what will actually separate these eight countries five years from now.

  • Where Africa’s Armies buy their Drones, and who they rely on

    Where Africa’s Armies buy their Drones, and who they rely on

    Ten African countries buy every single one of their military drones from one place. Somalia gets all of its drones from Turkey. Benin, Mozambique, Namibia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo get all of theirs from China. Botswana relies entirely on Israel. Burundi relies entirely on the United States. On paper, these ten countries look identical: total dependence, nowhere else to turn if the relationship sours. In practice, they are not the same story at all, and figuring out why is a better way to understand Africa’s drone market than the raw percentages alone can offer.

    Start with the supplier landscape underneath these numbers. According to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, which tracks drone deals across the continent using Military Africa’s own procurement data, Turkey has signed 32 separate drone agreements with African governments, 28 of them since 2021, making it easily the continent’s most active supplier. China follows with 27, Israel with 18, the United States with 15, and Iran with 9. That ranking explains most of the ten countries locked at 100 percent reliance in one stroke: Burkina Faso, Djibouti, Somalia, and Togo all sit entirely inside Turkey’s rapidly expanding sales network, while Benin, DR Congo, Mozambique, and Namibia sit entirely inside China’s. These are not countries locked into a single supplier by accident. They are countries that happened to make their first, and so far only, drone purchase from whichever of the two most aggressive sellers in Africa got there first.

    Somalia is the deepest and most consequential of the Turkish cluster, and worth dwelling on because its dependence runs well past hardware. Turkey has operated its largest overseas military base, TURKSOM, in Mogadishu since 2017, has sold Somalia everything from Bayraktar TB2s up to AKINCI strategic strike drones, and by early 2026 was flying its own F-16s and deploying its own ground troops directly into combat against al-Shabaab alongside the hardware it had already sold Mogadishu. A DefenceWeb analysis comparing Somalia to Morocco, which forced Turkey to build an actual production facility on Moroccan soil before it could service its own aircraft, found Somalia extracted no comparable concession and reportedly still relies on Turkish personnel to operate drones it nominally owns. A hundred percent reliance in Mogadishu’s case means something closer to a client relationship than a supply chain. Djibouti and Togo, which have taken smaller, less publicized Turkish deliveries, look statistically identical but almost certainly carry far less of that entanglement, simply because far less has been bought in the first place.

    Supplier Reliance Score · Herfindahl Index
    Supplier Reliance Score · Herfindahl Index
    Supplier Reliance Score · Herfindahl Index
    Supplier Reliance Score · Herfindahl Index

    The two genuine outliers in the “100 percent” club, Botswana’s reliance on Israel and Burundi’s on the United States, are outliers for opposite reasons. Israel’s Bluebird Aero Systems has quietly built a real footprint in southern and eastern Africa through its WanderB vertical-takeoff surveillance drone, one of the most widely adopted tactical platforms on the continent according to Africa Center’s tracking, which likely explains why Botswana, and to a lesser extent Zambia and Uganda further up the diversification scale, show Israel as a dominant or leading supplier despite Israel rarely featuring in African drone coverage the way Turkey or China do. Burundi’s case is different again, and more mundane than it looks: the only documented drone transfer on record is a 2011 US military aid package, worth 45 million dollars and shared with Uganda, that included four small surveillance drones for counterterrorism operations tied to the African Union mission in Somalia. Fifteen years with no recorded follow-on purchase is not deep strategic dependency; it is a thin, aging data point that happens to register the same way a genuine patron relationship does once it gets reduced to a single percentage. The lesson generalizes: a Herfindahl score of 100 can describe either a country locked into one supplier’s ecosystem for a decade, or a country that has simply never had reason to buy a second batch of drones from anyone.

    A cluster of West and Central African states shows what active diversification looks like when it is a deliberate policy rather than an accident of timing. Ivory Coast, Chad, and Mauritania, sitting in the 64 to 67 percent range with France still recorded as their largest historical supplier, are all in the process of visibly moving away from that legacy relationship rather than deepening it. Ivory Coast took European-funded surveillance drones, confirmed Chinese Wing Loong II purchases, and opened talks with the American military for a drone facility of its own, all within about eighteen months of France withdrawing its last combat troops in 2025. Chad has folded Chinese CH-4s into a fleet built around Turkish Bayraktar and Aksungur aircraft, hedging simultaneously against Boko Haram pressure in its west and Sudan’s civil war spilling across its eastern border. Mauritania’s drones currently come mostly from China, but its defence minister was meeting Turkish officials in Istanbul as recently as May 2026. None of these three countries is dependent in any single direction; all three are actively shopping.

    South Africa and Tunisia sit at opposite ends of the table but represent the same underlying idea: a low reliance score is not automatically good, and a high one is not automatically bad, once the identity of the supplier is factored in. South Africa’s score, 95 percent reliant on South Africa itself, looks at first glance like the same kind of concentration as Somalia’s dependence on Turkey. It is nothing of the sort. It reflects Denel’s aerospace programs dating to the 1970s and the newer Milkor 380, the largest indigenously designed drone on the continent, meaning South Africa’s “100 percent” equivalent is actually a description of sovereignty rather than dependency. Tunisia sits at the opposite extreme, just 22 percent reliant on its own domestic production and the most diversified buyer on the entire list, a position that reflects both a genuinely mixed foreign supplier base and a small but real indigenous sector: Tunisian firm ENOVA Robotics has exported dozens of its ground-security robots to the United States, a rare case of the trade flowing the other way. Between them, South Africa and Tunisia demonstrate that the two healthiest positions on this table, deep self-reliance and deliberate diversification, look nothing alike on paper but solve the same underlying problem from opposite directions.

    Sudan and Libya appear on this list as split personalities because their wars have split their procurement in two. Sudan’s government sources roughly half its drones from Iran, layered with Turkish and Chinese purchases, while the Rapid Support Forces it has been fighting since 2023 gets 81 percent of its own separate arsenal from China, financed according to UN reporting by the United Arab Emirates. The Africa Center’s own tracking adds a detail that isn’t visible in either government’s or party’s reliance score alone: Sudan’s Military Industry Corporation has unveiled its own indigenous FPV loitering munition, the Kamin-25, meaning the state side of the war is now producing weapons as well as importing them. Libya shows the identical pattern in miniature, its Tripoli-based government diversified across Turkey, Israel, and Austria, its rival eastern administration overwhelmingly dependent on China. In both countries, a single national reliance score would have hidden the fact that there are really two governments buying two separate arsenals from two different parts of the world.

    None of this means the Herfindahl Index is the wrong tool, only that it needs a second question sitting next to it before it means very much: reliant on whom, and why. A hundred percent concentration in your own domestic industry and a hundred percent concentration in a foreign patron’s export catalogue produce an identical number and opposite outcomes. The countries worth watching over the next few years are not necessarily the ones with the highest or lowest scores, but the ones like Ivory Coast, Chad, and Mauritania actively moving between the two, and the ones like Somalia where a high score has quietly become something closer to an arrangement than a market.

  • Africa’s Emerging Drone Buyers: Eight Countries Accelerating Fast

    Africa’s Emerging Drone Buyers: Eight Countries Accelerating Fast

    In March 2025, two enormous, missile-carrying drones touched down in Mogadishu, delivered by a Turkish military transport plane. They were Bayraktar AKINCIs, among the most capable attack drones in the world, and their arrival in Somalia was meant to send a message to al-Shabaab, the militant group that has fought the Somali government for nearly two decades. But the delivery sent another message too, one aimed less at the militants than at Washington. Days earlier, Somalia’s president had fired his defence minister after the United States leaned on him to pull back from Turkey and lean toward America’s own regional partner, the UAE. The drones arrived anyway. It was a small moment in a much larger story: across Africa, a growing number of governments are buying serious military drones for the first time, or buying a lot more of them very quickly, and the reasons why say as much about the world’s competing powers as they do about the countries doing the buying.

    Somalia is the most dramatic example, but it is far from the only one. New procurement figures show at least eight African countries or forces have sharply ramped up drone purchases over the past three years compared with the three years before that. Some of the jumps are enormous on paper, Chad’s drone inventory has grown more than four and a half times over, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces fighting Sudan’s civil war have more than quadrupled theirs. Others look even more dramatic at first glance: Ivory Coast, Kenya, Mauritania, Somalia, and Libya’s Tripoli-based government all went from having essentially no recorded drone purchases in the earlier period to having a handful now, technically an infinite percentage increase, though what that really means is simpler: these are countries starting a drone programme from scratch, not accelerating an existing one. That distinction matters, because a country buying its first six drones is telling a very different story than one doubling an arsenal it already had.

    Look closely at that list of new buyers and one country’s fingerprints turn up again and again: Turkey, whose rise alongside China to dominate the continent’s drone market is now reshaping air power well beyond any single conflict. Kenya took delivery of six Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones in the final days of 2024, its answer to al-Shabaab fighters operating near its northern border, and followed up in 2026 by deepening the relationship with Ankara further still. Libya’s Tripoli government has leaned on Turkish drones for years to hold its own against a rival, Russian and Gulf-backed force in the country’s east. Chad’s fleet includes Turkish aircraft alongside a newer set of Chinese drones spotted at an airbase near its border with Sudan, evidence that Chad is trying to cover threats from Boko Haram in the west and spillover from Sudan’s war in the east at the same time. And Somalia, again, is the deepest case of all: Turkey has operated its largest overseas military base there since 2017, and by early 2026 had gone so far as to send its own fighter jets and ground troops into direct combat against al-Shabaab, on top of everything it has sold Mogadishu. Turkey has become, in effect, the world’s most aggressive drone salesman, offering capable weapons with none of the political conditions that Western countries typically attach, and a remarkable number of African militaries have said yes.

    Not every country on this list is simply buying into Turkey’s orbit, though. Some are doing the opposite: hedging their bets by buying from as many different countries as possible at once. Ivory Coast is the clearest case. After France withdrew its last combat troops from the country in early 2025, ending decades of military partnership, Abidjan didn’t pick a single new patron to replace Paris. Instead it took European-funded surveillance drones in February 2026, confirmed a purchase of Chinese Wing Loong attack drones months later, and has spent more than a year in talks with the American military about hosting a drone facility of its own. One regional intelligence analysis suggested Ivorian officials are well aware that Chinese-made drones have a spotty reliability record elsewhere in Africa, and are spreading their risk across suppliers on purpose rather than by accident. Mauritania looks similar: its current drones came from China, but its defence minister was in Istanbul meeting Turkish officials as recently as May 2026, suggesting Beijing’s hold on that relationship may not last.

    Then there is Sudan, which shows up on this list twice, once as the internationally recognised government and once as the Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary group it has been fighting since 2023. That is not a coincidence or a data quirk. It is the story of a civil war in which both sides have spent the past three years racing to buy their own drones, the government turning mainly to Iran and Turkey, the RSF fielding Chinese-made aircraft that United Nations investigators say are financed by the United Arab Emirates. When a war generates two competing buyers instead of one, a procurement list like this one simply reflects that reality back.

    What ties all of these stories together is a harder, more interesting question than who bought what: does buying a foreign drone actually leave a country any more capable of standing on its own? Here Somalia offers an unflattering comparison, one that a recent DefenceWeb investigation laid out in detail. Morocco started in almost exactly the same place back in 2021, buying its first Bayraktar drones straight from Turkey. But Moroccan law required foreign manufacturers to set up a local operation before servicing equipment on Moroccan soil, so Ankara ended up building an actual production facility outside Rabat, leaving Morocco with a small but real slice of the manufacturing itself. Somalia had no such requirement and extracted no such concession, and by some accounts still relies on Turkish personnel to operate the very drones it nominally owns. Two countries, the same aircraft, the same supplier, and two very different answers to what all this buying actually buys you. The unit counts and growth percentages tell you who is spending. They do not tell you who, five years from now, will have anything to show for it besides an aircraft they still cannot fly, fix, or replace on their own.

  • Africa’s Military Drone Manufacturers: A Continental Survey

    Africa’s Military Drone Manufacturers: A Continental Survey

    Nine African nations now have some claim to domestic military drone production, and it is worth saying upfront that “domestic production” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, because it covers at least four genuinely different activities happening in parallel: state-owned aerospace conglomerates with decades of engineering depth, venture-capital-backed startups assembling airframes from a standing start, military research centres bolting together indigenous ISR platforms to reduce a fragmented import bill, and, in Sudan’s case, a war economy converting a wrecked industrial complex into wartime drone assembly out of sheer necessity. Unmanned Africa has already profiled two of the continent’s highest-profile manufacturers in depth, South Africa’s Milkor and Nigeria’s venture-backed Terra Industries, so this piece keeps both brief and focuses instead on filling out the rest of the roster: the older, larger South African player that predates Milkor, Egypt’s rapidly maturing programme, and the earlier-stage efforts in Algeria, Kenya, and Ethiopia that rarely get sustained coverage.

    South Africa’s drone-manufacturing story did not begin with Milkor. Denel, the state-linked defence group whose Denel Dynamics division has built reconnaissance UAVs since the Seeker series entered service in the 1980s and 90s, remains, per Military Africa’s tracking, the single largest drone manufacturer on the continent by output, and it is the reason South Africa’s decades of indigenous aerospace engineering, not just its recent MALE-class ambitions, underpin the country’s position as Africa’s most mature drone-manufacturing base. Milkor’s 380, the largest indigenously designed platform currently flying anywhere on the continent, sits on top of that foundation rather than having built it from nothing, which is worth remembering when comparing South Africa’s trajectory to newer entrants that lack anything like the same accumulated institutional base.

    Egypt offers the most striking recent case of a country moving from drone operator to drone producer, and its programme has moved faster in the past year than almost anywhere else on the continent. Cairo’s state-owned Arab Organisation for Industrialisation and its Ministry of Military Production have run indigenous UAV projects since at least 2021, when the Nut reconnaissance drone, a joint AOI and Military Technical College project with a 50-kilogram payload and ten-hour endurance, and the EJune-30 SW, built by Industrial Complex Engineering Robots and widely assessed as a technology-transfer descendant of the UAE’s Yabhon United 40, both debuted at the Egypt Defence Expo.

    What changed in 2025 was scale and ambition: Tornex Egypt’s Jabbar family, unveiled at EDEX 2025, is the country’s first fully locally designed and built UAS family rather than a licensed or transferred design, spanning variants built for long-endurance surveillance, radar-signature threat emulation, and long-range strike, with a turbojet-powered version reportedly capable of cruise-missile-like speeds over a claimed 1,500 to 2,000 kilometre range. AOI followed in February 2026 with the Hamza-3, shown at Saudi Arabia’s World Defense Show alongside a new counter-drone jammer and detection system, though a company representative acknowledged some Hamza-3 subsystems still arrive from China while Cairo works to localise full production, a candid admission that captures where most African manufacturing programmes actually sit: assembling and increasingly designing airframes domestically while depending on imported engines, optics, and electronics underneath the skin, a constraint this site has covered in Nigeria’s case and one that recurs almost everywhere else on this list.

    Nigeria’s story is less about any single manufacturer than about running three distinct models simultaneously, which is itself somewhat unusual: the Nigerian Air Force’s own Research and Development Centre builds the indigenous Tsaigumi ISR platform to reduce reliance on a fleet already stretched across dozens of imported types; Terra Industries has, in under two years, turned Silicon Valley venture capital into two factories and a strike-and-interceptor product line aimed as much at export markets as at the Nigerian government; and Babasky Technologies has built a DICON-linked counter-drone platform through a more conventional state-industrial-partnership route. No other African country is currently running all three models, private venture capital, state R&D, and state-linked industrial partnership, at once, which makes Nigeria a genuine test case for which approach actually produces a durable domestic industry, though it is too early to say which, if any, will still be standing in five years.

    The rest of the continent’s manufacturing base is considerably less proven, and it is worth being honest about that rather than treating every announced programme as equivalent to what South Africa or Egypt have achieved. Algeria’s Amel series, developed since 2013 by Star Aviation and later by the state’s Research Centre in Industrial Technologies, has produced at least five design iterations and roughly 17 units of the Amel 300 to date, but independent trackers including Oryx have assessed that most Amel variants are unlikely to ever enter operational service, and Algeria’s parallel claim to be locally building the UAE’s Yabhon Flash 20 and United 40 under the designations El-Djazair-55 and El-Djazair-54 sits closer to licensed assembly than original design, a distinction worth drawing clearly given how often “locally built” gets used to describe both activities interchangeably. Kenya’s most notable indigenous effort, a reverse-engineered adaptation of Israel’s Aerostar developed with Turkish assistance and unveiled in 2021 as the TAI, and Ethiopia’s twin-variant WanderB reconnaissance platform, remain smaller-scale programmes without the institutional depth or announced production volumes of the Egyptian or South African efforts, though both represent the same underlying pattern: militaries with enough foreign-drone experience to want a domestic alternative, even a modest one.

    Stepping back, Military Africa’s own tracking of the sector shows the scale of this shift more clearly than any single manufacturer’s story. Its dataset counted roughly 180 locally made units across seven countries and 13 companies as of 2024; by mid-2026 the same tracking, now cited across several of this site’s own pieces, put the figure at 216 units across nine countries and 35 distinct models, a meaningful jump in under two years. Southern Africa still accounts for the largest share, some 94 units across a dozen models, with North Africa close behind at 51 units across 14 models, ahead of West Africa’s 20 and East Africa’s 15, though those last two regions are the ones adding new entrants fastest, Nigeria and Egypt chief among them.

    What almost none of these programmes have solved, regardless of which of the four models above they follow, is the imported-component problem underneath the airframe. Whether the manufacturer is a decades-old state conglomerate, a two-year-old venture-backed startup, or a university-linked research centre, the engines, precision optics, and satellite-navigation receivers inside an African-built drone still overwhelmingly come from somewhere else, which means the real measure of how far this industry has matured is not how many companies now claim to build drones, but how much of what goes inside them they will eventually build too.

  • Nigeria’s Scramble for Counter-Drone Capability

    Nigeria’s Scramble for Counter-Drone Capability

    Nigeria is building its counter-drone capability on two parallel tracks at once, one running through the Nigerian Air Force’s own procurement and training pipeline, the other through a wave of homegrown defence-technology startups the military has begun leaning on directly. Both are responses to the same problem: Boko Haram and its offshoot, the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), have gone from flying commercial drones for reconnaissance to dropping explosives from them in barely two years, and Nigeria’s air defences were not built with that threat in mind.

    The shift became impossible to ignore on 24 December 2024, when four drones carrying locally modified grenades struck a Nigerian Forward Operating Base at Wajiroko in Borno State, the first confirmed combat use of armed drones by a Lake Chad Basin militant group. Further armed-drone attacks followed within days at Damaturu and Abadam, and by January 2026 open-source trackers were reporting roughly 35 additional drones smuggled into the region through Lake Chad corridor routes, with interviews conducted by the Institute for Security Studies pointing to foreign Islamic State trainers helping local fighters adapt the tactics. Independent incident trackers cited by Military Africa put the overall scale of the shift at roughly a six-fold increase in documented drone incidents since 2024, a rate of change that has left conventional, centralised air-defence assets poorly matched to a threat that can be assembled from parts bought online for a few hundred dollars.

    The Nigerian Air Force’s most visible response has been a dedicated training programme on what it calls the 612A Anti-UAV Radar System, inaugurated on 26 July 2025 at the headquarters of the Air Component for Operation Hadin Kai in Maiduguri, Borno State, under then Chief of the Air Staff Air Marshal Hasan Bala Abubakar. The programme graduated its first cohort that October, with the air force describing the system as capable of detecting the low, slow and small aerial targets that conventional radar tends to miss. Open-source defence trackers have not been able to match the 612A designation to any publicly documented radar system, and Military Africa has suggested it may be a locally assigned name for newly acquired equipment rather than a manufacturer’s original model number, a reminder that even basic order-of-battle details can be hard to pin down for African procurement. Air Marshal Sunday Aneke succeeded Abubakar as Chief of the Air Staff on 30 October 2025 and has since folded the counter-drone effort into a broader National Threat Assessment and security-planning process alongside Nigeria’s other service chiefs.

    Alongside the radar, Nigeria has fielded the Lithuanian-made EDM4S SkyWiper from NT Service, a handheld jammer first unveiled in 2019 that disrupts the control, telemetry and navigation links between a drone and its operator, typically paired with NT Service’s own Wingman detector for a fuller picture of what is approaching. A separate layer, Thales Ground Observer 12 radars delivered in 2019, provides Ku-band pulse-Doppler surveillance originally intended for broader battlefield and border monitoring that now does double duty against low-flying drones.

    Running alongside the Air Force’s own procurement is a second, distinctly Nigerian track: a cluster of domestic startups building counter-drone hardware from scratch rather than importing it. The most prominent is Terra Industries, an Abuja-based company founded in 2024 by Nathan Nwachuku and Maxwell Maduka that has become the continent’s most heavily funded defence-technology startup, raising more than 50 million dollars in seed funding by August 2026 from investors including 8VC and Lux Capital. Terra’s product line includes the Archer, a vertical-takeoff-and-landing (VTOL) surveillance and strike drone, and the Iroko tactical UAV, but its counter-drone entry is Kama, an interceptor the company says can run down and disable hostile aircraft at speeds of up to 300 kilometres per hour. The company’s existing Abuja factory, Pax-1, is being supplemented by a larger facility in Accra, Ghana, due to reach full operation around mid-2026 and eventually produce up to 50,000 units a year, a scale-up Terra has framed explicitly around the pace of drone attacks across the wider Sahel rather than Nigeria alone. Terra is not working this ground alone: Babasky Technologies, the defence subsidiary of Nigerian conglomerate UNICCON Group, has pursued a parallel counter-drone programme linked to the Defense Industries Corporation of Nigeria (DICON), pairing its own detection-and-jamming platform with a companion strike drone, a project Unmanned Africa covered in detail when it was demonstrated in August 2026. Between them, Nigeria now has at least two well-funded, credible domestic counter-drone efforts running independently of, and in addition to, whatever the Air Force is importing.

    Whether any of this closes the gap fast enough is a genuinely open question. Continental market analysts tracking the broader shift from drone procurement toward counter-drone spending put growth in the sector at more than 27 percent a year through 2030, and Nigeria’s build-out fits a pattern seen from the Sahel to the Horn of Africa, where militaries are moving from ad hoc handheld jammers toward layered detection-and-defeat systems. The economics remain stubbornly lopsided in the meantime: an ISWAP or Boko Haram cell can put together a working strike drone for a few hundred to a couple of thousand dollars, while a single radar or jamming installation of the kind Nigeria is now fielding can run into the hundreds of thousands. Insurgent groups have also shown they adapt quickly, shifting to frequency-hopping firmware and, in Mali and the wider Sahel, fiber-optic tethers that defeat radio jamming entirely, an evolution Nigerian planners will need to anticipate rather than simply react to if the current investment is to hold up.

    For now, the more telling signal may be less about any single radar or jammer and more about who is building Nigeria’s answer to this threat. A state air force training on imported hardware and a cluster of homegrown startups building interceptors from the ground up are not usually part of the same defence-procurement story, but in Nigeria’s northeast, both have become necessary, and neither looks likely to be enough on its own.

  • Libya’s Arms Embargo Frays as Haftar Eyes New Drones

    Libya’s Arms Embargo Frays as Haftar Eyes New Drones

    In April 2026, Reuters reported that satellite imagery showed drones arriving at Al Khadim airbase in eastern Libya, in territory controlled by Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA). Image analysts who reviewed the pictures for the news agency identified one aircraft as most likely a Chinese Feilong-1 and a second, smaller airframe as resembling a Turkish Bayraktar TB2, deliveries that would breach the arms embargo the United Nations has maintained on Libya since 2011. The find matters less for its novelty, both sides in Libya’s long-running dispute have received prohibited weapons for years, than for its timing. It lands five years into a fragile ceasefire, revives interest in the conflict that first made the TB2 famous, and raises the question of whether the 2020 Tripoli stalemate is as settled as it has looked.

    In April 2026, Reuters reported that satellite imagery showed drones arriving at Al Khadim airbase in eastern Libya, in territory controlled by Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA)

    Libya has been split between two rival administrations since a UN-facilitated process failed to deliver the elections it promised in 2021. The Government of National Unity (GNU), based in Tripoli and led by Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, controls the west with the backing of an array of militias and, since 2020, direct Turkish military support. In the east, the House of Representatives in Tobruk backs a rival administration, the Government of National Stability (GNS), led by Prime Minister Osama Hamad, whose security is provided by Haftar’s LNA. The current division hardened after the LNA laid siege to Tripoli for fourteen months starting in April 2019, an offensive that Turkish intervention, including the Bayraktar TB2’s combat debut at scale, broke by mid-2020. The ceasefire that followed left the frontline roughly where the fighting stopped, and it has stayed there since, even as both governments’ claims to legitimacy have grown steadily weaker and elections remain unscheduled.

    The Security Council imposed the arms embargo in February 2011 through Resolution 1970, which also gave its name to the committee that still oversees the sanctions regime today, and compliance has been thin almost since the resolution passed. A UN Panel of Experts concluded in 2017, and reaffirmed in later reporting, that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) had “most probably” supplied and helped operate Chinese-made Wing Loong II drones for Haftar’s forces during the Tripoli offensive, aircraft that gave the LNA a marked early edge before Turkey’s TB2s arrived to contest the skies. Enforcement since has stayed weak enough that violations barely register as news anymore: a March 2026 UN report found that a shipment of trucks, delivered to Libya after what investigators described as secret negotiations involving the European Union, Greece, the UAE, and both Libyan governments, was split between Tripoli-aligned Misrata and Haftar-aligned Benghazi, with some vehicles ending up with a militia that runs a notorious migrant detention camp.

    Against that backdrop, the Al Khadim imagery is notable mainly for what it suggests about the LNA’s ambitions rather than for breaking new legal ground. The Feilong-1, built by the Xi’an-based Zhong Tian Guide Control Technology Company (marketed under the Zhongtian Feilong brand), first flew in January 2019 and bears a strong resemblance to China’s larger CH-5 (Rainbow-5) family, with a maximum takeoff weight of around 3,200 kilograms, a payload of up to 1,400 kilograms, and four underwing hardpoints. It had not previously been confirmed in African service. Reuters could not establish who supplied either aircraft at Al Khadim or precisely when they arrived, and neither the Chinese government, Turkish officials, nor the LNA responded substantively to requests for comment. What the imagery does suggest is that Haftar’s forces are working to close a gap that opened in October 2022, when Tripoli’s GNU signed a deal with Turkish manufacturer Baykar for the AKINCI, a larger, longer-range, and more heavily armed uncrewed combat aircraft than anything the LNA has been confirmed to operate.

    Turkey’s position complicates any simple reading of the story. Ankara has spent years cultivating a working relationship with Haftar’s camp even while remaining the GNU’s principal military patron, a balancing act it has practiced elsewhere on the continent by selling rival buyers different tiers of the same product line. Whether that extends to supplying the LNA directly with combat drones remains unconfirmed, but Turkish officials have acknowledged publicly that exported drones carry technical safeguards, described in a December 2021 interview by then head of Turkey’s defence industries authority Ismail Demir as a form of remote lockout, that would let Ankara restrict how a buyer uses the aircraft. If Haftar’s forces are indeed flying Turkish-made drones, they would be doing so without the reassurance the UAE’s Wing Loong IIs offered during the 2019 to 2020 siege: aircraft supplied, and according to the UN panel’s findings partly operated, by a patron with no ambiguity about whose side it was on.

    None of this has translated into renewed large-scale fighting, and there are reasons to think it might not, at least for now. In April 2026, mediation led by US Senior Advisor for Africa Massad Boulos helped the two governments agree on Libya’s first unified state budget in nearly a decade, a rare concrete step that UN officials have cited as evidence the political track still has life in it. But the same month’s satellite imagery is a reminder that Libya’s political and military tracks are not necessarily moving in step with each other. The country that gave the world its first large-scale demonstration of what an inexpensive, expendable drone could do to a conventional army is once again the place both sides are watching most closely to see whether that lesson needs relearning.

  • Tantita Adds Aerosonde VTOL Drones to Niger Delta Oil Watch

    Tantita Adds Aerosonde VTOL Drones to Niger Delta Oil Watch

    American defence manufacturer Textron Systems Corporation, a subsidiary of Textron Inc. (NYSE: TXT), has been awarded a contract to deliver three Aerosonde Mk. 4.7 vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) to Tantita Security Services Nigeria Limited (TSSNL), the private security firm that holds the federal government’s pipeline surveillance contract across the Niger Delta’s oil-producing communities. Textron announced the deal in a statement dated December 29, 2025, saying the aircraft will be delivered in a configuration free of restrictions under the US International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), the export-control regime that normally limits how far American defence technology can travel once it leaves the United States.

    The Mk. 4.7 VTOL differs from the fixed-wing Aerosonde variant Nigeria has operated since 2022 in one important respect: it needs no runway. The aircraft uses what Textron calls Hybrid Quadrotor technology, four rotors that lift the airframe vertically before it pitches into forward flight and cruises on its wings for the bulk of a mission. For an operator working the Niger Delta’s creeks and mangrove swamps, where a conventional airstrip is rarely close to the pipelines and flow stations that need watching, that detail matters more than it would in open terrain. Textron’s own specification sheet for the Mk. 4.7 VTOL lists a range of 140 kilometres on electronic line of sight, up to twelve hours of endurance, a ceiling of 12,000 feet density altitude, and a payload capacity of roughly 20 pounds (about 9 kilograms), enough to carry up to six sensors per sortie from a catalogue of more than 40 payload options that includes full-motion video and signals intelligence packages. The system can reportedly move from transport case to flight in under 20 minutes with a crew of three, and both the airframe and its cases are built for a two-person lift, features suited to operators working from small boats or improvised forward sites rather than fixed bases.

    Textron’s own account of the deal credits the award to Arco Worldwide Services (AWS), a Lagos-based drone operator and a subsidiary of Arco Group Plc, an indigenous oil and gas services company with roughly 45 years of operating history in Nigeria. AWS, which describes itself as the country’s first licensed commercial drone operator, will provide the contracted UAS services in support of Tantita’s operations. That role is not new for the firm: Arco Worldwide’s own published account of its work states that it previously facilitated Textron’s earlier Foreign Military Sale (FMS) contract for Nigeria, a $25.6 million agreement signed in 2020 that delivered three fixed-wing Aerosonde 4.7 aircraft to the Nigerian Army, reaching operational status in October 2022 after delays pushed the original 2021 completion date back about a year.

    David Phillips, Textron’s Senior Vice President of Air, Land and Sea Systems, called the new aircraft “a mature, highly reliable, and industry-proven autonomous solution” for Tantita’s work. He added that the Aerosonde’s record positions it to help Tantita expand its capacity to protect infrastructure that matters to both domestic security and government revenue. Textron points to the wider Aerosonde family as evidence for that claim: the platform has logged more than 700,000 flight hours across desert, maritime, Arctic and jungle conditions, and it currently flies from more than ten US Navy ships as part of shipboard intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) work.

    For Tantita, the acquisition builds on a two-decade-old company and an increasingly technology-heavy operating model. TSSNL was founded in 2005 by High Chief Government Ekpemupolo, widely known as Tompolo, together with engineer Kestin Pondi and two other partners. Tompolo, a former Niger Delta militant leader, serves as a director and remains the company’s most recognisable public figure, while High Chief (Engr.) Kestin Pondi has run day-to-day operations as Managing Director since the firm’s founding.

    Pondi has described Tantita’s approach as delivering security solutions tailored to each client, whether government agencies, corporate operators or economies working in high-risk conditions, language consistent with a company that has spent the past year expanding its own technology stack. That stack now includes the Tantita Operations Command and Control Application (TOCA), an in-house platform the company unveiled publicly at Nigeria Oil and Gas Week in Abuja this August, which fuses real-time and historical satellite imagery and lets operators reconstruct vessel movements across Nigerian waters over a two-year window from Tantita’s Command and Control Centres. The new Aerosonde aircraft will feed that system directly, adding a dedicated aerial layer to surveillance work that, in one recent example, saw Tantita intercept a vessel allegedly carrying stolen crude off Delta State in mid-December 2025 and hand the suspects to a federal task force days later.

    Independent data offers some support for Tantita’s claims of operational effect, though the picture is not without dispute. A NUPRC-sourced figure reported by Vanguard in September 2025 put average daily crude oil losses at around 9,600 barrels as of July 2025, down from about 102,900 barrels in 2021, a decline of more than 94 percent over the period Tantita has held its surveillance mandate. At the same time, the company’s effective hold on pipeline protection in the region has drawn criticism from Niger Delta civil society groups, who in a March 2026 open letter questioned both the cost of the contract and Tantita’s ability to reach remote swamp terrain.

    Textron had not published a delivery timeline for the three aircraft as of late August 2026. In early January, Tantita’s Executive Director of Operations and Technical said company personnel had already travelled to the United States to inspect Aerosonde operations and study the technical processes involved, describing Tantita as the first private security firm in Nigeria to acquire an Aerosonde platform with full ISR capability. The contract also carries options for additional aircraft and further training as Tantita’s needs grow, a structure that lets a customer scale a fleet in stages rather than commit to a large purchase upfront.

    The sale places Nigeria among a small but expanding group of countries where Western-built VTOL drones are entering service with private security operators rather than state militaries, a shift likely to draw as much scrutiny as interest across a West African security market where oil theft, pipeline sabotage and maritime crime remain persistent threats to national revenue.

  • Chinese CH-4 Drones spotted in Abéché, Chad

    Chinese CH-4 Drones spotted in Abéché, Chad

    Newly emerged video footage shared on X by Chadian commentator Mahamat M Adam Bechir reveals that the Chadian Air Force has likely acquired Chinese-manufactured Caihong-4 (CH-4) uncrewed combat aerial vehicles into its operational fleet. The visual evidence, filmed at Abéché Airbase in eastern Chad, depicts at least four distinct CH-4 airframes parked on the apron alongside ground support equipment. Although N’Djamena has not formally announced the procurement contract, the presence of multiple fully assembled aircraft confirms that deliveries have taken place and that operational integration is actively underway in a critical sector of the country.

    Engineered by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, the CH-4 is a medium-altitude, long-endurance platform designed for intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, and strike missions. Featuring an 18-meter wingspan and a maximum takeoff weight of roughly 1,330 kilograms, the aircraft provides up to 40 hours of endurance in pure reconnaissance configurations, which reduces to approximately 14 hours when fully armed. Its underwing hardpoints can carry up to 345 kilograms of mission payload, including AR-1 laser-guided air-to-ground missiles and FT-9 satellite-guided bombs. This capability allows operators to engage tactical ground targets from altitudes above 5,000 meters, keeping the drone outside the engagement ceiling of light anti-aircraft guns and shoulder-fired missiles.

    Staging these long-range platforms at Abéché Airbase provides Chadian defense planners with an immediate operational advantage across multiple strategic sectors. Abéché serves as the primary military gateway to eastern Chad, positioned within rapid response distance of the border with Sudan’s Darfur region, where spillover from ongoing civil conflict creates continuous security challenges. From this eastern hub, CH-4 units can execute long-duration border monitoring, track armed transnational groups, and conduct rapid precision strikes against hostile incursions without requiring intermediate airfield refueling stops. The drone’s operational radius also enables surveillance coverage extending north toward the Tibesti Mountains, a region historically utilized by rebel formations.

    The acquisition of the CH-4 reflects a ongoing effort by Chadian military leadership to diversify its uncrewed asset inventory. In recent years, N’Djamena has integrated Turkish platforms, including Bayraktar TB2, Aksungur, and Anka drones, alongside legacy intelligence assets to reinforce its counter-insurgency posture against groups like Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province in the Lake Chad Basin. By procuring Chinese medium-altitude platforms, Chad joins a growing list of African operators, such as Nigeria, Egypt, Algeria, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, that rely on Beijing for cost-effective armed uncrewed aircraft to expand their operational reach.

  • Ghana Army Drone Pilots Complete AeriusPro & Ghost OEM Training Programme

    Ghana Army Drone Pilots Complete AeriusPro & Ghost OEM Training Programme

    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.

    Ghana Army drone pilots on successfully completing the AeriusPro & Ghost OEM Training Programme.
    The Ghanaian Armed Forces have operationally deployed the locally designed and manufactured VTOL AeriusPro drone in the northern regions of Bawku and Binduri.

    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.