Singapore start-up aims to bring healthcare to Papua New Guinea's needy, one drone at a time

SINGAPORE: In the Hebrew language, Yonah refers to a dove. Drawing on the name and its symbolism, one Singapore start-up aims to bring comfort and healing where it lands.

Yonah wants to achieve this through a cargo drone delivery system it is developing as a sustainable, reliable method of delivering measles vaccines to remote villages in Papua New Guinea. The country occupies the eastern part of the world’s second-largest island of New Guinea, some 160 km north of Australia and is vulnerable to nature’s wrath in the form of volcanoes, earthquakes and tidal waves.

Co-founder Ong Tian Chang, 30, told Channel NewsAsia in a recent interview that the genesis of the company came about even as he was at another start-up, Subnero, working on underwater wireless communications in 2015. Then, he was already interested in cargo drones but he did not know how to get the idea off the ground.

He later got to know of a Christian non-governmental organisation (NGO) called Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF), and started an email correspondence with them in the hope of finding out more about their projects and how he could participate.

According to the NGO's website, its pilots use Cessnas and Kodiak aircraft to deliver medicine and doctors, disaster relief, education, evangelists, Bible translators, food supplies, agriculture and clean water projects to "hardest-to-reach locations, where people live isolated from the rest of the world, cut off from the most basic necessities".

Full article at https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/singapore-start-up-aims-to-bring-healthcare-to-papua-new-guinea-9956414