Developing a policy framework for adoption and management of drones for agriculture in Africa

This paper proposes a drone policy framework for developing drone regulations for Africa, expediting the individual countries’ developing drone regulations. This research was conducted following concerns raised by individuals and businesses whose imported drones were seized by customs or had to go through a cumbersome process for approval to use drones for lack of regulations. To derive the policy framework, we matched the provisions of 15 existing drone regulations from Africa to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Manual on Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS) using a decomposition modelling technique. The proposed framework is presented as a formal business process model and is evaluated in a multi-case study approach in two different case studies. The results indicate that two key aspects/elements are crucial in the development of a drone framework and thus are included in our framework: (i) stakeholders’ inclusion in the policy development and (ii) regulators liaising with security agencies like the police and immigration officials to implement and enforce developed regulations. Applying the proposed framework in describing existing regulations reveals that 40-85% of provisions in existing regulations conform to the provisions in ICAO’s RPAS manual.