In January, a community in northern Mozambique experienced one of its worst floods in decades, yet the raging waters failed to claim a single life.
This miracle was made possible thanks to a small squadron of drones and their pilots tasked with informing search and rescue efforts in real time.
The story, shared by the African Development Bank, centers around Marracuene, a district just north of the capital, where the Incomáti River burst its banks after weeks of rainfall.
As it would happen, in April 2025, the Bank’s South Korea–Africa Economic Cooperation (KOAFEC) Trust Fund had launched a program to train 30 public sector experts from the meteorology, road mapping, water management, and disaster response agencies in the use of drones in emergency response.
Called the Drone-Based Disaster Management Project, January’s floods came halfway through the piloting course, where students were not only learning how to fly the drones, but also to operate sophisticated equipment like LiDAR instruments and data platforms that could transmit information about disaster areas in real time.
Marracuene and the Incomáti River became the equivalent of a final-year exam.
“Before this project, I had absolutely no experience with drones,” says Kátia Manjate, one of the new pilots.
Under Korean instructors, she learned to run the entire pipeline, “from data collection all the way to the final product… the processing and understanding what results we can draw from it all.”
That early expertise was vital as the Incomáti totally forgot where its banks were, and submerged hundreds of square miles beneath murky water. 8 months before their training was set to finish, the government ordered the project’s team to the district, where they got to work successfully “locating stranded families, mapping washed-out roads, and streaming live imagery to rescue teams who had no other way to see what the water had done.”
LiDAR imagery showed how deep each brown pool was, and could successfully guide rescue vehicles through door-high flood waters.
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Their work ensured that not only were there no recorded fatalities among the population, but none among the rescuers as well.
In August, the 30 pilots graduated from the program, 10 of whom with licenses to train further drone operators. Local councilwoman Márcia Moiane noted that the significance extends well beyond this flood when she spoke with a press team from the African Dev. Bank.
“This project marks a major leap forward — not only in technology but also in how we respond to emergencies. It means we can act faster and smarter, saving more lives.”
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