SORA Technology, a Japanese drone-based solutions and aerial technology provider, is using AI-powered drones to curb the spread of malaria on the African continent.
This follows revelations that the continent continues to face a severe and enduring malaria crisis that claims hundreds of thousands of lives each year, most of them children under five.
The continent bears more than 95% of global malaria infections and fatalities.
Southern and eastern Africa have experienced troubling spikes in cases, driven by climate change, rising insecticide and drug resistance, funding gaps, and widespread humanitarian disruptions in recent years.
Countries including Zimbabwe and Botswana reported sharp surges in malaria cases in 2025, threatening to erode decades of hard‑won progress.
Against this background, SORA Technology has brought in the solution of drone technology to curb this growing threat.
"Malaria remains one of the deadliest yet most preventable diseases in the world, still killing hundreds of thousands of people every year, overwhelmingly in Africa. Many existing interventions, such as bed nets, are reactive and inefficient, especially in remote areas," said SORA Technology CEO Yosuke Kaneko in a recent interview.
"At the same time, drone and AI technologies are advancing rapidly. I saw a clear opportunity to apply these technologies to malaria prevention in a way that could be far more precise, scalable and impactful – particularly in hard-to-reach environments and around large industrial environments such as mining operations, where mosquito risk is often concentrated."
He added that malaria continues to be a major public health and economic burden across the continent, affecting not only households but also national and continental productivity.
"Our mission aligns closely with national malaria-elimination strategies by enabling more targeted, data-driven prevention. This is especially important in rural regions and in areas surrounding infrastructure and mining projects, where environmental changes can increase malaria risk," Kaneko said.
"By improving prevention in these settings, we support both public health outcomes and sustainable economic development," he added.
The company claims its drone‑enabled Larval Source Management (LSM) approach delivers a more precise, technology‑driven alternative to traditional broad‑area spraying campaigns. Instead of indiscriminate spraying, the system’s drones identify specific water puddles that are breeding grounds for mosquitoes and spray them selectively.
“Until now, malaria control has been mainly focused on approaches against adult mosquitoes, such as the use of mosquito nets and insecticide spraying, but while these approaches have been effective for indoor malaria control, they have been insufficient for outdoor control and reducing the potential risk of malaria infection,” the company says.
In response to this, the Larval Source Management (LSM) approach, which manages water bodies that serve as habitats for mosquito larvae, has been attracting attention in recent years. This method, however, requires searching for puddles that may be infested with mosquito larvae, and then spraying all discovered puddles, done all manually, which has a huge issue in terms of execution cost.
“SORA Malaria Control combines aerial photography data from our in-house developed fixed-wing drones, with multiple AI technologies, to efficiently identify and manage puddles with a high risk of serving as habitats for mosquito larvae. And thanks to the aerial imaging technology of fixed-wing drones that can cover large areas, this solution also enables cost-effective implementation of LSM by limiting insecticide application to puddles at high risk of mosquito larvae breeding, while greatly reducing labor cost which is essential for puddle detection.”
From Japan, SORA Technology has expanded into Nigeria and several other African countries– including Sierra Leone, Ghana, Benin, Niger, Democratic Republic of Congo, Côte d'Ivoire, Senegal, Nigeria, Malawi, Kenya, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania and Togo – rolling out fleets of fixed‑wing drones across high‑risk regions to pinpoint mosquito breeding sites and deliver targeted larvicide-spraying with greater precision.
Sora Technology also recently raised $2.5 million in series A funding, which it says will be used to advance AI algorithms for infectious-disease prediction, expand field operations across African partner countries, strengthen partnerships with governments and international institutions, and enhance drone systems and local operational capabilities.