The WeRobotics 2019 Annual Report

Last year was the busiest year yet for Flying Labs and WeRobotics. Together, we carried out 56 trainings and 52 projects across 26 countries. We worked on cargo drone projects with Dominican Republic, Nepal, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and Cameroon Flying Labs. We held our first-ever Flying Labs Retreat, convening Flying Labs from 11 countries to learn from each other and strategize for the coming year, and launched the Drone Charter in Inclusion and Equal Opportunity. We also organized our second WeRobotics Global Conference in March, hosted at The Rockefeller Foundation. The conference once again brought Flying Labs together with leading experts across multiple sectors and technologies to catalyze information sharing and new partnerships. Over the summer, we launched the Unusual Solutions Competition to support local experts by creating an enabling environment for them to scale their positive social impact. The Competition received 245 solutions from 54 countries.

To improve our reporting, we revamped our finance and accounting processes, along with our monitoring and evaluation strategy. These updates enabled us to pass an independent, donor-required financial review successfully and to create a dedicated public-facing impact page with all our updated impact metrics to inform our strategy continuously. We also created our first organizational videos along with several other thematic videos after launching 'The Power of Local' as our new tagline. We consolidated our Board of Directors' strategy and added a significant number of new donors such as Omidyar Network, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Jansen PrimeSteps Foundation.

In 2020, our main priorities will focus on the data-value chain, closing feedback loops, increasing the quality of Flying Labs, growing the number of technology partnerships, and further diversifying revenue streams. We will continue to meet the growing demand for Flying Labs while enabling them to scale their impact through the provision of new, high-quality services. By bringing on select new technology partners, for example, Flying Labs can offer new use-cases for the application of robotics. This will enable labs to become more sustainable as they further diversify their activities.

You can read our 2019 Annual Report below or download the PDF here.