A Mozambique drone flood rescue operation, mounted by trainees less than halfway through a Korean-funded programme, located stranded families, mapped washed-out roads and guided emergency vehicles through the Incomáti River flood in January, without a single recorded fatality, among either residents or rescue workers.
The operation centred on Marracuene, a district just north of the capital, where the Incomáti River burst its banks after weeks of rainfall and submerged hundreds of square miles of land. The flood was among the worst the area had experienced in decades. What made the outcome different from previous disasters was the presence of a trained drone team that could show rescue crews, in real time, exactly where the water had gone and how deep it was running.
How the Mozambique Drone Flood Rescue Team Came to Be
In April 2025, the African Development Bank‘s South Korea–Africa Economic Cooperation (KOAFEC) Trust Fund launched the Drone-Based Disaster Management Project. The programme enrolled 30 public sector experts drawn from meteorology, road mapping, water management and disaster response agencies, placing them under Korean instructors to learn not only how to fly drones but how to operate LiDAR instruments and live data platforms capable of transmitting imagery from disaster zones as events unfolded.
The January floods arrived roughly eight months before the training was due to finish. The government ordered the project’s team to Marracuene anyway. The pilots went, and they delivered.
‘Before this project, I had absolutely no experience with drones,’ said Kátia Manjate, one of the new pilots. Under her Korean instructors she learned to run the full pipeline, ‘from data collection all the way to the final product… the processing and understanding what results we can draw from it all.’ That knowledge proved its worth when the Incomáti swallowed the district. LiDAR readings showed the depth of each flooded section, allowing vehicles to pick routes through waters that in places reached door height. Live imagery gave rescue teams a view of the landscape they would otherwise have had no way of seeing.
In August, all 30 pilots graduated. Ten received licences to train further drone operators, extending the programme’s reach beyond the original cohort.
A Crisis That Reached Far Beyond One District
The Marracuene operation took place inside a far larger regional emergency. According to ReliefWeb, the floods affected nearly 600,000 people in Mozambique, primarily in Gaza Province, displacing thousands, severing the main transport link between Maputo and the rest of the country, and destroying vast areas of farmland while killing 27,000 livestock. The scale of the agricultural and infrastructure damage underlines why technology that can rapidly map flooded terrain carries consequences well beyond the immediate rescue phase.
Across the broader southern African region, GloFAS News reported that humanitarian agencies estimated around 300 people were killed and nearly 800,000 affected, with the most severe impacts recorded in South Africa, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Tanzania alongside Mozambique. The REPAIR Programme, responding to the regional emergency, disbursed over USD 22.3 million within seven business days to support urgent flood response operations in Mozambique and Malawi.
Against that backdrop, the absence of fatalities in Marracuene is not a small number. It is the direct result of a programme being in place when the water rose.
What Comes Next for the Programme
Márcia Moiane, a local councillor in Marracuene, spoke to a press team from the African Development Bank about what the project means beyond January’s emergency. ‘This project marks a major leap forward, not only in technology but also in how we respond to emergencies,’ she said. ‘It means we can act faster and smarter, saving more lives.’
The ten newly licensed instructors now carry the responsibility of turning that one-off demonstration into a durable local capability. With flood risk across the region running high, the question is not whether Mozambique will face another disaster of this scale, it is whether the drone teams will be ready, and in greater numbers, when it arrives. The graduation of the first cohort in August has at least ensured that the answer is no longer entirely out of local hands.
