On 10 September 2026, regulators met in a closed room in Nairobi to compare how they let drones fly. The inaugural African Drone Regulators Forum (ADRF) ran from 9:00 to 12:00 at the Sarit Expo Centre during Aviation Africa 2026. It was co-hosted by Kenya's State Department for Aviation & Aerospace Development, the Kenya Civil Aviation Authority (KCAA) and the African Drone Forum, and billed as "Closed-door. By invitation. Regulators only." Its agenda covered beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) authorisation, unmanned traffic management (UTM) governance and digital registration. No outcomes have been published. What follows is therefore analysis of what the session is for, not a report of what it decided.
The case for meeting privately
The strongest argument for a closed format is candour. Civil aviation authorities are often thin on staff, and a regulator is more likely to admit that its BVLOS approvals take months, or that its registry does not work, when no vendor or journalist is in the room. Aviation safety is also a field where regulators learn from each other's incidents. A peer session with short structured updates from each authority, which is how the ADRF agenda was laid out, is a sensible way to build that trust. Regulators who trust each other copy each other's working rules, and that is how harmonisation actually happens.
Why the problem is real
Drone operators who work across borders face a patchwork. Kenya has had dedicated drone rules since the Civil Aviation (Unmanned Aircraft Systems) Regulations, 2020 (Legal Notice 42 of 2020). South Africa is still deciding how to integrate drones into its system. The Department of Transport's draft Airfreight Strategy, put out for comment in September 2025, proposes that every drone operated, distributed or sold in the country be on a national register. It also proposes that drone corridors be defined, approved and established under the National Airspace Committee (Nascom).
Some of that draft is good policy. It says corridors "must ideally be public-good facilities with open access, avoiding a spaghetti of single-user corridors", which is the right instinct. A corridor reserved for one delivery company is a private monopoly carved out of public airspace. The draft is also candid about the regulator's limits. It describes the South African Civil Aviation Authority as "under-capacitated and under-resourced", resulting in licensing delays, as TechCentral reported. The Department's own statement reaffirms that SACAA will continue to regulate all civilian drone operations.
Where the risks lie
A national register is a reasonable tool if it is cheap, electronic and fast. The risk is that registration becomes a gate rather than a database. If a regulator that is already delayed has to approve every aircraft, every sale and every corridor, the bottleneck moves rather than disappears. Africa's best-known drone use cases, such as delivering medicines and blood to remote clinics, depend on routine BVLOS flights. Those flights are only economical when approvals are predictable. A delivery network that waits months for each corridor will not be built.
There is also a coordination risk in any forum of 30-plus authorities. If each country designs its own remote-identification format, registry and UTM interface, an operator running in three countries needs three compliance stacks. The cost of that falls hardest on small African drone firms, not the multinationals that can afford a legal team in each capital. Fragmentation is the quiet way that well-meant safety rules turn into barriers to entry.
What a proportionate approach looks like
The evidence-based position is not deregulation. Drones share airspace with crewed aircraft, and a mid-air collision or a strike on a hospital helipad would damage public trust for every operator. The answer is risk-tiering, and the South African draft points that way by distinguishing low-risk operations (small drones at low altitude) from higher-risk ones (flights over people, dangerous goods, cross-border flights). Four principles follow.
- Publish the rules and the approval times. If a regulator commits to a decision window for BVLOS applications, operators can plan and investors can price the risk.
- Make registration electronic and interoperable. One record, usable across borders, should be the goal, not national silos.
- Keep corridors open-access by default, as the South African draft itself urges, and allow competing UTM service providers rather than a single monopoly manager.
- Report what was agreed. The ADRF page promises a "State of African Drone Regulation 2026" briefing and a Year 2 agenda. Publishing both would turn a private session into a public good.
The test for the forum
A closed-door meeting is a means, not an outcome. The session on 10 September is worth having only if its results show up in the next set of rules: shorter approval timelines, compatible registers, a shared vocabulary for remote ID and UTM. The ADRF was scheduled for three hours, which is enough for introductions, not for harmonisation. Whether it matters will be judged by whether a drone operator in Nairobi can, in two years, fly under a comparable rulebook in Johannesburg or Lagos. Regulators should publish a short communiqué now and a harmonisation roadmap with dates next. Anything less leaves the continent with a well-attended meeting and the same patchwork of rules.