On 10 September 2026, the Kenya Civil Aviation Authority (KCAA) and Kenya's State Department for Aviation & Aerospace Development co-hosted the inaugural African Drone Regulators Forum at the Sarit Expo Centre in Nairobi. By the organizer's account, it was a closed-door working session of roughly three hours. It drew drone-department leads from more than 30 invited civil aviation authorities (CAAs). Each authority gave a short framework status update. Peer discussion on beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) authorization, unmanned traffic management (UTM) governance and digital registration followed. The session closed by agreeing a '2026 State of African Drone Regulation' briefing and a Year 2 agenda. It ran alongside the Aviation Africa Summit on 9–10 September, a date we have from search results and trade coverage only, because the event listing itself could not be fetched.
The forum is a good idea. Its value will depend on what it publishes.
The case for caution
Regulators are not wrong to be slow on BVLOS. Once a pilot cannot see the aircraft, collision risk with crewed aircraft, with people on the ground and with other drones depends on detect-and-avoid technology, reliable command links and traffic management that few countries have deployed. A CAA that approves a long-range delivery route and then sees an incident has to answer for it. Closed-door sessions also help here: regulators will admit uncertainty to each other in a way they rarely do in public. The organizer describes the format as a working session where regulators compare what they are building, not a conference panel.
That is a legitimate way to build trust between institutions with thin staffing. Many African CAAs run drone programmes with a handful of people.
Where the cost of caution shows up
Kenya is a useful test case because it is both the host and an early mover. The organizer's own material says Kenya has a live UTM procurement process, an operational BVLOS corridor and more licensed training academies than any other African country. In July 2025 KCAA approved the Konza National Drone Corridor, Kenya's first designated controlled airspace for BVLOS operations. The approval followed review by a UAS Multi-Agency Route Committee, according to trade reporting.
The broader picture was more restrictive. In July 2024, industry players at the Elevate Africa UAS Summit told The Standard that only Zipline had commercial BVLOS approval, and only in limited areas. They also objected to a KCAA charge of Sh2,500 per day regardless of how long a flight lasts, and to a 400-foot (120 m) altitude ceiling. At that time the report counted 26 remotely piloted aircraft operator certificates and 16 registered training organisations. These figures are from 2024 and may have moved since. They show a regime that is workable for a single well-resourced operator and awkward for everyone else.
The pattern is common across the continent. Approval-by-exception means each BVLOS operation is negotiated individually. This favours incumbents who can afford the compliance effort, and it makes it hard for a startup to plan a business around a route that may or may not be approved. Fees that ignore usage penalise the small agricultural and survey operators who could benefit most from drones.
What the forum should produce
A 'State of African Drone Regulation' briefing will be useful only if it is specific. Our view is that three outputs would make the forum worth its cost.
- A public comparison table. Which authorities allow BVLOS, under what pathway (standing rule, waiver or corridor), with what detect-and-avoid or remote-ID requirement. Operators currently learn this country by country, at cost.
- Common technical references. Regulators do not need identical laws. They do need to accept the same standards for registration data, remote identification and UTM interfaces, so that an operator certified in one country can reuse evidence in another. The organizer's programme already points to corridor design, remote identification and coordination with air navigation service providers as topics.
- Risk-based categories instead of case-by-case waivers. Low-risk BVLOS over sparsely populated land should have a published, repeatable authorization route. Higher-risk operations over cities can keep tighter conditions. This is proportionate regulation: the burden tracks the hazard.
The transparency problem
The closed-door format is defensible for the working session. It is harder to defend for the result. If the outputs stay among the 30-plus authorities, the forum becomes a networking exercise. Operators, manufacturers and the public have no way of knowing whether the commitments mean anything. The organizer's own account of the 2025 Kigali edition offers a modest benchmark: one regional BVLOS and UTM white paper and six formal CAA briefing requests after the event. A white paper is a start. It is not a rulebook.
There is also a limit to what we can say. The forum's actual conclusions have not been published, and we have not seen the briefing. Everything above about the session comes from the organizer's pre-event description, not from a record of what was agreed. Observers should treat any claims of 'harmonisation' as unproven until a text appears.
Bottom line
Africa's drone sector is not short of regulators who care about safety. It is short of predictable, published rules that let an operator plan a route, a fleet and a budget. The Nairobi forum is a sensible place to start that work. Its test is simple: within a year, can an operator read one document and see how BVLOS is authorized in each participating country? If so, the forum will have lowered the cost of safe innovation. If not, it will have been one more meeting.