The vastness of any large-scale project is often its undoing. A thousand hectares of new crops, a stadium rising in a city’s dust, a wetland restoration effort stretching beyond the horizon. For the people tasked with seeing these projects through, the physical distance becomes an immediate, intractable problem. How do you manage what you can’t fully see?
In much of Africa, this challenge isn’t merely logistical; it’s existential. It is what Eric Muziga, Founder and CEO of Charis UAS, calls the “lack of visibility.” It is the knowledge that effort is being expended, money is being spent, but the precise location of the issue, the exact status of the concrete pour, the telltale sign of a crop failure, remains just beyond the horizon, locked in an outdated map or a distant, low-resolution memory.
Eric Muziga came to this problem not as a utopian technologist, but as an engineer who understood the necessity of clear sight. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree with a Master’s in Electrical Engineering from the University of Minnesota, he is the kind of person who is not satisfied until the data is clean and the action is informed. In 2014, he founded Charis UAS as Rwanda’s first drone company with a humble, almost obvious idea: use a view from above to fix the problems on the ground.
The drone, that whirring, slightly awkward machine, is not the point. The point is the high quality, accurate, near-real time 3D representation it delivers. It’s the replacement of guesswork with indisputable geometry.
The Anxiety of the Unseen Asset
Muziga’s success is built on understanding a particular kind of managerial anxiety. He acknowledges that managing sites and physical assets can be “difficult, stressful and anxiety-inducing.” The lack of accurate representation only reinforces that dread. You can’t control what you can’t verify.
Charis UAS, and its proprietary platform Charis Analytics, is the antidote to this worry. It monitors assets worth more than US$1 billion, ranging from the sheer scale of airports and skyscrapers to the subtle details of solar power plants and forest tracts. The platform takes that complex aerial data and turns it into simple, real-time dashboards that work even on low-bandwidth connections—a deeply practical nod to the realities of the operating environment. The goal is to let a site team track progress and spot an issue, say, a material shortage or an uneven foundation, without having to drive six hours over difficult roads.
The shift is fundamental. It’s the difference between hearing a rumor about a problem and seeing a high-resolution photograph of the problem, complete with precise coordinates, rendered in 3D. This visualization allows clients to simplify their data, detect cost savings, and make better informed decisions on physical assets. It’s a move toward operational clarity, achieved through patience and persistence.
Malaria, Wetlands, and the Scale of Impact
The true measure of this technology, however, is found away from the construction sites and the big corporate ledgers. It is found in the unexpected places the simple, clear vision from above can solve human problems.
Charis UAS has two statistics that stand out, not for their financial volume, but for their profound human effect. The first is the restoration of over 15,000 hectares of wetlands. When you can map the precise boundaries of environmental degradation and track restoration efforts with granular accuracy, the project becomes manageable. The work moves from aspiration to execution.
The second is even more compelling: the use of the platform to mitigate malaria. The drones detect mosquito breeding sites in wetlands in Rwanda and the Ivory Coast. By knowing the exact, tiny coordinates of a threat, public health teams can target their intervention with surgical precision. The result is a reported 90 percent reduction in malaria cases where the technology has been used.
This is the quiet dignity of the work. The drone, originally brought in to measure construction progress or crop yield, finds itself engaged in a public health mission. It is a stunning, unexpected application of geospatial data, demonstrating that the pursuit of efficiency often leads to the highest form of social good.
Building the Ecosystem and the Future
Muziga is aware that simply having the technology isn’t enough. The challenge of adopting new technology and drones wasn’t easy, he admits. Customers needed to understand the upside. Progress was earned through perseverance.
This understanding is why Charis UAS is deeply committed to capacity building for Africa’s next generation of drone professionals. Muziga isn’t just selling a service; he’s helping to build the entire ecosystem that can sustain it. The company, active across eight markets in Africa and now expanding into North America, Australia, and Europe, is profitable, but its ambition remains rooted in the continent where it began.The enduring lesson, one that perhaps only a persistent engineer turned entrepreneur can truly appreciate, is that visibility is the first step toward development. Before you can build, before you can harvest, before you can heal, you must simply see. Eric Rutayisire Muziga built a company that hands people the ability to see clearly, and in doing so, he has given Africa’s builders, farmers, and decision-makers the tools to act faster and scale smarter. He is a man who solved a fundamental, large-scale problem by looking at it, clearly and precisely, from a small machine hovering quietly in the air.
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