Uber adds yet another unit to its primary ride-hailing service. Uber Eats has now commenced medicine pickup and delivery to its list of businesses with the aim to stablise the African health sector and uplift digital shopping in the most industrial economy in the southern region of Africa. Uber Eats expanded its delivery services, using the mobile application platforms tagged an over-the-counter medicine service as an updated app feature. A pilot program is currently being carried out in South Africa with an aim to spread to other countries soon.
Appropriately utilizing the advancement of e-commerce mobility as the section of the company, Uber Eats has invested more than $600 million with the sole objective of improving health care amenities and dispatching food across the southern African market.
The food delivery company consulted with other high-profiled local pharmaceuticals such as Clicks and Dis-Chem. The chains of pharmacies have also been productive in the South African health sector prior to the covid-19 outbreak. The agreement between Uber health, Clicks, and Dis-Chem is initiated to establish medications for online shoppers since there has been a huge shift in this area on the African continent. Many startups are now making medicine delivery as seamless as possible.
The terms of the consortium among the three parties required the pharmaceutical firms to control the operation in the medicine delivery digital marketplace. Since the uprise of Covid-19, most of the active sectors in the economy came to a halt. The government authorized the exercise to temporarily close businesses’ operational activities such as stores, malls, restaurants, limited banking operations, etc. and as result businesses must come up with new ways to operate.
Majority of workers have spent most of the year at home or working from home as a result of the compulsory lockdown which became necessary as the pandemic spread across the world. Uber Eats say they service billing affordable for users and they even get a bonus for new subscribers and the aim is to achieve med-care mobility over-the-counter affordability.
The new Uber Eats platform has more than the potential to accomplish successful delivery operations from now to the nearest future. It comes with an introduction to the med-care delivery services to its 2 million active users in South Africa. To execute its market strategy as a new feature on its mobile app which is designed for multitasking, Uber Eats combined medicine delivery’s with ride-hailing, food/grocery delivery. This also includes a pharmaceutical firm’s medical services that operate with 50 active outlets in South Africa. The bigger picture is to utilize the advantages of e-commerce and to boost the African digital economy.
“The nationwide lockdown and restrictions in movements created an immediate need to accelerate our business in increasing the accessibilities to daily essentials. This is part of the reason our focus has been towards on-boarding various other merchants onto the app, aside from just restaurants,” Uber Eats General Manager South Africa, Shane Austin said.
According to the data in the overall digital market operations and active e-commerce activity that has over 25 million active users, it is expected of South Africa to attain more than 11% growth in its digital economy from now till 2024.
Medicine delivery is not new to many African economies. Rwanda partnered with Zipline to deliver medical supplies to remote areas of the country with the help of drones. In Nigeria, Drugstore, Konga and Pharm among others all deliver medicine to your doorstep.
