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This exclusive Cogs of War interview is with Maxwell Maduka, the co-founder and chief engineer of Terra Industries, an African defense technology company building autonomous drone and counter-drone systems designed for the continent’s operating conditions. As cheap imported airframes flood African markets and non-state actors employ drones across the Sahel, we asked Max why Terra is betting on Africa building its own defense industrial base.

Cheap Turkish and Chinese drones and sensor systems have proliferated across Africa for years. Where do those systems fall short, and what capabilities do you hope to add to the crowded unmanned market?

Imported Turkish and Chinese drones are cheap and fly fine, but they are difficult to sustain locally, and do not guarantee sovereignty over software and data.

These drones are also mainly designed for other terrains, then sold as a hard-to-maintain generic kit. Few are fit for African operating conditions like dust, heat, and patchy navigation systems. A single failed part can literally ground a drone for months if there is no in-country support or spares. There’s also the worry of espionage: If your intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance backbone is still linked to these countries, and you can’t audit the firmware, your operational picture is probably insecure.

We fill that gap through indigenous build and support from the continent. Our own software stack (ArtemisOS) keeps autonomy and data under the operator’s control. Its specifications and communications are tuned for Africa, and we have a strict human-in-the-loop policy.

The environmental challenges of designing a drone for a Ukrainian winter differ greatly from hot, humid, or dusty climates such as those found in Africa. What conditions and differences are you designing for? What has proven most challenging?

It’s almost the inverse of what you’re solving for in Ukraine. The big four for us are heat, dust, humidity, and topography, which affect different parts of the system.

Heat is the trickiest problem. It’s just always there, degrading batteries, cutting the drone’s endurance, and cooking the compute needed for the onboard autonomy. Keeping processing cool enough to stay reliable when the air around it is already hot, and doing it without bolting on weight that costs endurance elsewhere, is very difficult.

Anyone who has been to Africa knows there is a lot of dust. Harmattan (the Northwesterly trade wind blowing from the Sahara over West Africa from November to March) in particular seems to get into everything, including bearings, motors, and connectors. So, we end up caring a lot more about sealing and about how easily you can service a unit in the field than the Ukrainians may.

The winds here are also stronger and gustier than most imported platforms are equipped for, which eats into endurance. You’re doing more work on flight control than in other places just to hold a steady shot or keep the aircraft on station.

And then there’s topography. Africa is blessed with varying geography, from the Ethiopian highlands and rift valleys to dense rainforest and coastal plains, and all of it affects communication differently, from knife-edge diffraction to signal attenuation. We account for that by using dual-band signal hopping and testing various bands.

You advertise most of your systems as primarily serving defensive capabilities, from surveillance and perimeter monitoring to search and rescue, environmental analysis, and agricultural uses. Why did you design around those use cases? Do you foresee your drones being used for kinetic purposes?

We designed around awareness and protection use cases because that’s where the persistent demand is, which offers a bigger and more sustainable market than kinetic effects. The day-to-day problems across the continent are very different than the drone use cases you see in conventional warfare in Ukraine. Here, it’s about a pipeline being tapped, a mine site to monitor, farmland to assess, people to find after a flood.

That said, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance platforms and strike platforms require similar hardware and software, including airframes, autonomy, datalinks, and optics, as kinetic platforms. Any serious manufacturer knows the technology isn’t hermetically sealed, so we assume our drones will be used for defensive kinetic purposes.

For instance, improvised explosive devices are among the most destructive tools affecting both civilians and military personnel in Africa. Our Minesweeper, a mine-detecting unmanned ground vehicle, protects against improvised explosive devices and unexploded explosive ordnance. And non-state actors have been using drones across the Sahel in recent years (since 2023, over 100 drone strikes have been carried out by terrorist organizations across the region). So, the counter-unmanned aerial system mission is also important.

But we have a firm principle that every armed effect in our systems needs positive authorization from a human operator. We don’t and won’t build autonomous lethality: Nothing in our engineering or documentation stack allows a system to decide to engage on its own.

What’s been the most interesting or unexpected use of one of your systems that you hadn’t planned for?

There are two that stand out, but we’re sure more will pop up. The first is communication interception, which opened up a whole internal conversation — operators using our platforms to monitor signals in ways we hadn’t explicitly designed for. Lawful interception of communication data is paramount to the success of any defense system.

The second is that some of our operators have been using the aircraft itself as a communication node. In environments where ground infrastructure is patchy or nonexistent, the drone has become more of a relay — part of the network rather than just a sensor on top of it.

We’re trying to minimize future surprises by having as many direct, hands-on understandings of the problem as possible, and working with operators. We do mental modelling together with those facing these problems, working from the ground up to iterate our systems quickly when we get feedback. But modularity of our systems is key.

Terra recently announced it would be opening offices in London and San Francisco. What are some unforeseen challenges in entering the U.S. and European markets?

The United States and Europe have established defense primes and a new generation of defense tech companies that are already competing hard for the same government contract dollars. Inserting ourselves into that market would not be a good strategy.

Yet in our view, the most persistent security challenges are concentrated in places where Western defense systems don’t work well, or aren’t designed for. As we’ve done with Africa, we plan to serve governments in South Asia and South America, which also face transnational terrorism, insurgency, border insecurity, illegal extraction, and threats to critical infrastructure. We’d like to become the defense prime for the Global South. Our offices in San Francisco and London will allow us to access engineering talent and capital networks needed to scale the company’s technology and accelerate deployments across these markets.

Countries in the Global South are building and investing in sovereign military and defense capabilities, some built around affordability, autonomy, persistence, and local operational realities. Entering these new markets means navigating procurement frameworks, regulatory environments, and government relationships that may be even slower to sell into than mature, Western procurement systems. We’ve found relationship-building to be particularly critical in these markets. And while terrains and topographies across the Global South differ, designing and building for Africa’s conditions already gives us a useful foundation.

For both outside investors and your company, which is building a large manufacturing facility in Ghana, what are the advantages of manufacturing in Africa? What are some common misconceptions?

There are lots of benefits. When your factory is built in the same environment and the same market you’re selling into, your feedback loop is tighter: Field issues come back fast, and iterations are quicker because the factory is in similar environmental conditions. For an African customer, there’s also more trust. A locally made system, with the supply chain and data staying in the region, is easier to buy and to rely on. And then there’s the talent. We have young and capable people who are still underpriced relative to the rest of the world and have lots of untapped potential.

Troublingly, the risk gets over-weighted, and everything that’s working gets under-weighted. There are usually two big misconceptions. First is that you can’t build advanced hardware here — Africa is fine for light assembly but not for autonomy, embedded systems, or precision work. We like to think we are proving that thinking is outdated. The second is that Terra’s business case relies on cheap labor, but that also isn’t true anymore because good engineers cost money everywhere.

People also fairly point out that Africa lacks dependable infrastructure. Yes, securing logistics like power isn’t very easy, but it’s possible to design around that.

Your company calls itself Africa’s first defense tech prime. What resources does the current African defense tech ecosystem lack? What investments should African governments be making in the next decade to strengthen it?

The ecosystem needs four things to become more self-sustaining: patient, mission-aware capital; a local supplier base for subsystems; test and certification infrastructure; and systems-engineering and program management talent. Of those four, the supplier base is the biggest deal right now. Many critical subsystem parts are still import-dependent.

That’s why our partnership with the Defence Industries Corporation of Nigeria, Nigeria’s state-run defense manufacturer, is so important. The agreement establishes a joint venture company focused on local production, assembly, and research and development of drones, robotics, and cybersecurity systems, with technology transfer and training built into the structure, in an attempt to grow the supplier base from the ground up. We plan to help replicate this across other African markets in the future as we scale.

As such, what African governments should be investing in over the next decade is more infrastructure: shared test and certification facilities, favorable procurement policies, and engineering education pipelines tied to actual defense programs. The goal is to build an ecosystem where the next generation of African defense and hardware companies has people to hire, parts, and government customers that can actually buy what the companies are selling.

Maxwell Maduka is the co-founder and chief engineer of Terra Industries. 

Image: Terra Industries