Lagos. It’s sizzling exterior, town is buzzing and you’ve got someplace to be. So, you hail a cab, and that is the place it begins. You get to your vacation spot, you pay along with your cellphone. The cab driver confirms your fee together with his cellphone. The driving force then transfers cash to his mom who lives in Abia together with his cellphone. Throughout the continent, practically 4,000 km away in Nairobi, a mom will get dwelling from work and realizes they’re virtually out of the bioethanol they should prepare dinner dinner. So she heads to a KOKOpoint (an ATM for cooking gasoline) to prime up their bioethanol for the night along with her cellphone. All of this simply occurred with out an web connection utilizing {hardware} that prices lower than $20 USD.
Keep in mind these?
If you happen to do, that’s most likely the final time you used USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Information). Activating a SIM, checking your steadiness, topping up minutes, shopping for a ringtone, making a charitable donation—these all occurred through USSD (to not be confused with SMS). A normal developed within the early 90s as a part of the GSM Technical Specification, which allowed for real-time, session-based communication between cellular gadgets and your cellular operators community providers through easy menu driven-interfaces.
And if this all sounds overseas to you, right here’s the way it works at a high-level. Somebody with a characteristic cellphone makes a request (one thing like this *123#), the message traverses their cellular community to a USSD gateway that routes the request to the suitable utility server primarily based on the brief code (that *123#). The server then responds again via the identical path with a menu that customers can work together with. It’s a stateful session with fairly brief timeouts. Nevertheless it’s quick, low-cost to function, and solely requires 2G connectivity.
Then got here internet-connected smartphones, and for many people USSD fell out of favor for contemporary interfaces that extra intently resembled our desktop experiences, finally evolving into the cellular first designs that we see in the present day. Nothing most likely exhibits this higher than banking. (When was the final time you wrote a test?)
We transfer cash round so continuously, so shortly, and so simply, each from our conventional financial institution accounts and digital wallets (Venmo, Money, Zelle, Tikkie) that it’s exhausting to think about the rest. But, giant parts of the world nonetheless don’t have entry to dependable web or good telephones. In Sub-Saharan Africa, cellular web penetration sits at simply 27%. They do nevertheless, have characteristic telephones; and plenty of them.
Quite than letting entry or {hardware} be a limiting issue, there are massively worthwhile companies, like M-Pesa, Moniepoint, Mukuru, and OPay which have taken USSD, an outdated, but ubiquitous messaging normal, and ingeniously turned it right into a front-end for consumer transactions that rival the size of their Western counterparts. M-Pesa alone processed over $100 billion in 2024, whereas Moniepoint dealt with 5.2 billion transactions value $150 billion.
To be crystal clear, these firms aren’t caught up to now. Behind these easy USSD interfaces, they’re constructing refined cloud architectures. M-Pesa makes use of machine studying for real-time fraud detection whereas dealing with 4,000 transactions per second, with Safaricom leveraging AWS for his or her cloud infrastructure. KOKO Networks operates what’s described as Africa’s largest deployment of IoT know-how for shopper fuels, with every of their 700+ gasoline stations linked to their cloud platform, sending real-time stock information and enabling demand forecasting. This isn’t a narrative of know-how limitations inflicting hardship. It’s about builders who’re targeted on know-how that’s appropriate, not shiny.
“The constraints of supplies are honesty in design. What you’ll be able to’t do is as essential as what you select to do.” – Santiago Calatrava
Whereas the last word aim of < $100 USD smartphones and common connectivity is noble, it’s not the fact of in the present day. 55% of cellular customers in Sub-Saharan Africa are on 3G and it’s estimated that a 3rd of connections will nonetheless be 3G in 2030. There are lots of of tens of millions of people that can not look forward to know-how to catch as much as their on a regular basis wants. They should purchase groceries in the present day, not tomorrow. They should purchase gasoline this week, not on the finish of the month. So long as this hole exists, the builders who perceive this urgency will preserve discovering methods to bridge it with the instruments that truly work for his or her communities and so they’ll flip a revenue whereas doing it. Whereas not at all times apparent, that is tech for good.
Some closing ideas
Many people have heard the acronym KISS, preserve it easy silly. A phrase that originated from the US Navy within the Nineteen Sixties. Actually, I don’t prefer it. Simplicity is difficult. And also you’re not silly should you don’t get it proper on the primary strive. Nonetheless, I do strongly imagine that as builders we have to be relentless in asking: are we really preserving issues easy for our prospects? Easy to take care of? Easy to replace? Easy to elucidate?
Take into consideration a automobile. Beneath the hood, it’s an advanced beast. A mixture of mechanical and digital elements, sensors, computer systems, all working collectively.
However as a driver, the interface hasn’t modified a lot in practically a century. A wheel, some mirrors, just a few pedals, and a shifter (a clutch should you drive handbook). You don’t want to grasp gasoline injection or anti-lock braking to get the place you’re going. The identical precept applies right here. USSD would possibly look primitive subsequent to a smartphone app, nevertheless it works on each cellphone, requires no information plan, and your grandmother can use it with out an in-depth tutorial.
Not the whole lot must be engineered to the extent of Apollo 11’s steerage pc. Positive, it’s a pinnacle of constraints-driven design utilizing a measly 4KB of RAM to get astronauts to the moon and again safely. However that’s bespoke engineering for a unprecedented mission. The perfect engineering blends into the background of on a regular basis life. You don’t take into consideration driving your automobile or paying for groceries. Nobody writes headlines when somebody sends cash from Lagos to Kigali or uploads a file to S3. When know-how works so nicely that it’s virtually invisible—that’s most likely the very best praise you will get.
As builders, it’s our job to summary away the complicated, to search out elegant options for exhausting issues. And after we get it proper, it may be an attractive factor. However we have to keep away from the temptation to engineer for the sake of engineering, and to at all times work backward from the wants of our buyer.
That’s why what’s taking place in Sub-Saharan Africa isn’t simply spectacular in a regional context, it’s a blueprint to construct extra resilient, environment friendly, cost-aware programs anyplace on this planet.
Now, go construct!
