Lagos. It’s scorching 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 together with your telephone. The cab driver confirms your cost along with his telephone. The motive force then transfers cash to his mom who lives in Abia along with his telephone. Throughout the continent, almost 4,000 km away in Nairobi, a mom will get residence from work and realizes they’re virtually out of the bioethanol they should cook dinner dinner. So she heads to a KOKOpoint (an ATM for cooking gasoline) to high up their bioethanol for the night along with her telephone. All of this simply occurred with out an web connection utilizing {hardware} that prices lower than $20 USD.
Keep in mind these?
When you do, that’s in all probability the final time you used USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Knowledge). Activating a SIM, checking your stability, topping up minutes, shopping for a ringtone, making a charitable donation—these all occurred by way of USSD (to not be confused with SMS). A regular developed within the early 90s as a part of the GSM Technical Specification, which allowed for real-time, session-based communication between cell gadgets and your cell operators community companies by way of easy menu driven-interfaces.
And if this all sounds international to you, right here’s the way it works at a high-level. Somebody with a characteristic telephone makes a request (one thing like this *123#), the message traverses their cell 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. However 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 carefully resembled our desktop experiences, finally evolving into the cell first designs that we see as we speak. Nothing in all probability exhibits this higher than banking. (When was the final time you wrote a examine?)
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 arduous to think about the rest. But, massive parts of the world nonetheless don’t have entry to dependable web or sensible telephones. In Sub-Saharan Africa, cell web penetration sits at simply 27%. They do nonetheless, have characteristic telephones; and many 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 previous, but ubiquitous messaging customary, and ingeniously turned it right into a front-end for person transactions that rival the dimensions of their Western counterparts. M-Pesa alone processed over $100 billion in 2024, whereas Moniepoint dealt with 5.2 billion transactions price $150 billion.
To be crystal clear, these corporations aren’t caught prior to now. Behind these easy USSD interfaces, they’re constructing subtle 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 client fuels, with every of their 700+ gasoline stations linked to their cloud platform, sending real-time stock knowledge 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 restrictions of supplies are honesty in design. What you’ll be able to’t do is as vital as what you select to do.” – Santiago Calatrava
Whereas the last word purpose of < $100 USD smartphones and common connectivity is noble, it’s not the truth of as we speak. 55% of cell 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 as we speak, 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 maintain discovering methods to bridge it with the instruments that really work for his or her communities and so they’ll flip a revenue whereas doing it. Whereas not all the time apparent, that is tech for good.
Some closing ideas
Many people have heard the acronym KISS, maintain it easy silly. A phrase that originated from the US Navy within the Sixties. Truthfully, I don’t prefer it. Simplicity is tough. And also you’re not silly for those who don’t get it proper on the primary strive. Nevertheless, I do strongly imagine that as builders we have to be relentless in asking: are we really holding issues easy for our prospects? Easy to keep up? Easy to replace? Easy to elucidate?
Take into consideration a automobile. Underneath the hood, it’s a sophisticated 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 almost a century. A wheel, some mirrors, a number of pedals, and a shifter (a clutch for those who drive guide). 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, but it surely works on each telephone, requires no knowledge plan, and your grandmother can use it with out an in-depth tutorial.
Not every part must be engineered to the extent of Apollo 11’s steering laptop. Certain, 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 most effective 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 in all probability the perfect praise you may get.
As builders, it’s our job to summary away the advanced, to seek out elegant options for arduous issues. And once we get it proper, it may be a ravishing factor. However we have to keep away from the temptation to engineer for the sake of engineering, and to all the time work backward from the wants of our buyer.
That’s why what’s occurring in Sub-Saharan Africa isn’t simply spectacular in a regional context, it’s a blueprint to construct extra resilient, environment friendly, cost-aware methods wherever on the earth.
Now, go construct!