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 along with your cellphone. The cab driver confirms your fee along with his cellphone. The driving force then transfers cash to his mom who lives in Abia along with his cellphone. Throughout the continent, practically 4,000 km away in Nairobi, a mom will get dwelling from work and realizes they’re nearly out of the bioethanol they should cook dinner dinner. So she heads to a KOKOpoint (an ATM for cooking gas) 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.
Bear in mind these?
In the event you do, that’s most likely 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 typical 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 providers 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 function cellphone 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 based mostly on the quick code (that *123#). The server then responds again by means of the identical path with a menu that customers can work together with. It’s a stateful session with fairly quick 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 intently resembled our desktop experiences, ultimately evolving into the cell first designs that we see at present. Nothing most likely reveals this higher than banking. (When was the final time you wrote a examine?)
We transfer cash round so steadily, so shortly, and so simply, each from our conventional financial institution accounts and digital wallets (Venmo, Money, Zelle, Tikkie) that it’s onerous to think about anything. But, massive parts of the world nonetheless don’t have entry to dependable web or good telephones. In Sub-Saharan Africa, cell web penetration sits at simply 27%. They do nevertheless, have function telephones; and many them.
Reasonably 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 commonplace, 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 corporations aren’t caught previously. 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 expertise for client fuels, with every of their 700+ gas stations related to their cloud platform, sending real-time stock knowledge and enabling demand forecasting. This isn’t a narrative of expertise limitations inflicting hardship. It’s about builders who’re targeted on expertise that’s appropriate, not shiny.
“The restrictions of supplies are honesty in design. What you possibly can’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 fact of at present. 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 hundreds of thousands of people that can not watch for expertise to catch as much as their on a regular basis wants. They should purchase groceries at present, not tomorrow. They should purchase gas 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 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, preserve it easy silly. A phrase that originated from the US Navy within the Nineteen Sixties. Actually, I don’t prefer it. Simplicity is tough. And also you’re not silly in the event 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 conserving issues easy for our clients? Easy to take care of? Easy to replace? Easy to elucidate?
Take into consideration a automotive. Beneath the hood, it’s a sophisticated beast. A mixture of mechanical and digital parts, 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, a number of pedals, and a shifter (a clutch in the event you drive guide). You don’t want to know gas injection or anti-lock braking to get the place you’re going. The identical precept applies right here. USSD may look primitive subsequent to a smartphone app, but it surely works on each cellphone, requires no knowledge plan, and your grandmother can use it with out an in-depth tutorial.
Not every thing 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 rare mission. One of the best engineering blends into the background of on a regular basis life. You don’t take into consideration driving your automotive or paying for groceries. Nobody writes headlines when somebody sends cash from Lagos to Kigali or uploads a file to S3. When expertise works so effectively that it’s virtually invisible—that’s most likely the most effective praise you will get.
As builders, it’s our job to summary away the complicated, to search out elegant options for onerous issues. And after we get it proper, it may be a lovely 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 programs anyplace on the earth.
Now, go construct!