Lagos. It’s scorching outdoors, the 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 cellphone. The cab driver confirms your cost together with his cellphone. The motive force then transfers cash to his mom who lives in Abia together with his cellphone. 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 together 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 case 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 through USSD (to not be confused with SMS). A regular developed within the early 90s as a part of the GSM Technical Specificationwhich 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 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 cellular community to a USSD gateway that routes the request to the suitable utility server primarily based 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. 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 carefully resembled our desktop experiences, finally evolving into the cellular 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 rapidly, and so simply, each from our conventional financial institution accounts and digital wallets (Venmo, Money, Zelle, Tikkie) that it’s onerous to think about the rest. But, giant parts of the world nonetheless don’t have entry to dependable web or sensible telephones. In Sub-Saharan Africa, cellular web penetration sits at simply 27%. They do nonetheless, have function telephones; and many them.
Somewhat 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 normal, 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 value $150 billion.
To be crystal clear, these firms 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+ gasoline stations linked 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 may’t do is as essential as what you select to do.” – Santiago Calatrava
Whereas the last word objective of < $100 USD smartphones and common connectivity is noble, it’s not the fact of at present. 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 tons of of tens of millions of people that can’t await expertise to catch as much as their on a regular basis wants. They should purchase groceries at present, 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 hold 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, hold 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 in the event you don’t get it proper on the primary attempt. Nonetheless, I do strongly consider that as builders we should be relentless in asking: are we really maintaining issues easy for our clients? Easy to keep up? Easy to replace? Easy to elucidate?
Take into consideration a automobile. Below 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 almost a century. A wheel, some mirrors, just a few pedals, and a shifter (a clutch in the event you drive handbook). You don’t want to know 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 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 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 very best 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 expertise works so effectively that it’s virtually invisible—that’s most likely the perfect praise you may get.
As builders, it’s our job to summary away the complicated, to seek out elegant options for onerous issues. And after we get it proper, it may be a phenomenal 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 methods wherever on the planet.
Now, go construct!
