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 along with your telephone. The cab driver confirms your fee 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 nearly out of the bioethanol they should cook dinner dinner. So she heads to a KOKOpoint (an ATM for cooking gasoline) to prime up their bioethanol for the night together 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?
In case 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). An ordinary 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 overseas to you, right here’s the way it works at a high-level. Somebody with a function 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 by way of the identical path with a menu that customers can work together with. It’s a stateful session with fairly brief timeouts. But it surely’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 cell first designs that we see in the present day. Nothing in all probability exhibits this higher than banking. (When was the final time you wrote a test?)
We transfer cash round so regularly, so rapidly, and so simply, each from our conventional financial institution accounts and digital wallets (Venmo, Money, Zelle, Tikkie) that it’s laborious to think about anything. 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 function telephones; and plenty of them.
Relatively 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 commonplace, and ingeniously turned it right into a front-end for person 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 previously. 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 related 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 centered on know-how that’s appropriate, not shiny.
“The restrictions of supplies are honesty in design. What you may’t do is as vital 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 truth of in the present day. 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 tons of of hundreds of thousands of people that can’t anticipate 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 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 difficult. And also you’re not silly in the event you don’t get it proper on the primary strive. Nevertheless, I do strongly imagine that as builders we should be relentless in asking: are we actually holding issues easy for our prospects? Easy to keep up? Easy to replace? Easy to clarify?
Take into consideration a automotive. Below 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, just a few pedals, and a shifter (a clutch in the event you drive guide). 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 telephone, requires no information plan, and your grandmother can use it with out an in-depth tutorial.
Not all the things must be engineered to the extent of Apollo 11’s steering pc. 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 know-how works so effectively 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 complicated, to search out elegant options for laborious issues. And after we get it proper, it may be an exquisite 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 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 wherever on the earth.
Now, go construct!
