Lagos. It’s sizzling 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 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 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 telephone. 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 Information). 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 normal 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 overseas 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 software server based mostly on the brief code (that *123#). The server then responds again by 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 intently resembled our desktop experiences, ultimately evolving into the cell first designs that we see immediately. Nothing most likely reveals 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 good telephones. In Sub-Saharan Africa, cell web penetration sits at simply 27%. They do nevertheless, have characteristic 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 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 expertise for shopper 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 centered on expertise that’s appropriate, not shiny.
“The constraints of supplies are honesty in design. What you may’t do is as essential as what you select to do.” – Santiago Calatrava
Whereas the final word objective of < $100 USD smartphones and common connectivity is noble, it’s not the fact of immediately. 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 a whole bunch of tens of millions of people that can’t look ahead to expertise to catch as much as their on a regular basis wants. They should purchase groceries immediately, 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 really 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 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. Nevertheless, I do strongly consider that as builders we must be relentless in asking: are we really protecting issues easy for our clients? Easy to keep up? Easy to replace? Easy to clarify?
Take into consideration a automobile. Beneath 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 in the event you 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 may 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. 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 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 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 most effective praise you will get.
As builders, it’s our job to summary away the advanced, to seek out elegant options for laborious issues. And once we get it proper, it may be a stupendous 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 techniques wherever on the planet.
Now, go construct!
