Lagos. It’s scorching exterior, 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 fee together with his telephone. The driving force then transfers cash to his mom who lives in Abia together with his telephone. Throughout the continent, practically 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 gas) 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.
Keep in mind these?
Should 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 typical developed within the early 90s as a part of the GSM Technical Specification, which allowed for real-time, session-based communication between cell units 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 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. 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 right this moment. Nothing most likely exhibits this higher than banking. (When was the final time you wrote a test?)
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 laborious to think about anything. But, giant 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 nevertheless, have characteristic telephones; and plenty of 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 outdated, but ubiquitous messaging customary, 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 up to now. 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+ gas stations related 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 centered on know-how that’s appropriate, not shiny.
“The constraints 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 right this moment. 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 thousands and thousands of people that can’t await know-how to catch as much as their on a regular basis wants. They should purchase groceries right this moment, 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 they usually’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 Sixties. Truthfully, I don’t prefer it. Simplicity is difficult. And also you’re not silly should you don’t get it proper on the primary attempt. Nonetheless, I do strongly consider that as builders we must be relentless in asking: are we really retaining issues easy for our clients? Easy to take care of? Easy to replace? Easy to elucidate?
Take into consideration a automotive. Below 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, just a few pedals, and a shifter (a clutch should you drive guide). You don’t want to grasp 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, nevertheless it works on each telephone, requires no knowledge plan, and your grandmother can use it with out an in-depth tutorial.
Not every little thing 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 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 properly that it’s virtually invisible—that’s most likely one of the best praise you will get.
As builders, it’s our job to summary away the advanced, 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 this planet.
Now, go construct!