Lagos. It’s scorching outdoors, 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 driving 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 prepare dinner dinner. So she heads to a KOKOpoint (an ATM for cooking gas) to high 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 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 through 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 units and your cell 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 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 based mostly on the quick 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 quick 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, 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 verify?)
We transfer cash round so ceaselessly, 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, cell web penetration sits at simply 27%. They do nonetheless, have function 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 previous, but ubiquitous messaging commonplace, and ingeniously turned it right into a front-end for consumer 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 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 client fuels, with every of their 700+ gas 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 possibly can’t do is as essential as what you select to do.” – Santiago Calatrava
Whereas the final word purpose of a 3rd of connections will nonetheless be 3G in 2030. There are lots of of tens of millions of people that can’t look ahead to know-how 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 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 should you don’t get it proper on the primary strive. Nonetheless, I do strongly imagine that as builders we should be relentless in asking: are we really retaining issues easy for our clients? Easy to keep up? Easy to replace? Easy to clarify?
Take into consideration a automobile. Underneath the hood, it’s an advanced 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 almost a century. A wheel, some mirrors, a couple of 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 information 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 steerage 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. The most effective 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 know-how works so nicely 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 advanced, to search out elegant options for onerous issues. And once we get it proper, it may be a gorgeous 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 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 this planet.
Now, go construct!
