enabled.WORLD

I am the Solution Architect at enabled.WORLD, responsible for much of the concept, design and development of the WORLD platform and app. I graduated as an Electronic Engineer from the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa and have accumulated 25 years of experience in the mobile industry.

My work  with operators (MTN SA 2 years), vendors (Ericsson 13 years) and suppliers (Digitata 10 years) has given me the opportunity to live in South Africa, Mexico (where we adopted two 6-year-old boys), UK, New Zealand and Australia.

While at Digitata, I did development and consulting work on Dynamic Tariffing, a product that lowered call costs while simultaneously increasing operator revenue. Here I was exposed to the challenges of the mobile industry, especially in Africa where some of the concepts proposed by WORLD were seeded, leading me to be a co-founder of enabled.WORLD. I believe that affordable communication improves the life-outcomes of everyone.

Application developers in emerging economies have limited financial and human resources. These are often exhausted before a minimum viable product is produced.

Enabled.WORLD is a “social business”, building a free-to-use, cloud-based business platform offering functionality, via APIs for Messaging, Mobile Wallets, Trusted Identity and Reputation. By providing frequently required, yet complex functionality, developers can focus resources on building the unique aspects of their vertical applications.

WORLD negotiates favourable tariffs and direct integration with mobile network operators (MNOs) for mobile data, SMS, USSD and mobile money systems, allowing these developers to offer services cost effectively (or free) to customers. Contrary to OTT providers, WORLD works in cooperation with MNOs, helping them remain viable operators of critical infrastructure. The WORLD app is a live technology demonstrator of this platform.

By reducing costs, WORLD facilitates a sustainable ICT economy, fostering entrepreneurship, jobs and the development of applications to address local and global needs.

Among the many problems in developing economies, WORLD has identified the following that we believe we can mitigate:

1. Mobile data is expensive (Wi-Fi is not available as an alternative). This leads to bill-shock & below global average data consumption. Consequently, digital skills and internet awareness are poor;
2. Up to 50% of users still use legacy phones (i.e. not smartphones). There is no unified messaging between Legacy and Smartphone users, leading to a large group of socially isolated consumers.
3. Unaffordability, risk, and inaccessibility to information, impacts women and marginalised groups disproportionately;
4. MNOs suffer declining SMS and USSD revenue as OTT services offer competing products and extract value;
5. Local ICT economies are non-existent due to high entry barriers and poor success rates of local app developers, leading to low levels of innovation, few new revenue streams and few jobs in this sector;
6. Due to memory limitations of low-end phones it is difficult to persuade users to install a new app and thus to achieve a critical mass of users;

Due to the above issues, economic development, employment opportunities and product innovation are stunted. These issues are faced by hundreds of millions of users globally but especially in Africa and Asia.

WORLD is developing a cloud based (AWS) business/IT platform that includes four of the key functions required in any serious mobile application i.e.: 

• Messaging (full featured, including geo-spatial)
• Reputation/rating/voting/opinions
• Wallet/Payment (including open interfaces to mobile money systems)
• Trusted Identity

This platform is available to developers to use free-of-charge, white labelled, via API, or by building a service onto the WORLD app. The WORLD app is an extensible technology demonstrator. Both methods fast-track product development. Any developer using the WORLD platform has access to all the WORLD customers, thus instantly having an established customer base. Linking to the WORLD app avoids the onerous task of persuading users to install a new app. WORLD encourages collaboration between third party developers to further lower costs, increase competitiveness; ensure success.

WORLD also negotiates favourable, use-case specific, tariffs (and reverse-billing agreements) including direct integration to the MNO’s mobile data, mobile money, SMS and USSD systems. These exceptional commercial terms assist developers in offering low cost/free services to end users.

WORLD aims to develop a community of 50 million end-users within 5 years. WORLD earns commission on mobile money transactions and provides services to enterprises, brands and celebrities to fund the development and operational expenses.

WORLD improves circumstances of three groups; End users, Application developers/entrepreneurs and Mobile operators.

End Users:

The end users in developing economies are typically young (50% of Africans are < 20 years old), under-employed, with low income yet hungry for new opportunities. As formal employment is scarce, many are self-employed in micro-enterprises as traders, messengers etc. WORLD staff have spent hundreds of hours conducting face-to-face interactions with people on the streets in Eswatini, where the WORLD pilot is located.

Due to low income, end users typically have old-model or second-hand phones with little spare memory. They are very sensitive to data tariffs, to the extent that application executables are shared from other phones not from an app store. Typical total data consumption is <100MB per month/data subscriber. Up to 50% of phones are legacy phones (i.e.no data capability).

Developers:

App developers typically work in small teams and part-time. They have limited capital and frequently run out of resources before completing a product.

Mobile Operators:

MNO’s suffer declining revenue on traditional services (SMS and Voice) as OTT services compete. They fear losing further revenue and are suspicious of new ideas. Careful negotiation is required to persuade them of novel concepts.

WORLD’s concept breaks down competitive & silo behaviour and replaces it with a cooperative model which brings benefits to all stakeholders:

• WORLD offers a free-of-charge open platform providing critical functionality (including unified messaging between legacy and smartphones), access to an established app and a common customer base;
• MNO’s offer revolutionary use-case specific tariffs and direct access to network nodes to address niche opportunities;
• Developers/entrepreneurs create services on the platform to meet local needs;
• End users consume the services offered to fulfill the economic cycle.

These facilitate the creation of a sustainable ICT sector, jobs and economic upliftment for all parties.

I’ve been involved in the mobile industry since if the start of 2G (1993) and especially in roll-out of networks in developing economies across Africa but also in Latin America, New Zealand, England and Australia. I have witnessed both the dramatic successes of the mobile industry but also more recently been pondering its remaining challenges.

After a successful career, I have decided to devote the last decade of my working years to addressing these challenges. While working in Kenya from 2013 to 2015 I worked with many people with legacy phones who were excluded from the internet and digital services and saw that I could use my experience to assist them.

The WORLD concepts crystallised over a period of 3 years of trial of several different techniques. In the last 2 years I have persuaded a number of senior ex-colleagues to join me in addressing this challenge.

We established and registered enabled.WORLD as a philanthropic, social enterprise where shareholding is earned by contribution (in cash or kind) to the project in lieu of remuneration. To date, on the strength of the concept and the reputation of the individual team members, over 25 individuals have contributed to the WORLD project.

I was born and raised in South Africa. I have witnessed the power of the mobile industry to rapidly transform societies through affordable telephony. The introduction of mobile data now provides an opportunity to connect these countries to the internet, allowing their citizens to access the world’s information, services and receive a better education.

My skills (as a software developer), my experience as a telecoms engineer, my situational understanding as a result of my location and my current availability of time provides a rare set of circumstances. I am particularly heartened by attracting the cooperation and support of several life-long colleagues who identify with this mission. I am passionate to use this opportunity to build a business/IT infrastructure that can be leveraged by others to address the remaining shortfalls in the mobile industry.

By providing an example (the WORD app) and the tools for other developers to “fish”, I believe that I can leave a legacy that has the potential to become the basis of a sustainable ICT industry in Africa, leading to high quality jobs. I am encouraging a collaborative model of cooperation between developers, MNOs and end users, rather that the competitive and “siloed” approach which pervades today.

I spent 10 years at Digitata working on the concept of Dynamic Tariffing which significantly reduced the cost of telephony and then did the same for data, especially for low income users. During this period, I intensively studied the low-income market and travelled to many such countries providing consulting services. At one point 1% of the global population was using this software.

Living and working in Africa, I am continually exposed to the challenges, the opportunities and the potential solutions of the mobile industry. These are not immediately apparent to external parties. My team have the seniority, experience and personal contacts in the region to explain WORLD’s novel concepts and conduct the necessary negotiations with the mobile operators.

I have developed the necessary technical experience in cloud computing and various programming languages needed for solving full-stack problems, from app development to server design. More importantly, I have a passion for using those skills to solve real-world problems. I have fortunately attracted seven past colleagues who provide a range of other technical, marketing, promotion, and commercial skills to complement my technical ones. Their contribution has made a multi-disciplinary project of this magnitude feasible.

These unusual circumstances uniquely position me to as having a reasonable chance of making a real impact with the WORLD project.

While I am a citizen of the WORLD, I will always be a child of Africa. My love for its people and concern for its challenges are central to my motivation to see this project succeed.

I initially developed the SMS part, but this was rejected by MNOs as in their opinion SMS was a dying service, despite more than half their base being dependent on it for messaging.

I therefore developed an Android version of the product to lead with. This has now been launched in Eswatini. We now have an opportunity to reopen the SMS discussion by proposing a “unified messaging system” that allows legacy phone users to join smartphone user groups.

Negotiations with MNO’s have been particularly demanding as they do not immediately understand the vision. Consequently, it has taken over a year of persuasion before we were able to conclude commercial agreements.

It has taken many hours of discussions and convincing to eventually attract 7 other colleagues to join me full time on this project.

Funding for the project has come from the personal funds of over 25 like-minded individuals. For myself and my other key contributor this has meant over a year of effort without a salary.

This is not a project that will disappear without funding; my determination will see to that. Funding however will allow us to enrich the lives of a larger group of people much sooner.

During my time in Mexico, Ericsson was awarded a massive contract to roll out a GSM network. While GSM was already well established in other parts of the WORLD the America’s were quite late in adopting the standard and consequently experienced engineers were in short supply. When the contract was awarded, I already knew that Ericsson would not be able to secure sufficient people with the required skills in the required time to meet the rollout schedule.

I persuaded the Ericsson management team to allow me to approach some of my previous colleagues in Africa and in turn I persuaded some of them to join the Mexico project team. What resulted was a private exchange program between Ericsson and MTN South Africa that ran for 3 years and provided an opportunity for multiple engineers to experience a new challenge, a different environment and a very different culture, while at the same time enabling Ericsson to transfer skills to a large number of local graduate engineers and ultimately deliver the project close to schedule.

Several of the people who took the opportunity to work in Mexico are now also contributing to the WORLD project.

WORLD is innovative in several respects.

Shareholding model

WORLD has a novel, unconventional funding model. All contributions to the WORLD project (cash or kind) are recognised by the award of “Memory-of-Effort” (MoE) tokens according to a value-of-work table. Cash is more valuable than labour as it is post-tax. MoE share represents the relative shareholding of all contributions. There are no reserved shares for “founders”- all contributors are treated equally. WORLD will also recognise 100 “founders” who contribute a minimum of $2400 and who bring valuable expertise or influence to the WORLD project. MoE is tradeable.

Business model

WORLD’s objective is to eliminate obstacles faced by mobile app developers in developing countries and thus facilitate the development of a vibrant local development community, that build apps to meet local community needs. We encourage reuse of code components, allow access to a common end-user customer base and facilitate access to key network nodes.

In particular WORLD:

• negotiates of more appropriate tariffs on behalf of third-party developers across multiple MNOs and multiple countries;
• provides common APIs to different suppliers of mobile money, SMSC & USSD nodes;
• provides a unified messaging platform between smartphones and legacy phones
• offers extensibility in a common WORLD app;
• co-operates with MNO’s rather than competes with them

WORLD is not aware of another enterprise that makes such a service development and delivery platform available free-of-charge to third party developers. By encouraging co-operation WORLD hopes to remove the wastage of resources resulting from traditional individualistic “siloed” style competition.

Actions/Activities:

• Development of the WORLD cloud platform with Messaging, Wallet, Trust and Reputation functionality;
• Develop and release the WORLD app as a technology demonstrator;
• Negotiate with MNOs for preferential tariffs and access to network nodes. Concluded reverse-billed agreement and mobile money integration and revenue share agreement with both operators in Eswatini (Swaziland);
• Recruitment of local brand ambassadors in Eswatini;
• Promote app within initial target country to end users, developers, entrepreneurs and enterprises.

Outputs:

• Interest from third parties (content providers, schools, enterprises & brands- WORLD provides internal corporate communications for OK Foods);
• Growing end user customer base – WORLD has 2000+ monthly active users;
• Growing experience and understanding within WORLD of the market needs and technical requirements – WORLD has spent over 200 man hours in face-to-face engagement with customers on the streets while promoting and installing the app.

Short term outcomes:

• Interest from third parties (developers, WORLD has partnered with NGOs e.g. Health Institute (www.ghi.ngo ) to facilitate women’s’ health and is in negotiations with the Imbali Foundation (for young women) in Eswatini (https://www.facebook.com/ImbaliFoundation/);
• Growing end user base.

Medium term outcomes:

• Increased technical competence and level of innovation among local developers;
• Growing portfolio of applications, services and products using WORLD as a platform regionally;
• End-users (“WORLD Citizens”) find value and economic advantage in using WORLD-based services;
• MNO’s recognise that value of the WORLD collaborative model and case specific tariffing;
• WORLD platform is implemented and supported in multiple countries in Southern Africa with a customer base of 50 million.

Long term outcomes:

• Sustainable ICT economy, offering multiple job opportunities in WORLD countries;
• Extensive community of entrepreneurs exploiting the facilities of the WORLD platform;
• WORLD platform is implemented and supported in multiple regions/globally;
• General economic upliftment due to increased job opportunities, efficient economic transactions and expanded market for products and services attributable to WORLD.

WORLD project directly impacts the entrepreneur/developers and the end users of their services. The WORLD project should positively impact the families of these people as well, so impacted people may be a factor of ~5 times higher (4.7 children/women is the average in sub Saharan Africa) than the number of direct users.

A WORLD citizen is anyone having a WORLD ID, i.e. someone registered in the WORLD platform, and using its underlying services, whether via the WORLD app or as a white-labelled product or service.

We currently have 2000+ monthly active WORLD citizens in Eswatini (population 1.1m) across both MNOs.

We aim to have 400,000 monthly active WORLD Citizens within 12 months across several countries in southern Africa (including: Eswatini, Botswana (pop 2.5m), Lesotho (2.2m), Namibia (2.4m), Mozambique (31m) Malawi (19m), Zambia (18m), Tanzania (60m). 

After 5 years WORLD aims for 50 million users across several countries in sub-Saharan Africa and therefore potentially an impact on ~250m people. There is potential for the WORLD platform to be used further afield given sufficient exposure.

During the next year WORLD plans to:

• accelerate the rate of development of both the cloud platform and the app by employing full-time developers;

• attract third-party developers by promotions at universities and user groups;
• expand penetration and rollout to other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, acquiring 400k citizens from the efforts of WORLD and third party collaborators;
• develop a vibrant community of content providers, partners, and SMMEs using the services;
• establish a growing revenue stream based on sales commission from mobile money transactions and services provided to enterprises and brands to cover development and operational costs;
• have a number of products and services that address local and regional needs.

Within five years WORLD plans to achieve:

• a significant footprint in sub-Saharan countries and hopefully further afield;
• a widespread understanding among MNOs, of the business benefits of integration with WORLD and subsequently MNOs requesting such integration;
• a citizen base of 50million, and significantly more people benefiting indirectly from the platform.
• the release of WORLD as an open-sourced project to encourage more rapid evolution;
• a vibrant community of collaborators who have developed an extended set of features, interfaces, products and services based on the WORLD underling platform; in effect a self-sustaining ecosystem based on WORLD;
• the realisation that products and services addressing local needs, also address similar needs globally.

WORLD’s desire to assist in the creation of better jobs and more efficient business practices. Consequently, WORLD supports and encourages open source software and collaboration and replication of the concepts by others.

Funding:

WORLD has to date raised an equivalent of $820 000 in cash donations and labour (mainly labour) from contributors. In the immediate term, WORLD needs funds to accelerate technical development by employing full time developers and providing remuneration to current contributors.

MNO cooperation:

On-going effort is required in negotiations with MNOs to persuade them that more flexible tariff structures are required to secure business opportunities that currently are not economically viable. For example, current SMS tariffs are prohibitively expensive and unsuited for use in instant messaging services. A use-case specific SMS tariff for low-value, high volume services would allow an SMS based instant message service to be implemented. This would be the basis of a unified legacy/smartphone messaging platform. SMS revenue could be increased overall, as the required drop in tariff would be more than offset by a corresponding increase in volume (in particular by also being able to address the smartphone base).

End users:

The larger the WORLD user base, the easier it is to attract attention from all parties. Therefore, the acquisition and retention of users is critical. This involves promotion of the app within influential communities and removing all obstacles which may prevent users from installation and sustained use.

Collaborators:

Finally, a vibrant community of collaborators is required to build vertical applications on the WORLD platform. Effort is required to identify, promote and educate collaborators on the functionality offered by WORLD and to support them in their early stages of development.

Funding:

WORLD is pursuing several funding initiatives including:

• Offering shareholding in WORLD via Memory of Effort tokens for any contributions in cash or kind;
• Allowing, by invitation, up to 100 influential people to be called “founders” for a fee of $2400.00 each;
• Appealing for larger donations from angel investors;
• Pursuing grants where applicable;
• Earning revenue from sales commissions arising from any mobile money transaction facilitated by WORLD;
• Charging enterprises, brands and celebrities for services relating to advertising channels etc. on WORLD.

MNO negotiations:

MNOs are traditionally conservative and suspicious of new concepts. Senior and experienced staff are required to negotiate the required terms and conditions with C-suite executives. Fortunately, WORLD has very experienced staff who are able to achieve this, albeit still with some effort.

End users:

The acquisition of end users is critical. As with most things the first million are the most difficult to acquire. WORLD is addressing this in multiple ways including via local brand ambassadors, face-to-face engagements, Google ads and other advertising, partnerships with NGOs, addressing churches, schools, trade unions, youth organisations, etc.

Recruitment of collaborators:

WORLD will seek entrepreneurs and third-party developers by promoting the WORLD platform on the WORLD app itself, at universities, in technical discussions groups, with government bodies etc.

WORLD currently partners with:

• The mobile operators (MTN Eswatini and Eswatini Mobile) + currently in negotiations with several others in Botswana, Namibia, Tanzania and Mozambique;
• Gateway Health Institute (www.ghi.ngo) which provides health services to women. Gateway in turn partners with the following organisations:

• Aids Foundation;
• Choice Trust;
• Department of Health: South Africa;
• Frontline Aid;
• Girl Child Rights;
• Hivos;
• Right to Care;
• Roddenberry Foundation;
• SABR;
• Save the Children;
• ViiV Healthcare;
• Wits University.

WORLD is currently negotiating with:

• Imbali Foundation which supports girls and young women in Eswatini.
• Various schools
• Various churches

In the near future WORLD will seek partnerships with universities, technical colleges, and government projects working towards the development of the ICT sector. 

World brings value to stakeholders in the following ways:

End users:

• WORLD app is free to use (no data charges). This benefits low income and marginalised groups by allowing them to access information to be economically active;
• Improved access to information, hence better decision making and literacy;
• Allows legacy phone users to participate in with smartphone users. They would otherwise be socially isolated;
• Simplifies the current very cumbersome USSD based method of money transfers;
• Users can be entirely anonymous -reduces harassment;
• Improved prospects in concluding business transactions due to a trusted identity and credible reputation.
• Co-operates with MNO’s for mutual benefit, unlike OTT service provides who seek to keep all high value business and reduce the MNO to a bit-pipe;
• Improves product innovation based on messaging, mobile wallet, trust and reputational functionality.

Collaborating entrepreneurs:

• Attractive tariffs for data, SMS & USSD;
• Facilitating app adoption and allowing integration to the WORLD app;
• Lowering the cost of app development by providing commonly used functions;
• Provides a common platform that allows new apps to tap into an existing user base;
• Offers a resilient infrastructure on which to build scalable vertical products which can be fully industrialised should they become successful;
• Helps developers port a new mobile service across multiple operators and countries.

Mobile Operators:

• Opens new use-cases and revenue for data, SMS and USSD.
• Creates new revenue streams from enterprises, which do not cannibalise revenue from current end users;
• Increases (including legacy phone) end user usage of the internet;

WORLD is pursuing several methods towards financial sustainability:

• Offering shareholding in WORLD via Memory-of-Effort tokens for contributions in cash or kind;
• Allowing, by invitation, up to 100 influential people to be called founders for a fee of $2400.00 each.
• Appealing for larger donations from angel investors;
• Pursuing grants where applicable;
• Earning revenue from sales commission from any mobile money transaction facilitated by WORLD;
• Charging enterprises, brands and celebrities for services relating to advertising channels etc. on WORLD;
• Charging enterprises for updates on a user’s identity profile (e.g. change of address) -with the user's permission of course.

Business modelling indicates that sales commission on mobile money transactions is likely to be one of the more significant revenue streams. There is also the possibility of using the WORLD infrastructure and agreements (or modified agreements) to offer general purpose reverse-billing services to any third party that wanted to zero-rate access to their web site or app. This is a rapidly growing opportunity as enterprises strive to drive traffic to their online services.

WORLD is confident that other revenue generating opportunities will present themselves as the project develops. WORLD’s objective is to be self-funding.

WORLD has raised a total of $820,000 (cash donations: USD150,000 and labour donation: USD670,000) to date.

Cash donations have been received from a number of private angel investors who have made the investment based on their belief in the team and the merits of the project.

Labour (more than a man-year each, on average) has been donated primarily by the core development team although there are a large number of individuals who have made smaller contributions.

Both cash and labour contributions are recognised by the allocation of Memory of Effort (MoE) tokens which represent their shareholding in WORLD.

WORLD is aiming to raise USD 250,000 over the next 12 months to fund accelerated product development and market penetration. We would prefer this to be a grant however equity or a combination is acceptable. Funds are required as soon as possible.

WORLD's expected actual operational costs are USD 800k for 2020. This is about USD100k lower than budgeted below, as recruitment of addition staff did not occur earlier in the year.

The vast majority of these cost relate to remuneration for developers.

WORLD is applying to The Elevate Prize to:

• have our ideas challenged by your evaluation team;
• get exposure to a larger audience who may resonate with the objectives of WORLD and may then be able to contribute in cash or kind;
• have access to technology and marketing experts who may be able to provide mentoring in specific areas;
• gain greater publicity for WORLD’s concepts;
• use as a reference when explaining the merits of WORLD’s concepts to mobile operators;
• gain experience in applying for grants;
• raise funding.

WORLD is looking for partners that can add value by:

• Growing the end user base
• Providing content of value to end users
• Interfacing services to WORLD
• Purchasing services from WORLD
• Assisting WORLD in recruiting third party developers/entrepreneurs
• Facilitating access to funding

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Any other organisation that is focused on development of the ICT sector or specific areas such as Messaging, Fintech, Trusted Identity etc.