Let’s talk.
No pitch decks. No 10x jargon. Just a real convo about something I think needs more airtime:
Local devs — in Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America — are building things Silicon Valley can’t fully understand.
Why?
Because when you code with unreliable power, zero payment infrastructure, and users who think USSD is magic, your mindset is different. Sharper. Grittier. Rooted.
Let’s break this down.
🌍 Context Is Code
Silicon Valley builds in a bubble.
It’s a beautiful bubble — cloud credits, unicorn culture, VCs who clap at MVPs — but it is a bubble.
Meanwhile, local devs are:
- Figuring out how to deliver medicine via WhatsApp
- Building offline-first apps for rural farmers
- Using feature phones and solar-charged devices as primary endpoints
- Navigating languages, dialects, low trust in institutions, and inconsistent data sources
That’s not a coding challenge.
That’s a systems thinking flex.
🧰 The Real Resourcefulness
Silicon Valley has frameworks.
Local devs have workarounds.
I’ve seen teams pull off magic with:
- No stable internet, using mesh networks and local storage
- Limited APIs, so they simulate integrations with clever scraping and manual syncing
- Payment deserts, so they build their own wallet layers on top of telco USSD
In the Valley, you hear:
“Use Stripe.”
Here, it’s:
“What if the customer’s SIM has no airtime and they only trust their neighborhood POS agent?”
Same problem.
Different planet.
🤯 Users Are Not You
Here’s the punchline most folks miss:
If your user lives a different life, your assumptions are invalid.
A dev in Kenya, Nigeria, or Bangladesh isn’t dreaming up apps for tech bros with three monitors.
They’re asking:
- Can this work on a ₦25k Android phone?
- Will it load on 2G?
- Can Grandma figure it out without reading a manual?
This is inclusive engineering in action.
Designing not just for the edge case — but from the edge case.
🛠️ Less Fancy, More Functional
There’s beauty in the basics.
- A form that saves offline = revolutionary.
- An app that compresses images before upload = life-saving.
- A platform that works without updates for months = gold.
Valley devs may see this as "unscalable."
But here, it’s essential UX.
Because the user isn't comparing you to the next billion-dollar app.
They're asking:
"Does this solve my problem with as little data as possible?"
🧭 Local Devs Aren’t Behind, they’re Just Solving Different Problems
There’s this narrative that innovation flows from the top down — San Francisco to Lagos, New York to Nairobi.
Let’s flip that.
Some of the most grounded, resilient, and people-centered innovation is happening in places that never make TechCrunch headlines.
They don’t just think about product-market fit.
They think about product-life fit — how it fits into people’s messy, offline, human lives.
That’s not a downgrade.
That’s a design upgrade.
🎤 So, What Can the World Learn from Local Devs?
Plenty:
- Build for low-resource environments — even in high-resource countries
- Design for constraints — because they make you more creative
- Stop shipping software and calling it innovation
- Start understanding lived realities — and building with, not for communities
And if you're a funder, partner, or policy shaper reading this?
📌 Support builders who know the terrain, not just those who pitch well on Zoom.
🎯 Final Word
There’s something poetic about how local devs build.
No fluff. No overengineering. Just tech that works where it matters most.
And maybe…
That’s the real frontier of innovation.