This Startup Slices the World Into 57 Trillion Squares

The 30,000 residents of Tzaneen, South Africa, live in stately homes and compact cottages on the town’s wide boulevards and tidy streets. But in the surrounding area, more than 400,000 others inhabit mud huts, one-room cinder block bungalows, or ramshackle brick structures at citrus plantations and informal farms along roads that wind through the bush. Nikki Stuart-Thompson serves these people with a nonprofit that provides health care to the poor.

But before she can help them, she needs to find them, which isn’t always easy. There are villages with thousands of residents but no street addresses and places with houses strung out every few hundred yards on dirt paths. In some cases, Stuart-Thompson says, family members carry patients to the nearest road because it’s unlikely an ambulance driver will ever locate their home. “The amount of time that’s wasted circling, trying to find the right house, is unbelievable,” says Stuart-Thompson, director of CHoiCe Trust, a development group in Tzaneen. “You’re getting directions from someone who doesn’t have a car, and they tell you, ‘Look for the post office and then the bar, then go down the road for a while, and you see a house.’ It’s totally vague.”