Most people are used to having an address. They use it to fill in official forms, get bank accounts and find places to eat or meet. For millions of people around the world in informal settlements, however, an address is a luxury they can only dream of. Governments will always struggle to find them and support them, ambulances will get lost trying to help them, and banks won’t grant them access to their vaults. Now image being able to hand every one of these people a unique address that pinpoints precisely where they live, an address that consists only of three words, but is exclusively allocated to their patch of land. This is the simple ingenuity of what3words.

“The CEO and head of R&D, Chris Sheldrick, used to organise music events all over the world and had to ensure that the band, the instruments and people all ended up at the right location,” says Lyndsey Duff, country manager South Africa, what3words. “People always got lost, no matter what he did. This inspired him to create a friendly navigation and mapping solution that was musician-proof.”