This TED Talk features entrepreneur Chris Sheldrick, recorded live at TED Global 2017.

According to the UN, billions of people still live without an address. The economist Hernando

DeSoto said, without an address, you live outside the law. You might as well not exist.

I'm here to tell you how my team and I are trying to change that.

If you go to an online map and look at a favela in Brazil

or a township in South Africa,

you'll see a few streets, but a lot of empty space.

But if you've lived a satellite view,

there are thousands of people, homes and businesses

in this vast, unmeted and unaddressed spaces.

In Ghana's capital, Accra,

there are numbers and letters scrawled onto the sides of walls,

where they've piloted address systems but not finished them.

But these places, these unaddressed places, hold huge economic potential.

Here's why the issue of addressing stuck with me.

I worked in the music business for 10 years,

and what you may not know about the music world is that

every day people struggle with the problems of addressing. So from the musicians you have to find

the gigs to the production companies who bring the equipment, everyone somehow always gets lost.

We even had to add someone to our schedules who was the person you called when you thought

you'd arrived, but then realized you hadn't.

And we had some pretty bad days, like in Italy, where a truck driver unloaded all the equipment an hour north of Rome, not an hour south of Rome, and a slightly worse day where

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