Accepting payments in Ethiopia: the verified API options

Ethiopia's payment landscape runs on mobile wallets. Telebirr, operated by Ethio Telecom, and M-Pesa Ethiopia, operated by Safaricom, are the two dominant consumer rails. Card acceptance and bank transfers exist but mobile-first checkout is the baseline expectation for consumer products. The National Bank of Ethiopia (NBE) licenses and regulates payment service providers; any gateway you integrate has cleared that process before obtaining production credentials.

The Wycord registry indexes 10 verified resources for Ethiopia. Two are payment gateway APIs. Here is what each provides and how to choose between them.

Chapa: the primary integration path

Chapa is one of Ethiopia's leading payment service providers, with a REST API covering payment acceptance, transfers, virtual accounts, and transaction management. Wycord verified its documentation as live on September 10, 2026.

Currencies: ETB and USD. Both are supported natively; you specify the currency per transaction.

Payment methods via Direct Charge: The Chapa SDK confirms support for Telebirr and M-Pesa as direct wallet types. The type parameter in the Direct Charge request identifies the wallet, for example "type": "telebirr". This triggers a payment prompt on the customer's phone without redirecting to a hosted checkout page, which is the expected UX for USSD-adjacent Ethiopian mobile payment flows. Additional local methods exist alongside these two; consult the Chapa docs for the current full list.

Hosted checkout: Chapa also provides a hosted payment modal for teams that prefer not to implement Direct Charge. The modal handles the wallet selection UI and returns a tx_ref that you verify via the API.

Other Chapa capabilities:

• Virtual accounts: programmatically create dedicated account numbers per customer or order, used for invoice matching in B2B flows
• Transfers: disbursements to bank accounts and wallets
• Split payments: route a percentage of a transaction to one or more subaccounts, useful for marketplace or platform products
• Bulk transfers: batch multiple payouts into a single API call
• Webhooks: event-driven notifications for payment success, failure, and transfer status
• Fraud detection: built-in Radar layer for flagging suspicious transactions

The base URL is https://api.chapa.co/v1/. Authentication uses a secret key passed as a bearer token. A sandbox environment is available. Developer documentation is at developer.chapa.co.

ArifPay: the alternative gateway

ArifPay is an Addis Ababa-based fintech offering a payment gateway API for collecting payments across local Ethiopian methods. It provides a sandbox and a production environment at developer.arifpay.net. Wycord verified its documentation as live on September 10, 2026.

One material difference from Chapa: ArifPay onboarding requires explicit approval before production access is granted. Budget additional lead time when evaluating it as a primary provider. ArifPay's public documentation does not enumerate its payment methods by name, so confirm wallet and bank support directly with their team before committing to an integration.

When ArifPay makes sense: If Chapa's commercial terms or feature constraints do not fit your product, or if your risk posture requires dual-gateway redundancy, ArifPay is the only other payment gateway verified in the Wycord Ethiopia registry.

For most teams starting an Ethiopia integration, Chapa's open onboarding, active SDK ecosystem, and detailed public documentation make it the lower-friction starting point.

SDKs: two verified options by language

Two SDKs are verified in the Wycord Ethiopia registry:

Laravel (official): chapa-laravel is the official Chapa Laravel package, maintained by the Chapa organization at github.com/Chapa-Et/chapa-laravel. It supports Laravel versions 5 through 12 and has passed 12,000 Packagist installs. Configuration requires setting CHAPA_SECRET_KEY in your .env file. If your backend is PHP or Laravel, this is the default choice.

Node.js and TypeScript (community): chapa-nodejs covers transaction initialization, verification, transfers, and subaccount management. Available at github.com/fireayehu/chapa-nodejs. No official Node.js SDK appears in the registry; if the Chapa organization releases one, check Wycord for verification status before switching.

AI agent workflows: the Chapa MCP server

For teams building LLM-backed products that need to trigger or verify payments programmatically, Chapa MCP Server exposes 8 tools: payment initialization, verification, transfers, bank lookups, and balance queries. It is a community server at github.com/theYahia/WWmcp/tree/main/servers/chapa. Wycord last verified it on July 5, 2026.

This is the integration path if you are building an agent that, for example, must confirm payment status before releasing a digital good, or that needs to batch-initiate transfers based on a workflow decision.

What to use when

Situation	Best fit
Consumer-facing checkout in Ethiopia	Chapa hosted modal
Direct wallet charge: Telebirr or M-Pesa	Chapa Direct Charge API
Marketplace with split revenue routing	Chapa subaccounts
Batch payouts or salary disbursements	Chapa bulk transfers
Laravel backend	chapa-laravel
Node.js or TypeScript backend	chapa-nodejs
AI agent or LLM workflow triggering payments	Chapa MCP Server
Dual-gateway redundancy or Chapa alternative	ArifPay (approval required)

Language tooling alongside payments

If you are building a product that also needs to handle Amharic or other Ethiopian-language text, two verified resources complement the payment stack. Lesan AI is an API for machine translation across Amharic, Tigrinya, Oromo, and Somali, priced at EUR 20 per million characters. etnltk is a Python library for Amharic text processing, inspired by spaCy and NLTK. Neither has a hard dependency on the payment APIs, but both reduce the friction of building a product that communicates with Ethiopian users in their first language.

The full Wycord Ethiopia registry is at wycord.com/countries. For a filtered view of the verified payment APIs specifically, visit wycord.com/best/apis-in-ethiopia.