Building for Tanzania: the verified developer stack

Tanzania is East Africa's second-largest mobile money market. The infrastructure for payments, customer communication, geographic lookups, and supply-chain logistics is real and growing. The Wycord registry currently lists 9 resources for Tanzania: 5 payment APIs, 2 developer tools, and 2 open-source projects. This guide covers what each one does, where they differ, and which to reach for first.

Mobile money is the default

Tanzania's mobile money networks include M-Pesa (Vodacom), Airtel Money, Mixx by YAS (formerly Tigo Pesa), Halotel Pesa, TTCL Pesa, and Zantel Ezpesa. Bank coverage through CRDB and NMB handles higher-value transfers. Any serious payment API in Tanzania connects to all of these. If a provider cannot reach the major mobile wallets, a large share of your users cannot pay.

Cash on delivery is still common for e-commerce, but USSD-push collection, where the API prompts the customer on their handset to confirm payment, has become the standard integration pattern. QR payments via TanQR/Lipa Namba on the TIPS national interoperability layer are growing, particularly in urban retail.

The five payment APIs

AzamPay connects mobile wallets, cards, and banks through a single REST endpoint. It provides a sandbox environment and interactive documentation with live request and response examples. It also covers Rwanda from the same integration, which matters if you plan to expand east.

Selcom Developer Portal is the most feature-complete option in the registry. Beyond collections and disbursements, it covers utility bill payments (electricity, water, TV, telecom), virtual cards, agent cashout, and international money transfers. The supported mobile networks include MPESA-TZ, AIRTELMONEY, TIGOPESATZ, HALOPESATZ, TTCLMOBILE, and ZANTELEZPESA. Client libraries are available in PHP, Java, C#, Python, Node.js, and WordPress/WooCommerce. API credentials are issued by emailing [email protected].

ClickPesa covers M-Pesa, Mixx by YAS, Airtel Money, and Halopesa via USSD push, plus cards (Visa, Mastercard, American Express, UnionPay), NMB/CRDB/GTBank bank transfers, and QR payments via TanQR/Lipa Namba. One important caveat: ClickPesa has no sandbox. All testing happens on live production with real funds. Unverified accounts are capped at TZS 100,000 across all transactions and 100 API calls per day until KYC completes.

MaliPoPay is the only provider in this list with public pricing in its documentation. Mobile money and bank collections: 2.5% per transaction. Card payments: 3%. Disbursements: TZS 2,500 or 2.5%, whichever is higher. Bank settlements are free. It covers M-Pesa, Mixx by YAS, Airtel Money, Halotel, and TTCL Pesa plus CRDB/NMB BillPay and cards. The REST API uses an apiToken header. Custom rates are available through their fees endpoint.

Beem Africa is not a payment aggregator in the same sense. It handles SMS, OTP, USSD menus, WhatsApp messaging, airtime, and mobile payments across 25 countries and 60+ networks. If you need to send an OTP before a transaction or build a USSD menu flow, Beem is the right call, not a payment aggregator.

Choosing a provider: what to use when

Situation	Provider to reach for
Widest feature set (utilities, virtual cards, international transfers)	Selcom
Need pricing upfront before signing a contract	MaliPoPay
Tanzania and Rwanda from one integration	AzamPay
QR payments via TanQR / TIPS interoperability	ClickPesa
OTP, USSD menus, SMS, airtime, WhatsApp	Beem Africa
TypeScript project, want to try multiple providers	Bora Pesa SDK (see below)

If you are evaluating multiple payment providers and want to avoid locking in early, use Bora Pesa, a TypeScript SDK that wraps Selcom, AzamPay, ClickPesa, and Snippe under a single interface. You can swap providers by changing a config value rather than rewriting your integration. It ships with zero-config defaults (SQLite event store, test provider), server-side credential handling, and an MCP server for AI-agent compatibility.

Geographic data without a geocoding API

tz-geo-data is an npm package giving you typed access to Tanzania's administrative hierarchy: regions, districts, wards, and streets. If your product asks users to select a delivery area or service zone, this lets you build that form without calling a paid geocoding service. It is the only Tanzania resource in the registry with verified status.

The infrastructure underneath

Two open-source projects shape Tanzania's broader stack, though you do not integrate them directly.

Mojaloop is the open-source payments switch that underpins Tanzania's TIPS (Tanzania Instant Payment System), the national interoperability layer behind TanQR and real-time cross-network transfers. When ClickPesa advertises TanQR support, Mojaloop is what makes it work across operators.

OpenLMIS is a logistics management system deployed across Tanzania, Zambia, and Malawi for tracking health commodity supply chains. Relevant if you are building for government health procurement or pharmaceutical distribution.

Where to go next

The full Tanzania resource listing, with verification status and direct links to documentation, is at wycord.com/best/apis-in-tanzania.