Mobile money in Africa: M-Pesa, MoMo or an aggregator?

More than $2 trillion in transactions flowed through mobile money in 2025, with the industry reaching 2.3 billion registered accounts globally. Sub-Saharan Africa is the largest region by active usage and new registrations. If you are building a product for African users, accepting mobile money is not optional: it is often the only way to collect revenue at scale, especially outside large cities. The Wycord registry has 32 verified resources in this category. Here is how they break down.

Aggregator or direct: make this decision first

The first choice is whether to integrate with a single mobile money network directly or use an aggregator that handles many networks through one API.

Go direct when you are launching in a single country, need the full feature set of a specific network (STK Push timings, Paybill configurations, USSD menus), or want to avoid aggregator margin on every transaction.

Use an aggregator when you need to cover multiple countries, want to ship in days not weeks, or lack the capacity to manage contracts and reconciliation with each network separately. Most early-stage products should start here.

Pan-African aggregators

These are the resources to evaluate first if your product spans borders or you want one integration that can scale.

PawaPay covers roughly 85% of mobile money on the continent through a single REST API. Its network spans about 20 African countries and 650 million wallets. Collections and payouts share the same integration, and settlement is available in local or global currencies. This is the most frequently cited option for teams that want broad coverage without managing carrier relationships.

Tingg by Cellulant covers 24+ African markets through one API. It goes beyond mobile money to include card payments and bank transfers, which makes it useful when you need to abstract over all payment rails rather than wallets alone.

Bizao is a pan-African aggregator focused on mobile money and card payments across multiple carriers under a single merchant contract.

Hub2 unifies mobile money, bank transfer, card and crypto rails for francophone Africa through Pay-In and Pay-Out APIs. Worth considering if your product is francophone-first but you also need card and bank transfer coverage.

East Africa: M-Pesa is the starting point

In Kenya, M-Pesa handles the majority of digital transactions. The M-Pesa Daraja API is Safaricom's official Daraja 3.0 developer portal. Core operations include STK Push (prompts the user's phone to enter their PIN), C2B collections, B2C bulk payouts and account balance queries. A full sandbox is available before going live.

For Python and Django projects, django-daraja wraps the Daraja API and simplifies STK Push flows.

If you need to span beyond Kenya into East Africa broadly, Jenga API by Finserve Africa covers seven East African nations with APIs for bank and mobile money transfers, airtime, forex and KYC in a single integration.

MTN MoMo: the widest mobile-money footprint

MTN operates across more African countries than any other mobile operator. The MTN MoMo Open API exposes three core products: Collections (request-to-pay), Disbursements (send money) and Remittances. It supports sandbox and production environments and is the direct route to MTN's subscriber base.

Official and community SDKs support multiple stacks:

• android-mtn-momo-api-sdk: Kotlin Multiplatform SDK with OAuth2 token handling, for Android and JVM
• mtn-momo-node: Node.js library covering sandbox and production, with API user provisioning

Orange Money: 11 countries across Francophone Africa

The Orange Money Web Payment API accepts online payments from Orange Money wallets across 11 African countries. Orange Money is the dominant wallet in much of Francophone West and Central Africa.

Francophone Africa: the specialist options

Several platforms are built specifically for the CFA franc zone and francophone markets.

• CinetPay: Founded in 2016, covers 10 francophone countries via mobile money and bank cards. The most established gateway in this region.
• FedaPay: Covers francophone West Africa with payment links and a direct API. Official SDKs for Node.js and PHP.
• PayDunya: Senegalese platform for collections and payouts across francophone West Africa.
• Wave Business API: Developer API from Wave, the mobile money operator dominant in Senegal and Cote d'Ivoire, for FCFA-denominated collections and disbursements.

For Cameroon and Central Africa, notchpay-php adds PHP support for mobile money and card collections.

Southern Africa: Zambia and Airtel networks

MoneyUnify is a PHP package that provides a single interface for MTN Mobile Money, Airtel Money and Zamtel in Zambia, using a simplified USSD-based API.

airtel-money-node-sdk is a Node.js implementation for Airtel Money API with automatic OAuth2 token caching, covering Airtel networks across Africa.

Ghana: Hubtel

Hubtel is Ghana's established fintech platform offering REST APIs for mobile money collections, card payments, SMS, USSD and ID verification, with multiple official SDKs.

MCP servers: mobile money for AI agents

If you are building an LLM-based application or AI agent that needs to trigger or verify payments, four verified MCP servers cover mobile money operations:

• MoMo MCP Server: MTN MoMo operations exposed as tools, with approval gates, spend limits and idempotency
• CinetPay MCP: Payment and transfer operations across 10 francophone countries
• Orange Money MCP Server: 8 tools covering Orange Money WebPay across 11 countries
• Deggo MCP: Senegal-focused with Orange Money integration for natural-language payment flows

What to use when

Situation	Option
Kenya only, M-Pesa focus	M-Pesa Daraja
MTN network, one or two countries	MTN MoMo Open API
Orange Money markets	Orange Money Web Payment API
Multiple countries, fast launch	PawaPay or Tingg
Francophone West Africa specialist	CinetPay, Wave or FedaPay
Ghana	Hubtel
East Africa, seven countries	Jenga API
Zambia, multi-network	MoneyUnify
AI agent needs payment tools	MoMo MCP Server or CinetPay MCP

Know the standard

The GSMA Mobile Money API Specification is the harmonized industry REST and JSON specification covering merchant payments, P2P transfers, disbursements, international remittances and bill payments. Major networks are converging on it. Reading it once will reduce surprises when you move between markets or carriers.

Browse all 32 verified mobile money resources at wycord.com/apis, or filter by country at wycord.com/countries.