Ethiopia Mobile Money

Mobile money in Ethiopia (ETH) is available through the operators below. Set payerDetails.location to ETH on the checkout session and pass the operator’s provider slug on the payment; GET /v1/payment/available-methods returns the live list for the country.

For how a payment works, what you collect, sandbox testing, and error codes, see the Mobile Money overview. For the end-to-end API sequence, see Direct API: Mobile Money.

Operators

Operator	`paymentDetails.provider`	Approval flow
Telebirr	`telebirr`	Handset prompt (USSD push, PIN)
M-Pesa (Safaricom Ethiopia)	`mpesa`	Handset prompt (USSD push, PIN)
CBE Birr	`cbebirr`	Handset prompt (USSD push, PIN)
Coopay E-Birr	`ebirr`	Handset prompt (USSD push, PIN)
AwashBirr	`awashbirr`	Handset prompt (USSD push, PIN)
YaYa Wallet	`yaya`	Handset prompt (USSD push, PIN)

Ethiopia mixes carrier wallets (Telebirr, M-Pesa) with bank-issued ones (CBE Birr, Coopay E-Birr, AwashBirr) and an independent PSP wallet (YaYa). All six use the same handset-prompt flow, so a single integration covers them: the customer approves the debit on their handset and there is no POST /payment/authorize step. None of them use the redirect flow.

The mpesa slug here is Safaricom Ethiopia, a different wallet from the Safaricom Kenya product that shares the slug in Kenya. The slug is scoped by the session’s payerDetails.location, so there is nothing extra to pass.

ETB only

Ethiopian mobile money collects in ETB. Set currency (or collectionCurrency on an FX-enabled session) to ETB when you create the session. A payment that reaches these operators in any other currency is rejected with INVALID_CURRENCY rather than converted.

Collections only

Unlike most CrissCross markets, Ethiopia is a collect-only market today. Two consequences worth designing around:

No payouts. telebirr, cbebirr, ebirr, awashbirr and yaya are not valid operator values on the Payouts API and are rejected as payout destinations. ETB does not appear in Supported Destinations.
No refunds on this rail. Neither refund route described in the Refunds guide is available for these wallets: the rail does not support provider refunds, and the payout-refund fallback needs a payout route to the wallet, which does not exist. Arrange returns with support instead of calling the refund endpoint.

Collections themselves behave exactly as they do elsewhere: subscribe your endpoint to the transaction.* events and route on the delivered status, since the webhook body carries no event type. See Webhooks for delivery and signature verification, and Webhook Events for the full catalogue and payload schemas. Alternatively, poll GET /v1/payment/{transactionId}.