Glossary
Safaricom Daraja API
Safaricom's developer API for M-Pesa, providing STK Push, Paybill and Till payment collection, B2C disbursement, and transaction status and reversal endpoints.
In plain terms
Safaricom’s developer interface for M-Pesa. It provides STK Push prompts, Paybill and Till collection, business-to-customer payments, and endpoints for checking transaction status and handling reversals.
Integrating directly means your system talks to M-Pesa rather than through a third party, which lowers the cost per transaction and gives you the data, at the price of owning the error handling.
Why it matters in Kenya
This is the payment rail for Kenyan online selling, and getting it right is mostly about the unhappy paths: a callback that never arrives, a customer who pays twice, a payment with the wrong reference, a refund after delivery.
What to do about it
Four checks you can run on your own site this week.
- Make callbacks idempotent, so a repeated message cannot double-credit an order
- Query transaction status as a fallback rather than trusting the callback alone
- Keep a reconciliation view somebody in finance can actually use
- Test with live low-value transactions before launch, not only in sandbox
More terms
Other words you will meet when commissioning web, e-commerce or search work in Kenya.
- STK PushAn M-Pesa payment method where the customer receives a prompt on their phone to authorise payment by entering their PIN, rather than manually entering a Paybill or Till number.
- eTIMSThe Kenya Revenue Authority's electronic Tax Invoice Management System.
- .co.ke DomainThe second-level domain for Kenyan commercial entities, registered through KeNIC.
