The Africa region on apis.io maps 169 providers. Only 3 of them score strong: Paystack at 59.7, Peach Payments at 58.3 and AmunCore at 55.4. Twenty more are developing, 16 thin, 43 emerging and 87 minimal. The region’s own description says mobile money leapfrogged card rails. The rows show payments first, but they show mobile money’s own APIs well behind the card-and-bank gateways.
The top of the region
| Provider | Score | Band | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| Paystack | 59.7 | strong | Cards, transfers, USSD, QR, mobile money in six countries |
| Peach Payments | 58.3 | strong | Southern and East African gateway |
| Flutterwave | 54.1 | developing | Pan-African payments |
| MTN Group | 52.1 | developing | Telco, MoMo; 145 API rows in the region |
| Paymob | 51.2 | developing | Egyptian payments |
| Smile ID | 49.8 | developing | Identity and KYC |
| Interswitch | 48.6 | developing | Nigerian switching and cards |
| M-Pesa (Safaricom Daraja) | 47.4 | developing | Kenyan mobile money |
The leaders are almost all fintech: payments, KYC, remittance with Afriex and Klasha, and banking with Moniepoint. Agritech and logistics, which the region description also promises, do not reach the top twenty.
Mobile money trails
Mobile money is the defining African API, and it scores lower than the gateways that sit on top of it. M-Pesa’s Daraja is at 47.4, down 8.3 from 55.7 at the last run, with contract governance at 4.5. Wave Mobile Money scores 23.0, with contract quality at 0.0, despite five APIs for checkout, payouts and disbursements across Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Uganda, Mali and Burkina Faso. Africa’s Talking, the SMS, USSD and airtime layer many African apps are built on, is at 21.9, down 6.5. The rails people actually use publish their documentation as HTML pages, and it is the gateways that ship the contracts.
How the region is built
125 of the 169 providers were admitted on a tag alone. Only 39 carry an African headquarters signal. Paystack, Flutterwave, Smile ID and M-Pesa are all tag-admitted, so the list leans toward who serves Africa more than who is based there. That is a fair way to define a sales region, but it is worth knowing when reading the list.
Two catalog defects belong to us. The region header claims 657 APIs, and the page renders 200 API rows, MTN alone accounting for 145 in the header’s sum. And the row counts disagree with provider files: the region row gives M-Pesa 11 APIs and Africa’s Talking 6, while their provider files say 1 each. I cited the provider files above.
Takeaway
What would move Africa is the mobile-money rails publishing OpenAPI contracts with versioning: Daraja, Wave and MTN MoMo first. The demand is already proven, since every gateway in the top ten routes to them. The developer surface is what is missing.
Browse the region at apis.io/regions/africa/.