Digital Exclusion Is a Technical Problem
The article discusses the challenges of digital exclusion faced by creators in Kenya and Ethiopia due to unsupported payment systems. After unsuccessful attempts to integrate a third-party API for M-Pesa, the authors decided to build their own payment gateway. This new system significantly improved payment success rates and revenue for creators in these regions.
- ▪Traditional payment gateways excluded users in Kenya and Ethiopia, where M-Pesa is widely used.
- ▪Attempts to integrate M-Pesa through a third-party API failed due to reliability and latency issues.
- ▪Building a custom payment gateway improved payment success rates from 70% to 95% and increased revenue by 300%.
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try { if(localStorage) { let currentUser = localStorage.getItem('current_user'); if (currentUser) { currentUser = JSON.parse(currentUser); if (currentUser.id === 3942413) { document.getElementById('article-show-container').classList.add('current-user-is-article-author'); } } } } catch (e) { console.error(e); } Alice Nkosi Posted on May 22 Digital Exclusion Is a Technical Problem #community #webdev #programming #opensource The Problem We Were Actually Solving Our platform relied on traditional payment gateways like Stripe and PayPal, which were easily integrated into our system but excluded a large portion of our users. In Kenya and Ethiopia, for example, M-Pesa is the most widely used mobile payment system, but it's not supported by our current payment gateways.
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