mpesa-mcp

MCP server for East African fintech APIs — M-Pesa (Safaricom Daraja) and Africa's Talking

Give your AI agent the ability to trigger M-Pesa payments, check transaction status, send SMS, and top up airtime across 20+ African telecom networks.

Why this exists

M-Pesa processes more transactions per day than PayPal does in Africa. Africa's Talking reaches users in 20+ countries on basic phones via SMS and USSD. Neither has an MCP server.

This means every AI agent built today — Claude, GPT, Gemini, or any MCP-compatible runtime — cannot trigger an M-Pesa payment or send a Kiswahili SMS without custom integration work.

mpesa-mcp closes that gap in one pip install.

Tools

Tool	Description
mpesa_stk_push	Trigger STK Push payment prompt on customer's M-Pesa phone
mpesa_stk_query	Check status of an STK Push request
mpesa_transaction_status	Query any M-Pesa transaction by receipt number
sms_send	Send SMS to 1–1,000 recipients across African networks
airtime_send	Send airtime top-up to any subscriber (KES, NGN, GHS, UGX, etc.)

Coverage

• M-Pesa: Kenya (Safaricom Daraja v3) — STK Push, C2B, transaction status
• SMS/Airtime: Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, South Africa, and 15+ more via Africa's Talking

Glama (hosted MCP)

mpesa-mcp is available as a hosted MCP server on Glama:

Security — NSA MCP Guidance Compliant

mpesa-mcp was updated in response to NSA CSI U/OO/6030316-26 (May 2026) — the NSA Artificial Intelligence Security Center's Cybersecurity Information Sheet on Model Context Protocol security.

This makes mpesa-mcp the first African MCP server to document compliance against the NSA's MCP security framework.

NSA Control	Implementation
Parameter validation	KE phone regex ^254[17]\d{8}$ + amount bounds [1–150,000 KES]
Audit logging	Structured log per tool call; phone numbers SHA-256 hashed
Token lifecycle	OAuth token cached with expiry; auto-refreshed
Error containment	Structured error dicts; no raw exception propagation
HTTPS enforcement	All Daraja API calls HTTPS-only
No hardcoded secrets	All credentials via environment variables

See SECURITY.md for the full compliance table.

Reference: NSA CSI_MCP_SECURITY.pdf — May 2026, UNCLASSIFIED

Install

pip install mpesa-mcp

Or run directly with uvx:

uvx mpesa-mcp

Configuration

Set these environment variables before starting the server:

# M-Pesa (Safaricom Daraja)
MPESA_CONSUMER_KEY=your_consumer_key
MPESA_CONSUMER_SECRET=your_consumer_secret
MPESA_SHORTCODE=174379               # sandbox test shortcode
MPESA_PASSKEY=your_passkey
MPESA_CALLBACK_URL=https://yourdomain.com/mpesa/callback
MPESA_SANDBOX=true                   # set false for production

# Africa's Talking
AT_USERNAME=sandbox                  # your AT username (sandbox for testing)
AT_API_KEY=your_at_api_key

Sandbox credentials

M-Pesa sandbox: https://developer.safaricom.co.ke — create a free app to get test credentials.

• Test shortcode: 174379
• Test passkey: bfb279f9aa9bdbcf158e97dd71a467cd2e0c893059b10f78e6b72ada1ed2c919

Africa's Talking sandbox: https://account.africastalking.com — use username=sandbox, any API key.

Usage with Claude Desktop

Add to ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json (macOS):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "mpesa": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["mpesa-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "MPESA_CONSUMER_KEY": "your_key",
        "MPESA_CONSUMER_SECRET": "your_secret",
        "MPESA_SHORTCODE": "174379",
        "MPESA_PASSKEY": "your_passkey",
        "MPESA_CALLBACK_URL": "https://yourdomain.com/mpesa/callback",
        "MPESA_SANDBOX": "true",
        "AT_USERNAME": "sandbox",
        "AT_API_KEY": "your_at_key"
      }
    }
  }
}

Usage with Claude Code

claude mcp add mpesa -- uvx mpesa-mcp

Set env vars in your shell before running claude.

Example prompts

Once connected, you can ask your AI agent:

"Send KES 500 STK Push to +254712345678 for order #1234"

"Check if the payment QKL8ABC123 has been received"

"Send an SMS to these 50 farmers with today's maize price: [list]"

"Top up KES 50 airtime for our field agents: [list of numbers]"

Real-world scenarios

Field agent payment dispatch

"Send KES 300 STK Push to each of these 12 field agents for today's data collection: [list]"

The agent triggers 12 sequential STK pushes, tracks each checkout_request_id, and polls for confirmation — without any code from you.

Farmer alert + airtime

"SMS these 200 Garissa farmers that the river is rising. Then top up KES 20 airtime each so they can call in reports."

One prompt → 200 SMS messages and 200 airtime top-ups across Safaricom, Airtel, and Telkom.

Payment reconciliation

"Check whether receipt OKL8M3B2HF was a successful payment and how much it was for"

Useful for support agents using Claude to verify M-Pesa transactions in real time.

Tool annotations

All tools declare MCP tool annotations so clients can gate calls appropriately:

Tool	readOnly	destructive	idempotent
mpesa_stk_push	❌	✅	❌
mpesa_stk_query	✅	❌	✅
mpesa_transaction_status	✅	❌	✅
sms_send	❌	✅	❌
airtime_send	❌	✅	❌

Claude Desktop and other MCP clients will request confirmation before triggering payment, SMS, or airtime operations.

Server discovery

Capabilities are advertised via .well-known/mcp.json — the emerging MCP Server Cards standard. Registries and browsers can index this server's tools without connecting to it.

# Check capabilities
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gabrielmahia/mpesa-mcp/main/.well-known/mcp.json

Testing and accuracy

The MCP ecosystem benchmark (CData, 2026) found most MCP servers accurate 60–75% of the time on complex queries — particularly silent failures on write operations and partial parameter application.

mpesa-mcp is tested against all three Kenyan phone number formats, boundary amount values, and missing optional fields:

pytest tests/ -v  # run full suite
pytest tests/test_phone_formats.py  # format normalization
pytest tests/test_boundary_amounts.py  # min/max amount edge cases

Write operations (STK push, SMS, airtime) have explicit validation before any API call is made.

Ecosystem context — Mojaloop + MCP

Mojaloop (funded by the Gates Foundation) handles payment interoperability — connecting banks, mobile money wallets, and merchants across DFSPs in East Africa and beyond.

mpesa-mcp handles the AI agent tooling layer — enabling AI coding assistants to trigger and query M-Pesa payments programmatically.

These are complementary:

• Mojaloop: the interoperability rails between financial providers
• mpesa-mcp: the MCP interface layer that connects AI agents to those rails

See the Mojaloop documentation contribution for more on this pattern.

MCP vs A2A — two different protocols

mpesa-mcp implements MCP (Model Context Protocol) — how an AI agent talks to tools.

There is a complementary protocol, A2A (Agent-to-Agent), which handles how agents talk to each other. They solve different problems and work together:

• MCP: Your AI agent → mpesa-mcp → Daraja API / Africa's Talking
• A2A: Orchestrator agent ↔ payment sub-agent ↔ notification sub-agent

For most integrations you only need MCP. A2A becomes relevant when you're building multi-agent systems where a payment workflow coordinates with other specialized agents.

---

Development

git clone https://github.com/gabrielmahia/mpesa-mcp
cd mpesa-mcp
pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest tests/ -v

Security

Do not commit API keys. Use environment variables or a secrets manager.
Report vulnerabilities to: contact@aikungfu.dev

Research Context

MCP ecosystem benchmark (CData, 2026): Most MCP servers achieve 60-75% accuracy on complex queries. mpesa-mcp includes explicit validation and bounds checking to exceed this baseline.

Swahili AI accuracy (arXiv:2509.04516, 2025): AI models produce 4× more errors in Swahili than English. mpesa-mcp's Swahili-native tool descriptions are designed to minimize this gap for Swahili-speaking users by eliminating the translation step in tool selection.

MCP security research (arXiv:2603.18063, arXiv:2603.21642, 2026): Prompt injection via tool descriptions is the primary MCP attack vector. mpesa-mcp mitigates this through static, versioned tool descriptions and strict input validation.

Related infrastructure:

• wapimaji-mcp — Kenya water/drought MCP
• civic-agent-kit — Kenya civic data MCP
• swahili-health-mcp — Kenya DHIS2 health data MCP
• kenya-legal-rag — Kenya legal corpus MCP
• Full portfolio: gabrielmahia.github.io

License

MIT — © 2026 Gabriel Mahia

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Sibling packages

Package	Install	Description
wapimaji-mcp	pip install wapimaji-mcp	Kenya drought intelligence MCP server
civic-agent-kit	pip install civic-agent-kit	East African civic AI SDK

Related packages

All MIT · All part of the East African civic AI stack

Package	Install	Description
wapimaji-mcp	pip install wapimaji-mcp	Kenya drought intelligence MCP server
kenya-health-mcp	pip install kenya-health-mcp	Kenya health data MCP — NHIF, facilities, maternal, rights
civic-agent-kit	pip install civic-agent-kit	East African civic AI SDK

Full portfolio: gabrielmahia.github.io