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2026

REDEFINING

THE DIGITAL�LANDSCAPE.

WORDCAMP LIRA 2026

29–30 AUGUST 2026�LIRA TOWN COLLEGE • LIRA CITY

ANDREW - WORDPRESS DEVELOPMENT

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SPEAKER

MOBILE MONEY & PAYMENTS ON WORDPRESS IN UG

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Andrew Ssanya

WordPress Development

29–30�AUGUST

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01 / THE HOOK

Open This On Your Phone. Right Now.

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momo.mtn.com/api RUNS ON WORDPRESS

Look at any image URL on that page: wp-content. MTN's own API front door is built on the CMS you already use.

THE HOOK — 90 seconds. Phones out. This is the strongest moment in the talk for this room, so give it space.

"Everybody take out your phone and go to momo.mtn.com/api. That is MTN's official MoMo API page — the front door to the API this whole talk is about. Now view source, or just look at any image URL on that page."

WAIT. Do not fill the silence. Someone will spot wp-content and say it out loud.

"It is WordPress. MTN's own developer front door, for a payment platform serving fifty million people a month, runs on the same CMS you build client sites with."

Then the point — this is the sentence that matters:

"There is no us and them here. The tools are already the same. What is missing is the bridge between them, and that is what the next twenty minutes are about."

VERIFY IT YOURSELF the week before, in case they redesign the site. If they have moved off WordPress, open the page anyway and use the products section instead — the talk still works.

Then set the frame: "This talk is not about which plugin to install. It is about the ten minutes AFTER the customer taps Pay."

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02 / WARM-UP

Everyone Stand Up.

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STAY STANDING IF

You have paid with MoMo this week.

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STAY STANDING IF

You have paid on a Ugandan website with MoMo.

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STAY STANDING IF

The site confirmed it instantly - no screenshot, no WhatsApp.

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03 / EVIDENCE

This Is Not A Niche Payment Method.

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326T

UGX, E-MONEY VALUE

E-money value in the year to June 2025, up 28.6%. Person-to-business alone: UGX 59.2 trillion.

Source: Bank of Uganda, Integrated Annual Report to 30 June 2025

90 seconds. Pick two numbers, do not read all of them.

"Three hundred and twenty-six trillion shillings moved through e-money in one year. Person-to-business alone — people buying things — was fifty-nine trillion. And it grew twenty-nine percent in twelve months."

The one that lands hardest with developers: mobile money transaction value is roughly five times the entire commercial banking sector's balance sheet.

MTN's own scale, if you want it: over 50 million active monthly users, 910,000 agents and 626,000 merchants across 16 markets. And per MTN's own page, the MoMo journey started here in Uganda — they say 2007, though Uganda's public launch is usually dated 2009, so attribute it to them rather than stating it flat.

Then pivot: "So when a client asks you to add Visa checkout to their WordPress site, you are building for the smaller market. By a lot."

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04 / THE PROBLEM

The Screenshot Economy

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HOW IT WORKS

Customer sends money manually and WhatsApps a screenshot.

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WHY IT BREAKS

Screenshots are easy to fake. No audit trail. One human bottleneck.

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WHAT IT COSTS

Breaks past ~30 orders a day. Abandoned carts stay silent.

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05 / OPTIONS

Four Ways To Take MoMo On A Site

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Aggregator

Flutterwave, Pesapal, Xente. Easiest start, ~2-4%.

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Collection

MTN's API. You ask, they approve on their phone.

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QR Widget

Customer scans a code. The least code to write.

04

Payouts

MTN Disbursement. Refunds and supplier payments.

90 seconds. This is new information for most of the room — slow down a little.

Card 1 is the honest advice for the majority: "Ninety percent of you should start here. Take the two percent, ship this week, and spend your time on the actual product."

Cards 2 to 4 are MTN's own products, listed on momodeveloper.mtn.com. Say that out loud — it is the same page they just opened on their phones.

CARD 3 IS THE ONE TO DWELL ON. Ask the room: "Put your hand up if you knew the Collection Widget existed." Expect almost no hands. Then: "MTN will let your customer approve a mobile money payment by scanning a QR code on your site. For a WordPress build that is far less work than a full Collections integration, and almost nobody in this country is using it."

That question and the silence after it is worth the trip to Lira on its own.

Airtel Money exists too and has its own API — same architecture, different shape. Mention it once so nobody thinks you only know MTN.

One caution: under the National Payment Systems Act 2020, aggregation is a licensed activity. Check a provider's Bank of Uganda licence before you route a client's money through them.

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06 / UNDER THE HOOD

What Actually Happens On “Pay Now”

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Request

Your server POSTs requesttopay with a UUID.

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202 Accepted

Empty body. Request received. Nothing more.

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The Human

A PIN prompt reaches their phone. Maybe 3 minutes.

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Verify

Callback or poll. Confirm server-side, then release.

2 minutes. This is the technical spine — slow down here.

Walk it as a story, not a list: "You are not making a payment. You are ASKING a phone to ask a human to approve a payment. Everything difficult follows from that one fact."

Emphasise card two hard — it sets up the next slide: "Two-zero-two Accepted. Empty body. This is where careers go to die."

Emphasise card three in human terms: "Between the request and the confirmation, a person in a boda in Lira traffic has to find their phone, unlock it, and remember their PIN. Your code has to survive that. Sometimes for minutes."

RESOURCE TO NAME OUT LOUD: MTN has already filmed every step on this slide. Six short videos on momo.mtn.com/api — introduction, creating a sandbox user, generating an API key, RequestToPay, transaction status and balance, checking user status. Tell them: "Everything in this slide, MTN filmed for you. Watch them on the bus home."

TIMING: you should be around 11:00.

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07 / BIG IDEA

If You Remember One Thing

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202 ACCEPTED IS NOT PAYMENT.

No money has moved. The customer has not touched their phone. The response body is empty.

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08 / STATES

Four Outcomes, Not Two

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Pending

Unanswered on their phone. The normal state here.

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Successful

Money moved. The only state that releases goods.

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Failed

Wrong PIN, no balance, rejected, timed out.

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Silence

The callback never arrives. You must handle it.

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09 / YOUR TURN

MTN Said 'Got It.' We Said 'Paid.

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$code = wp_remote_retrieve_response_code( $res );��if ( 202 === $code ) { // MTN said "got it"� $order->payment_complete(); // we say "paid"� wp_redirect( $thank_you_url );�}

60 SECONDS • Turn to the person next to you. There are four things wrong here.

INTERACTIVE 2 — 3 minutes. The centrepiece of audience participation. Commit to it.

THE COMMENTS ARE DELIBERATE. Read them out loud before you set the timer, so the non-developers in the room can play too:

"MTN said 'got it'... so we say 'paid'. Does anybody see a problem with that?"

That sentence alone gets bug 1 from someone who has never written PHP. The developers will find the rest.

Give them 45-60 seconds with the person next to them. Actually time it. Walk into the audience while they talk — do not stand at the podium.

Then take shouted answers. REPEAT EVERY ANSWER BACK LOUDLY — the back of the room never hears it. Credit whoever gets one: "Yes, exactly that, thank you."

The four you are fishing for:

1. 202 is acknowledgement, not payment - free goods

2. No idempotency - refresh fires a second request, second prompt, second debit

3. No server-side status verification before releasing the order

4. No pending path - the customer who takes two minutes gets nothing

If the room is quiet, prompt: "Forget the 202 for a second. What happens if the customer hits refresh?"

DO NOT highlight the guilty line before you ask — that answers the question for them. On the reveal, point at payment_complete() with your hand or the pointer.

If someone spots something you did not list, take it, say "that is a better catch than mine," and move on. Never argue with a correct answer.

This pattern is not a strawman - say so. It runs on live Ugandan sites right now.

TIMING: around 17:00 leaving here.

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10 / THE FIX

Three Rules That Fix All Four

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ONE UUID PER ATTEMPT

Store it on the order. Your X-Reference-Id is your idempotency key, so a retry can never become a second debit.

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NEVER TRUST THE INBOUND

Anyone can POST to your callback URL. Check the reference, the amount, and whether it is already processed — then act.

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POLL AS A FALLBACK

Callbacks get lost. Check status by reference on a schedule, and expire stuck payments with a message, never silence.

2 minutes. This is the practical payoff — the thing they came for. Deliver it with confidence.

Rule 1 — dwell here: "Generate the UUID once, when the order attempt is created. Save it on the order. If the customer refreshes, you reuse it. MTN treats a repeat of the same reference as the same transaction. That is free idempotency, and almost nobody uses it."

Rule 2, plainly: "Anyone on the internet can POST to your callback URL. Anyone. Validate every field against your own database before you release a single item of stock."

Rule 3, pre-empt the objection: "Someone is thinking 'but the webhook works fine in testing.' It does. It works fine until the one day it doesn't, and that day your client loses a hundred orders and blames WordPress."

The customer-service point: "The angriest customer is not the one whose payment failed. It is the one who was debited, got no confirmation, and got no message."

Worth adding out loud if time allows: never set an order to complete on the request — create it pending and let a verified status change it.

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12 / ACTION

Three Things To Do On Monday

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AUDIT ONE INTEGRATION

Find where it decides an order is paid. Fix it.

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WATCH THE SIX VIDEOS

MTN filmed one per step. Free, on momo.mtn.com/api.

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CONTRIBUTE IT BACK

No great free MoMo gateway exists in the repo yet.

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THANK YOU ☺

Pending your feedback.

Andrew — WordPress Developer

https://andrewssanya.bio �Learn the API: momodeveloper.mtn.com, h ttps://developers.airtel.ug/user/login

WORDCAMP LIRA 2026�29–30 AUGUST • LIRA TOWN COLLEGE

#WCLira2026

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