Payment gateway Airtel Africa

This plugin was developed thanks to funding from Medical Access Uganda and i+academy

The plugin allows a site to connect to Airtel Africa to process payments.

Currently this plugin supports payment on following currencies:

Country	Country Code	Currency	Currency Code
Uganda	UG	Ugandan shilling	UGX
Nigeria	NG	Nigerian naira	NGN
Tanzania	TZ	Tanzanian shilling	TZS
Kenya	KE	Kenyan shilling	KES
Rwanda	RW	Rwandan franc	RWF
Zambia	ZM	Zambian kwacha	ZMW
Gabon	GA	CFA franc BEAC	CFA
Niger	NE	CFA franc BCEAO	XOF
Congo-Brazzaville	CG	CFA franc BCEA	XAF
DR Congo	CD	Congolese franc	CDF
DR Congo	CD	United States dollar	USD
Chad	TD	CFA franc BEAC	XAF
Seychelles	SC	Seychelles rupee	SCR
Madagascar	MG	Malagasy ariary	MGA
Malawi	MW	Malawian kwacha	MWK

Setup Airtel Africa account

To set up access within Moodle you will need to:

• Register a new application: Airtel Africa have their own docs on this.
• Enable the Collection-APIs and in the settings select the countries where you want to accept money from.
• Configure the callback url in your Application settings. The URL is in the format "example.com/payment/gateway/airtelafrica/callback.php". Make a phone call to your local Airtel representative so your submitted request is accepted. Yes, somebody at Airtel Africa needs to turn a switch before your changes take effect. Hope for the best. I never made my phone call, my dashboard tells me the APIs are enabled, but after more than 5 months none of the APIs work ...
• For every change, callback url, going live, enabling extra APIs, ... see previous line.
• If you want to test this plugin in the sandbox environment, contact your local Airtel representative. He/she will manually confirm your test payment.
• Do NOT rely on the sandbox environment, sometimes this service just stops working. If you are lucky, everything returns to normal after a week

Requirements

• This plugin requires Moodle 4.2.0+

Configure Moodle

• Go to site administration / Plugins / Manage payment gateways and enable the Airtel Africa payment gateway.
• Go to site administration / Payments / Payment accounts
• Click the button 'Create payment account' then enter an account name for identifying it when setting up enrolment on payment, then save changes.
• On the Payment accounts page, click the payment gateway link to configure Airtel Africa.
• In the configuration page,
  • Enter your clientid from the application you have created in the Airtel developer centre
  • Paste your own private key value.

Add Enrolment on payment

• Go to Go to Site administration > Plugins > Enrolments > Manage enrol plugins and click the eye icon opposite Enrolment on payment.
• Click the settings link, configure as required then click the 'Save changes' button.
• Go to the course you wish to enable payment for, and add the 'Enrolment on payment' enrolment method to the course.
• Select a payment account, amend the enrolment fee as necessary then click the button 'Add method'.

see also:
moodledocs: Payment gateways
moodledocs: Enrolment on payment

Theme support

This plugin is developed and tested on Moodle Core's Boost theme and Boost child themes, including Moodle Core's Classic theme.

Database support

This plugin is developed and tested using

• MYSQL
• MariaDB
• PostgreSQL

Testing

This plugin can be tested in PHPUnit and Behat, but you need to add your phone - login - secret key as an environment variable.

• env phone=???? login=???? secret=???? vendor/bin/phpunit --coverage-text payment/gateway/airtelafrica/
• env phone=???? login=???? secret=???? vendor/bin/behat --tags='paygw_airtelafrica'

Or you can use secrets in Github actions:

• gh secret set phone -b"?????"
• gh secret set login -b"?????"
• gh secret set secret -b"?????"

Plugin repositories

This plugin will be published and regularly updated on Github

Challenges

The main problem is that we can't use a reliable callback. The transition from sandbox to production environment in Moodle is immediate, the transition from sandbox to production environment in Airtel Africa can take days. So a sandbox callback can end up in a production environment and vice versa. We addressed this issue by:

• using the callback only as a backup tool, in case a successful payment was missed.
• pinging the server for three minutes to see if the payment was successful.

Bug and problem reports / Support requests

This plugin is carefully developed and only thoroughly tested in Uganda, but bugs and problems can always appear. Please report bugs and problems on Github We will do our best to solve your problems, but please note that we can't provide per-case support. Please contact you Airtel Africa representative in case you get invalid transactionids or timeouts.

Feature proposals

• Please issue feature proposals on Github
• Please create pull requests on Github
• We are always interested to read about your feature proposals or even get a pull request from you, but please accept that we can handle your issues only as feature proposals and not as feature requests.

Status

License

2023 Medical Access Uganda

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.