Telebirr Payment Confirmation: A Developer's Guide

Telebirr has over 40 million users in Ethiopia. But verifying payments programmatically comes with a unique challenge: Telebirr geo-blocks its receipt pages to Ethiopian IPs only.

The Telebirr Geo-Blocking Problem

When a customer pays via Telebirr, they receive an SMS with a confirmation. The problem for developers is that Telebirr's receipt verification page only responds to requests from Ethiopian IP addresses. If your server is in Frankfurt, New York, Singapore, or any data centre outside Ethiopia, you'll get blocked.

This affects:

• Diaspora businesses serving Ethiopian customers
• International e-commerce platforms
• Cloud-hosted apps on AWS, GCP, or DigitalOcean (none have Ethiopian regions)
• Any developer outside Ethiopia building for the local market

Solutions to the Geo-Block

There are a few ways to handle this:

1. Run a server in Ethiopia

You can get a VPS from an Ethiopian provider and route Telebirr verification traffic through it. This works but adds complexity — you need to manage the relay, keep it running, and monitor it.

2. Use qbirr (recommended)

qbirr handles the geo-blocking automatically. We run verification relays in Ethiopia that route Telebirr and M-Pesa requests through local IPs. Your server anywhere in the world just calls our API:

curl -X POST https://verify.qbirr.com/api/v1/verify \
  -H "X-API-Key: $QBIRR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "provider": "telebirr",
    "ref": "FT23001234ABC",
    "amount": 500,
    "receiver_name": "YOUR NAME"
  }'

The geo-bypass happens transparently — we route through an Ethiopian relay, fetch the receipt, parse it, and return the result. Your server never needs an Ethiopian IP.

M-Pesa Has the Same Limitation

Safaricom Ethiopia's M-Pesa has the same geo-blocking rule. We handle it the same way. All other providers in the qbirr network (CBE, Awash, Dashen, Bank of Abyssinia, eBirr) work from any IP.