Refund and Chargeback Policy

Refunds are started by the merchant. Payment Gateway Africa does not refund your customers on its own initiative.

Every refund is subject to your agreement with us and to the rules of the payment method used for the original payment.

Looking up an earlier payment and refunding it are two separate procedures. Finding a transaction does not reverse it.

A mobile money payment cannot always be reversed. Some methods may not support refunds through the gateway at all.

We do not commit to a refund timeframe. Timing depends on the method, the provider behind it and the details of the case.

This policy covers payments accepted through Payment Gateway Africa in Kenya, Egypt, Ethiopia, Senegal, Tunisia, Mali and Guinea. It applies to merchants connected through either the Hosted Payment Page or the H2H API integration.

It addresses refund requests on pay-ins, which are payments your customers make to you. Payouts and merchant settlements are separate flows and are not refunds.

The policy sits alongside your merchant agreement and our terms of service. Where your agreement includes specific refund conditions, those conditions take precedence for your project.

Your business decides whether a customer is entitled to a refund. That decision rests on your own published refund terms, your consumer obligations and the facts of the purchase.

Customers who want money back should contact you, not Payment Gateway Africa. We do not run a customer-facing refund desk and we do not send refund updates to shoppers.

Once you decide to refund, you submit the request under the current terms of your project. If the method does not support a gateway refund, you may need another way to return funds to your customer, as allowed by your agreement and applicable law.

Local methods each have their own refund rules. They include M-Pesa in Kenya and Ethiopia, mobile wallet payments by phone number in Egypt, CBE Birr and local transfers in Ethiopia, Wave and Orange Money in Senegal and Mali, Moov Money in Mali, Orange Money in Guinea, and D17 and Flouci in Tunisia.

Those rules decide whether a refund is possible and whether it can be partial or only full. They also set any time limit after the original payment and how the money returns to the customer's account or wallet.

Because these rules belong to each method and can change, we cannot give a single rule that fits every market. Ask your account contact which options apply to the methods enabled on your project. You can also review method coverage on our mobile money payment gateway overview.

A customer may say they paid but cannot see the order. Your first step is to look up the original operation and check its status. This lookup shows what happened. It does not move any money.

A refund is a separate action that you request only after you have confirmed a successful payment that you have decided to return.

Keep these steps apart in your support process. Merging them can lead to duplicate refunds or refunds on payments that never completed. Guidance on checking statuses appears in our webhooks documentation.

Where a method supports gateway refunds, any status we have is sent to your system. Delivery uses the same postback and webhook mechanism as other operations. Your backend should record the result and update your own order data.

Do not tell a customer that a refund is complete until your system shows a final status for that request. A pending or unconfirmed request is not a completed refund.

Keep your own records of refund decisions, request references and customer communications. You may need them to answer customer questions or a dispute.

A dispute arises when a customer or a payment provider challenges a payment. How disputes are raised and resolved depends on the payment method involved.

If we receive a dispute about one of your payments, we will contact you through your project contact channels. We may ask for evidence such as order details, delivery confirmation, customer correspondence or your published refund terms.

Reply within the period we give you and provide accurate information. The final outcome may depend on the method provider's rules, not only on our review. Financial consequences of a dispute are handled under your merchant agreement.

This policy does not guarantee that any payment can be reversed. It sets no refund processing time and does not offer automatic refunds.

It does not make Payment Gateway Africa responsible for your refund decisions toward your customers or for your obligations under consumer law.

We may refuse or delay a refund request if it is incomplete, appears irregular, conflicts with the method's rules or needs further review under our AML and KYC requirements.

We may update this policy when our product, method rules or legal duties change. The date at the top of this page shows the current version.

Material changes affecting active merchants will be communicated through the usual project contact channels.

Merchants with questions about this policy, a particular refund request or a dispute notice can reach us through the contact page. Include your project reference and the operation details so we can respond without delay.

If you are not yet a merchant and want to know how refunds work for your target markets, you can also begin the onboarding process.