This section is where backend skills meet the way Ghana actually does business. Customers pay with mobile money, get updates by SMS or WhatsApp, and sometimes use USSD menus on basic phones. Connections drop, prompts time out and the same message can arrive twice. Fintech and payment adverts we read asked for webhooks, retries, idempotency and reconciliation by name. A developer who handles these calmly is useful to Ghanaian startups, fintechs, telcos and agencies very quickly.
Talking to other companies' APIs
So far you have built your own API. Now your server becomes the client of someone else's: a payment provider, an SMS gateway or a messaging platform. Each provider has its own documentation, test keys and rules, but the pattern is the same:
- Your server sends a request to the provider, using a secret key.
- The provider does something in the real world: asks a customer to approve a payment, or sends an SMS.
- Later, the provider tells your server what happened, often by calling a URL on your server. That call is a webhook.
Why this is harder than it looks
When you call your own database, it answers in milliseconds. When you start a mobile money payment, the customer might take a minute to find their phone and enter a PIN, or ignore the prompt entirely. Meanwhile:
- your request to the provider might time out even though it worked