Building Reliable OTP Flows Across African Networks

OTP systems fail silently when teams treat messaging as a single request-response hop. Reliable flows are event pipelines where every handoff can be observed, retried, and explained.

Start with measurable objectives

Before tuning providers, set hard service goals:

• verification completion rate target
• p95 message arrival budget
• max resend attempts per user session

When teams skip this, they optimize delivery receipts instead of user completions.

Design retries as first-class behavior

Retries should be explicit in your API contract and analytics model. Define:

• retry windows per carrier
• dedupe keys per verification request
• cooldowns to stop abuse and accidental spam

Treat resend actions as independent events with their own status transitions.

Instrument every stage

Track events for request creation, provider submission, carrier status callbacks, and final verification outcome. This creates a direct map between messaging health and business conversion.

Without this timeline, support teams cannot explain why a user failed verification.

Operate with regional awareness

Carrier behavior differs by country, hour, and traffic profile. Build route policies that can switch based on recent latency and error rates instead of static preferences.

Operationally, this is where most reliability gains are found.