Honest ICT4D case studies are the ones that admit which technology choices were forced on us by the people we were trying to serve.
I was the technical lead at UN Women HQ on Hecho por Mujeres, Costa Rica’s national e-commerce marketplace for women entrepreneurs living in poverty. What follows is the practitioner-level account of what the constraints demanded, including the parts that most project reports leave out.
We Adapted, We Did Not Invent
Hecho por Mujeres is the Costa Rica deployment of UN Women’s Buy from Women platform, an open-source, cloud-based e-commerce system.
The platform launched on November 22, 2021 with 54 women entrepreneurs, five public institutions, and four UN agencies. Today it serves 134 registered women sellers. The joint programme is implemented by UN Women, UNDP, ILO, and FAO, with IMAS as lead national counterpart and FIDEIMAS as the long-term administrator.
The sellers are women already enrolled in IMAS, FIDEIMAS, and INAMU social programs. The marketplace did not recruit entrepreneurs. It built a digital storefront for women the Costa Rican state had already identified as living in poverty.
Magento Was a Budget Decision
The platform runs on Magento Open Source. The reason was simple: money. Every dollar saved on proprietary licensing went directly to seller onboarding, training, and capacity building. For a UN-funded programme, that trade-off was obvious.
But open source comes with a catch. Open source means public code, and public code means a public attack surface. Anyone can read the codebase, which means anyone can look for vulnerabilities. Magento is one of the most targeted e-commerce platforms in the world for exactly this reason.
We took that seriously from day one. To keep the platform secure we implemented the latest Magento security patches at launch and maintained a strict patching schedule tied to Adobe’s security bulletins. We added two-factor authentication on all staff accounts, role-based access controls to separate seller, buyer, and admin environments, and hardened admin URL paths to reduce exposure.
The women selling on this platform are economically vulnerable. Their home addresses and financial details live in this system. A security breach is a real harm to real people. That shaped every decision we made.
Inclusion Bottleneck: Payment Infrastructure
The seller cohort does not have bank accounts. That single fact made every off-the shelf payment assumption wrong.
We integrated GreenPay because it offered three things the women needed and one thing the platform needed. The women needed card acceptance without a merchant account, payment links they could send over WhatsApp, and Spanish-language support they could access.
The platform needed PCI-DSS-compliant tokenization so card details were captured and stored by GreenPay, not by Hecho por Mujeres. The platform itself never holds sensitive payment information. That is the architecture to responsibly handle the data of women whose financial security has no cushion.
One clarification: GreenPay is not Costa Rican mobile money in the way M-Pesa is Kenyan mobile money. Costa Rica’s domestic real-time payment system is SINPE Móvil. GreenPay is a card and digital payment gateway.
The inclusion problem it solved was that a seller without a bank account could receive payment from a buyer with a card, and the platform is the regulated intermediary. That is bridging women into existing commerce infrastructure, not leapfrogging banking entirely.
Last-Mile Logistics Came From the Post Office
Costa Rica has something most ICT4D markets do not: a functioning national postal service. Correos de Costa Rica operates 110 branches nationwide and runs a dedicated e-commerce logistics platform through its EMS service. We integrated Correos rather than building custom logistics.
A seller in a remote canton now ships at the same rates and on the same timeline as a commercial business in San José.
The lesson is that the absence of usable national logistics infrastructure is the silent veto on rural e-commerce in most of the world. This fact rarely surfaces in project planning until the platform launches and orders cannot be fulfilled.
Sustainability Was an Institutional Question
The most important decision on this project had nothing to do with Magento or GreenPay or Correos. It was that FIDEIMAS was the platform’s owner from before launch, not after.
The default ICT4D pattern is the opposite.
- A donor funds a pilot.
- An implementing partner builds a system.
- The system runs on a donor budget for three years.
- At the end of the cycle, there is no handover plan.
- The platform either dies or is bolted onto a ministry that did not ask for it.
In Costa Rica we did it the other way.
FIDEIMAS was the implementing counterpart from project design. The platform’s seller intake form lives on the FIDEIMAS website. The classification commission is led by FIDEIMAS staff. In March 2022, the Ministry of Economy, IMAS, INAMU, and INA signed a framework cooperation agreement to formalise the interagency commitment.
The marketplace does not collapse when UN funding ends because UN funding was never the operational base.
What to Learn From My Experience
Five things, and none of them about technology preferences:
- Publish your security operations record. UN Women and implementing partners should publish the full patching cadence, incident logs, and data minimization decisions for every Buy from Women deployment. The platform is open source. Its security posture should be too.
- Budget security at 10–15% of platform cost from year one. Anything less offloads risk onto the most vulnerable users.
- Stop calling open-source platforms cheap. They are cheaper at procurement and more expensive at sustainment. That is a fair trade only if the sustainment budget is real.
- Demand institutional ownership from project design. The Costa Rica sequence is the replicable model.
- Stop publishing case studies that hide the constraints. The architecture of Hecho por Mujeres reads coherently because we accepted that the inclusion problem dictated the technology. Most platforms that fail in this space did the reverse.
The technology choices were the easy part. The honest part was admitting which choices were not ours to make.
By Itban Omair, Manager ERP Applications, UN Women HQ New York
