Five Governance Challenges We Found When Scaling a Labor Platform Across 43 Chambers of Commerce

When we arrived in Tegucigalpa in April 2024, the technology was already working. A single chamber of commerce — CCIT, the Cámara de Comercio e Industrias de Tegucigalpa — had built a labor intermediation platform called Promuévete that had processed over 3,400 job vacancies, sent 27,000 CVs to employers, and placed nearly 300 people in jobs in a single year. Client satisfaction was 92%.

The question was not whether the technology worked. The question was whether it could work across 43 independent chambers, spanning 17 departments, serving 20,000 member enterprises — and who would own, operate, and pay for it.

Over twelve consulting days (seven remote, five on-site), funded through Germany’s BMZ via sequa and bbw, we assessed the platform, ran workshops with chamber staff and the development team, and delivered a set of strategic recommendations. What we found confirmed a pattern we see across international development projects involving technology: the hardest problems are never about code.

Here are the five governance challenges we identified and what we recommended.

1. Too Many Platforms, No Unified Strategy

We counted at least five separate digital platforms in the chamber ecosystem: Promuévete (job matching, Tegucigalpa only), Emplea Más (intended national equivalent), PVA (a Moodle-based virtual learning platform), Formaliza tu Negocio (a business formalization tool), and Digital Hub 504 (a digitalization hub for SMEs). Each had been launched by a different stakeholder for a different purpose, but there was no overarching digital strategy connecting them.

Worse, some individual chambers outside Tegucigalpa had begun building their own local platforms — a fragmentation risk that, if left unchecked, would result in 43 separate, incompatible systems rather than one national infrastructure.

Our recommendation: Consolidate. Running two platforms for the same purpose — one for the capital and one for the rest of the country — would be a costly mistake. We recommended a single national platform under FEDECAMARA’s governance, with CCIT’s proven Promuévete as the technical foundation and Emplea Más as the unified brand. The other platforms (PVA, Formaliza, Hub 504) should be evaluated for integration rather than run as parallel initiatives.

2. The Transfer Gap: Organizational Excellence Cannot Be Copied Overnight

CCIT had done the hard work. Over years, the Tegucigalpa chamber had built genuine organizational excellence — user-centric platform design, professional HR service processes, a team of six full-time staff operating Promuévete daily, and the strategic clarity to turn a digital platform into a revenue-generating service. The 92% client satisfaction rate was not an accident; it reflected years of institutional learning.

The assumption behind the national rollout was that this excellence could be transferred to FEDECAMARA and then replicated across 42 additional chambers. But FEDECAMARA was primarily a project organization — a small team of roughly 15 people focused on managing grant-funded initiatives. It had neither the operational experience, the digitalization expertise, the change management capability, nor the software rollout experience that CCIT had built over years of hands-on platform operation.

You cannot transfer a decade of organizational transformation through a project plan. FEDECAMARA would need to undergo its own version of the journey CCIT had already completed — and the project timeline did not account for this.

Our recommendation: Be honest about the gap. Rather than pretending FEDECAMARA could immediately assume full operational responsibility, we recommended a phased approach where CCIT — the organization that had actually built the operational excellence — takes the lead on transformation, change management, and rollout to other chambers. FEDECAMARA’s role should focus on what a federation is uniquely positioned to do: product strategy, standards, and coordination across chambers. Trying to make FEDECAMARA simultaneously learn to operate a digital platform and roll it out to 42 other organizations was setting it up to fail at both.

3. The Governance Gap: Who Owns What?

The most politically sensitive challenge was ownership. CCIT had built Promuévete and operated it successfully. FEDECAMARA was supposed to operate the national version, Emplea Más. GrupoAT, a Honduran software company, had built the code. But the division of responsibility between these three actors was unclear, creating tension on fundamental questions: who decides what features to build next? Who has access to the production database? Who is responsible when something breaks?

This matters because platform governance determines whether the system survives beyond the project funding cycle. If no one clearly owns product direction, maintenance, and operations, the platform becomes an orphan the moment the grant ends.

Our recommendation: We proposed a governance split across three scenarios. The option we recommended assigned distinct responsibilities to each actor:

• FEDECAMARA takes ownership of product management — the strategic “what and why” of the platform’s direction, aligned with the federation’s national mandate
• CCIT takes responsibility for transformation, change management, and rollout to other chambers — leveraging its operational experience as the originating chamber
• Operations and ongoing development are shared, with clear service-level agreements between FEDECAMARA, CCIT, and GrupoAT

The key organizational gap this exposed: neither FEDECAMARA nor CCIT had a product manager. Both had project managers (focused on executing time-bound deliverables), but no one responsible for the long-term strategic direction of the platform as a product. We recommended creating this role at the federation level.

4. Project Funding Without Product Thinking

CCIT had demonstrated that a labor intermediation platform could generate real value — placing people in jobs, serving employers, creating a service model that chambers could charge for. The business logic existed. But the way the national rollout was structured reflected project thinking, not product thinking.

In project mode, everything runs on grant timelines: when the project ends, staff contracts end, development stops, and maintenance becomes an open question. The maintenance contract between FEDECAMARA and the software vendor covered only six months after acceptance. There were no market analyses or economic projections for individual digital products. Requirements were insufficiently documented, which in turn weakened acceptance testing and quality assurance.

This is a structural risk in development cooperation technology: project-based funding builds solutions, but project-based thinking does not sustain them. Each digital platform needs to be treated as its own venture — with a clear value proposition, a defined user base, a revenue model, and an operational team that outlasts the grant cycle.

Our recommendation: Treat each digital platform as a product, not a project deliverable. We proposed that every platform in the chamber ecosystem — Emplea Más, Formaliza tu Negocio, PVA — have its own product brief defining how it creates and captures value. For labor intermediation specifically, the revenue opportunity is significant: job matching, HR process outsourcing, candidate evaluation, and training delivery are services that enterprises will pay for. Companies like LinkedIn and Indeed generate billions in revenue from precisely these services. The Honduran chamber network, with its institutional legitimacy and 20,000 member enterprises, is uniquely positioned to offer these services at the national level — but only if it moves beyond project-based implementation toward sustainable product management.

5. Capacity Variance Across 43 Chambers

CCIT in Tegucigalpa had the staff, the infrastructure, and the institutional experience to run a sophisticated digital platform. But many of the other 42 chambers — particularly in rural departments — had limited technical capacity, unreliable internet connectivity, and staff who had never managed a digital system. The variation was enormous: from chambers with dedicated IT teams to chambers where the director handled everything personally.

Any national rollout strategy that assumed uniform capacity would fail. The platform needed to work for the most advanced chamber and the least resourced one simultaneously.

Our recommendation: Design for the least connected user — both on the platform side and the institutional side. On the platform: ensure manual registration pathways, WhatsApp notifications, and mobile-optimized interfaces so that neither candidates nor chamber staff depend on reliable desktop internet access. On the institutional side: create tiered onboarding paths for chambers, starting with the simplest services (candidate registration, vacancy posting) before adding advanced features (recruitment process management, psychometric evaluations). Pair experienced chambers with newer ones through a mentorship model rather than expecting all 43 to reach the same maturity level simultaneously.

The Underlying Pattern

These five challenges share a common root: the project had succeeded in building a proven platform at one chamber, but the organizational infrastructure needed to scale it nationally was not yet in place. Platform governance, organizational development, product management, sustainable funding models, and realistic capacity-building timelines are not optional extras — they are the foundation that determines whether a locally successful innovation becomes a lasting national institution or remains a well-intentioned prototype that cannot survive beyond the funding cycle.

This is not unique to Honduras. We have seen the same pattern in Ethiopia, in Germany, and across every international development technology project we have touched. The technology is always the easy part. The hard part is getting organizations aligned, building local ownership, and designing systems that survive beyond the funding cycle.

For FEDECAMARA and the Honduran chamber network, the path forward requires shifting from project-based thinking — “we are implementing a platform” — to product-based thinking: “we are operating a national labor market infrastructure that must serve its users, generate revenue, and improve continuously.”

The potential is real. A national system connecting 20,000 enterprises with job seekers across all 17 departments, backed by the institutional legitimacy of the chamber network, could transform how Honduras matches talent to opportunity. The technology exists. The governance to sustain it is the work that remains.

This project was conducted as part of the BBW Honduras program, funded by Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and implemented through sequa gGmbH and bbw. ZeroHunger.ai provided IT expert consulting for digital platform development and capacity building. Read the full project description for details on our engagement scope and technical approach.