Scaling National Crowdfunding Platforms on AWS: Chapa Case Study

About Chapa

Chapa Financial Technologies is an Ethiopian fintech company that provides payment gateway services to merchants and entrepreneurs. They build payment APIs, online checkout tools, and localized financial solutions for customers, institutions, and partners across Ethiopia.

The Challenge

In early 2021, the Ethiopian government asked Chapa to build two national crowdfunding platforms on a three-month deadline:

• MyGerd.com — a diaspora fundraising platform for the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam
• EyezonEthiopia.com — a donation platform to assist internally displaced families

Chapa was already building their core payment product. They had a small engineering team, limited AWS experience, and no time to learn infrastructure management on the job. They needed a partner who had done this before.

"At the beginning of the project, I had to dive into AWS to write the specs and get what we needed," says Israel Goytom, Co-founder and CTO of Chapa. "We did not have enough human resources, so I needed to spend as little time as possible managing infrastructure."

What We Built

CC Tech Digital worked alongside Chapa's team to architect and deploy both platforms on AWS. The priority was speed, reliability, and security — in that order.

Compute & Scaling

AWS Elastic Beanstalk handled application deployment and auto-scaling. As traffic surged during fundraising campaigns, the platform scaled automatically without manual intervention.

Database

Amazon RDS provided a managed relational database, removing the operational burden of backups, patching, and failover from Chapa's small team.

Global Performance

Amazon CloudFront served as the CDN, optimizing load times for the diaspora user base accessing the platforms from around the world.

Security

Security was non-negotiable for a financial platform handling real money:

• AWS WAF — Web application firewall protecting against common exploits
• AWS GuardDuty — Continuous threat detection and monitoring
• AWS KMS — Encryption at rest for all sensitive data
• SSL/TLS — Encryption in transit for all connections
• CloudWatch & CloudTrail — Performance monitoring and audit logging

Managed Services Strategy

CC Tech Digital pushed for managed services wherever possible — Elastic Beanstalk, RDS, S3, CloudFront — so Chapa's engineers could focus on product development instead of infrastructure operations.

Results

Both platforms launched on schedule and performed under real load:

• $6.4M+ raised across both platforms
• Zero downtime during peak fundraising periods
• 5,000 concurrent users on a single platform at peak
• Global reach via CloudFront CDN for diaspora donors

"Working with the CC Tech team has been wonderful," says Israel. "They have AWS-certified engineers who have built complex systems in AWS. They identified our gap areas ahead of time and provided advice and guidance on how to navigate those. It's always good to have support from someone who has done this before."

What Happened Next

After the success of both crowdfunding platforms, Chapa went on to partner with Ethiopia's Ministry of Health and Ministry of Education as their preferred fundraising technology provider — a direct result of the reliability and trust the platforms established.