When Fintech Meets Nation-Building: Chapa’s MyGERD Case Study











On September 9, 2025, Ethiopia officially inaugurated the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD)—a generational project now recognized as Africa’s largest hydroelectric facility. The ceremony capped more than a decade of construction and domestic fundraising, and it doubled as a testament to the power of citizen mobilization—much of it catalyzed online. The dam’s ultimate nameplate capacity of about 5,150 MW promises to reshape Ethiopia’s energy economy and, potentially, regional trade in power, even as it continues to animate complex Nile diplomacy.

This is also a story about infrastructure of a different kind: the rails that move trust, cards, and small acts of solidarity across borders. In 2021, when the government and partners sought a digital front door for diaspora giving, Chapa—then a young fintech—answered the call. The team was given three days to launch an official donation platform. They did, naming it MyGERD—and they learned, the hard way, that building for national moments means building for resilience.

A national project, a digital front door

The strategy behind MyGERD was deceptively simple: remove friction, increase transparency, and meet Ethiopians wherever they are—on their phones and in their browsers. MyGERD went live in late July 2021 as the official giving platform for GERD, offering campaign pages, progress bars, and a recognizable, centralized brand that embassies, community groups, and individuals could rally behind. The site still bills itself that way today.

From the start, the platform’s design decisions reflected the realities of cross-border philanthropy. Diaspora donors are global; cards are ubiquitous; and compliance is non-negotiable. While Chapa moved through Ethiopia’s licensing processes, it partnered with Flutterwave to handle international card processing [—an explicit, documented arrangement in MyGERD’s terms and privacy materials. That legal plumbing—rarely celebrated in press releases—was foundational to MyGERD’s early reliability.

Seventy-two hours to ship—and then a 24-hour blackout

The first chapter was speed: product definition, payment integration, security reviews, and launch—in 72 hours. The second chapter was pressure: a foreign cyberattack that knocked the platform offline for roughly 24 hours just after launch. In that window, donations stalled, visibility wavered, and the fragility of purpose-built civic tech was laid bare.

Recovery meant triage and triage meant people. According to Chapa’s own account, a German cybersecurity expert joined hands with the internal team to stabilize the platform and harden its defenses. The site came back stronger—technically, but also symbolically. With the lights restored, MyGERD settled into a more durable groove as a conduit for the diaspora’s giving.

What the data said

Early analytics—later distilled by Chapa’s research arm—confirm the breadth of the diaspora’s response. In the platform’s initial phase, donations arrived daily and spanned dozens of countries, with the lion’s share coming from the United States and small-ticket gifts dominating volume. While the precise totals evolved over time, the pattern was unmistakable: a long tail of modest contributions, punctuated by larger gifts, and geographic dispersion that mirrored Ethiopian communities worldwide.

Chapa’s team recalls that, cumulatively, “thousands of Ethiopians from 87 countries” gave through MyGERD, summing to millions of dollars over the platform’s life. The exact figure is less important here than the mechanism: by consolidating donor intent into one trustworthy URL, MyGERD turned sporadic grassroots initiatives into a coherent, trackable, and repeatable flow.

The partnership equation

It is tempting to romanticize heroic sprints and lone-wolf ingenuity. But payment systems are interdependent by design. The MyGERD story underlines three structural realities:

Compliance is product. Chapa navigated “a dozen layers of bureaucracy,” and while that slowed pace, it also conferred legitimacy. In parallel, documentation on the site made clear who processed cards and handled taxes. The clarity reduced donor anxiety and simplified troubleshooting.

Borrowed scale multiplies impact. By leaning on Flutterwave’s cross-border rails, the platform could accept international cards from day one, meeting donors where they already were. This wasn’t just a technical integration; it was a strategic shortcut through the thicket of global payments. Flutterwave, notably, has built additional Ethiopia-facing remittance ties, underscoring the logic of the pairing.

Security is a team sport. The post-attack rebound shows that capability can be rented in moments of crisis—if you’ve cultivated relationships and are transparent about the stakes.

GERD’s inauguration, and why it matters to the platform story

Yesterday’s ribbon-cutting was about turbines and transformers. But it was also about how Ethiopia funded a $5 billion flagship with heavy domestic participation after external lenders hesitated. Public donations weren’t the largest slice—bonds, state financing, and local banks were pivotal—but they were arguably the most unifying. Diaspora giving, channelled through platforms like MyGERD, mirrored the dam’s narrative arc: self-reliance meets modern coordination.

With commissioning complete and generation scaling, the energy story begins in earnest: grid stability, industrialization, and export potential to neighbors eyeing imports—all while diplomatic choreography with Egypt and Sudan continues. Every kilowatt shipped will be read through two lenses: development at home and interdependence on the Nile.

Lessons that outlive a campaign

From the vantage point of Chapa—and of any builder working at the intersection of civic purpose and financial plumbing—the MyGERD experience distills into three durable maxims:

Resilience is built under pressure. Systems that matter will be attacked, overloaded, and misused. The question isn’t if; it’s how quickly you recover and whether your post-mortems produce concrete, testable hardening.

The right partnerships multiply impact. In regulated spaces, distribution and compliance are shared assets. Borrowing them is not a compromise; it’s an accelerant.

Technology with purpose scales trust. Donors will forgive friction; they will not forgive opacity. A single, authoritative platform—clear about who does what and how money moves—turns ambient goodwill into measurable outcomes.

From one product to a philosophy

Internally, Chapa frames MyGERD as the company’s first public face—a crucible that forged a cultural stance: relentlessness. Relentless against bureaucracy. Relentless against opposition. Relentless against doubt. That posture now animates a broader mission—to build world-class financial infrastructure for Ethiopia and beyond, long after the last donation receipt has been emailed.

If GERD is a symbol of national capacity, MyGERD is a case study in digital capacity: the ability to coordinate at scale, to include the far-flung, and to keep faith with both donors and regulators in the messy middle. The dam will hum for decades; the playbook MyGERD refined—ship fast, secure faster, disclose everything that matters, and partner where it counts—is portable to any initiative where the public stake is high and the financing is diffuse.

What comes next

With GERD inaugurated, the civic-tech opportunity shifts from fundraising to service enablement:

Utility billing and prepay innovations that smooth consumption for households and SMEs.

Diaspora investment instruments that go beyond donations—structured vehicles with clear risk/return profiles, digitally subscribed.

Open APIs for public projects, allowing independent auditors, media, and community groups to query live progress and financials.

Resilience standards—shared threat intelligence and tabletop exercises—so that mission-critical platforms degrade gracefully under attack.

None of this is glamorous. All of it is essential. The point, as the Chapa team puts it, is to build things bigger than ourselves—not only monuments of concrete and steel, but also institutions and platforms that earn trust because they work, explain themselves, and improve every time pressure mounts.

If yesterday’s celebration belonged to the turbines, today’s reflection belongs to the rails beneath our browsers—and to the builders who keep them humming.