Fontagro

Introduction

FONTAGRO is a regional agricultural innovation fund operating across Latin America and the Caribbean. Its mission is to connect calls for proposals, projects, researchers, institutions and international organizations within an ecosystem of high technical and institutional complexity. With decades of experience and a growing portfolio of initiatives, the challenge they brought to us was one of organizational architecture.

FONTAGRO's technology operation was spread across multiple systems built at different times, each one to solve a specific need. As the organization grew, that accumulation became increasingly costly to sustain.

The problem

FONTAGRO's digital ecosystem included a call management system, a separate project management tool, manual tracking in spreadsheets running in parallel, and several institutional websites with partially duplicated or misaligned content. Each piece worked relatively independently, which created constant friction: information that had to be entered in more than one place, updates that did not propagate, processes that depended on specific people to keep from breaking.

Beyond the operational cost, the lack of integration affected the experience of external users, particularly researchers and institutions submitting proposals and interacting with the platform, and limited FONTAGRO's ability to scale without reproducing the same problem in every new initiative. Keeping institutional consistency across all touchpoints, and in the two languages in which the organization communicates with the region, was in practice impossible.

The diagnosis was clear from the start: the information existed, but it lived in systems that did not talk to each other.

The solution

We designed a central platform that acts as the core of FONTAGRO's digital ecosystem, connecting calls, projects, institutions, researchers, documentation, institutional content and impact metrics. Instead of adding one more system to the existing set, we built a common foundation on which everything that came before could work coherently.

Each component keeps its functional identity. What changed is that they all share the same technology and data foundation: a single reliable source of information, without duplication or parallel versions. On that foundation, a unified bilingual institutional website replaced the multiple environments that coexisted before, so each piece of content is published once and stays consistent in Spanish and English.

The platform supports the full cycle of the fund's operation: researchers submit their proposals and track their progress, and institutions evaluate projects within the same environment, without parallel spreadsheets or manual circuits. What used to be spread across systems and people became a process traceable end to end.

A central aspect of the project was the operational autonomy of FONTAGRO's team. We integrated a content management system that lets them update texts, documents, calls, events and library publications without depending on the development team. The same content is reused across multiple sections, which removes duplication and reduces the margin of error. The platform does not centralize decisions: it centralizes the structure so decisions can be made with agility.

The consolidation also reached the layer where all of this runs. We migrated the operation to its own infrastructure, optimized for the real load of the ecosystem, with a maintenance and security scheme the organization did not have to manage on its own. Unifying meant putting in order how information connects, and also where and under what conditions it lives.

Results

The impact of the unification materialized on several fronts.

• Processes that used to require parallel tracking and manual entry now run integrated: calls, projects, evaluations and content are part of the same flow.

• Information is entered once and reused where it belongs, in both languages, removing duplication and version errors.

• Metrics and indicators draw on a common foundation, without the need for manual consolidation.

• FONTAGRO's teams update content autonomously, without depending on the development team.

• The infrastructure was consolidated in its own environment, prepared to add new initiatives without fragmenting the system again.

From an institutional standpoint, FONTAGRO gained coherence across all its external touchpoints. From an operational standpoint, it gained the capacity to add new calls and initiatives without fragmenting the system again.

The figure that best measures the case is time. After delivery, we continue to operate and evolve the platform together with FONTAGRO's team, adding calls, event landing pages, product improvements and security reinforcements as the organization needs them. What began as an architecture unification became a living operation.

Conclusion

The FONTAGRO case illustrates something we often find in organizations that grew with accumulated technology: they have plenty of tools and lack integration between them. Solving it takes development capability and, above all, understanding how the organization works, where the real friction lies and what kind of architecture can sustain growth without breaking again.

And it takes staying. An integrated foundation does not sustain itself: it is operated, updated and evolved with the organization. That is what separates a custom platform from an adapted generic tool, and it is what we do at Minimalart.