How Many Dreams Fit Inside a Train Car? The Story of Rede Mulheres do Maranhão
Every day, Maria boards the train to sell babassu coconut-based products—crafted by the hands of her companions. It’s exhausting work: hours on her feet, juggling handwritten orders and scattered payments. She wishes she could manage it all with her phone, but the glare of the unfamiliar screen confuses her, filled with letters she doesn’t recognize. Amid the scent of babassu oil and the metallic hum of the tracks, she dreams of a tool she can touch, understand, and truly call her own.
But the reality is unrelenting. In a country bound by an extractive political economy, over 60% of Solidarity Economy Enterprises (SEEs) earn less than 5,000 reais ($855 USD) per month, with no funds for tech investment. How can a small cooperative begin to overcome Big Tech dependency?
One such cooperative, born out of this tension between extraction and resistance, is the Rede Mulheres do Maranhão. Located at the epicenter of the brutal process of mineral extraction and land exploitation in Brazil’s Northeast, the Rede Mulheres do Maranhão (Maranhão Women’s Network) emerged from a typical Brazilian contradiction: the ongoing struggle of the majority to escape the abyss of poverty and inequality—conditions forged by the same forces that enrich a minority. From the artery of international capital’s profit, a vein of resistance: this is how a group of women dared to dream—and took on the power of the big tech platforms in their search for answers to their most fundamental needs.
Rede Mulheres do Maranhão: Overcoming Technological Dependence
The Rede Mulheres do Maranhão (RMM) – Women’s Network of Maranhão – is a cooperative made up of 16 solidarity enterprises, bringing together more than 200 members. Their activities include the production of sweets and honey, processing and cracking of babaçu nuts and cashew nuts, baking, vegetable and greens cultivation, and clothing manufacturing. Many of these enterprises are based in communities located along the Estrada de Ferro Carajás (Carajás Railway), one of the largest freight and passenger railways currently operating in Brazil. It spans over 892 kilometers and transports more than 120 million tons of cargo—mostly minerals—and 350,000 passengers annually.
Since its creation in 1982, as a joint venture between Vale—a Brazilian multinational and one of the largest mining companies in the world—and the United States Steel Corporation to extract mineral reserves from the Carajás Mountains, the railway’s construction has been marked by numerous human rights violations: forced displacement of communities from their ancestral territories, destruction of several environmentally protected areas, run-over incidents, deaths, and cases of sexual violence.
The very viability of the Rede Mulheres do Maranhão’s businesses is, paradoxically, tied to the existence of the railway that has long symbolized exploitation in the region. After the train cars were renovated in 2014—with windows sealed shut—the women were compelled to formalize as a cooperative to gain authorization to continue selling their products onboard. This necessity gave rise to a new challenge: how to efficiently manage the sale of dozens of products inside a moving train that spans thousands of kilometers across the country?
MTST Technology Sector: Developing Grassroots and Sovereign Technology
With an extensive background in the development of grassroots technologies, the MTST Technology Sector (NT-MTST) was approached to take on the challenge. The problem presented by RMM was simple yet sophisticated: to develop a secure, resilient, reliable, and accessible application that would allow cooperative vendors to manage inventory inflows and outflows; register and authenticate users in the system; generate automated financial reports; and integrate and synchronize the data generated by the app with other tools and software already used by the cooperative.
Bruno Drugowick, an experienced software engineer and one of the project’s leads, explained that one of the main technical challenges of the app was ensuring that it could function without an internet connection, since there are no stable connection points along the train route. “The strategy we used was based on the offline-first principle, which ensures that the app’s functionalities work offline, allowing the data to be synchronized with a cloud server once an internet connection becomes available”, he explains.
The project’s developers also had to navigate other creative constraints typical of such a specific context: the entire app interface had to be designed to be extremely simple and intuitive to use, as many of the women users are illiterate.
In addition to the technical complexity involved in creating all the features required by RMM, the developers also had to deal with the challenges of managing volunteer labor. Over the course of the year and a half it took to complete the full development cycle of the app, at least 10 people contributed to the project, balancing their time between building the product and their personal and professional responsibilities. According to the developers’ estimates, building an app with all the functionalities demanded by RMM would cost around R$150,000 ($24,750 USD) — a level of investment unthinkable for solidarity economy enterprises if they had to hire a conventional software development company.
However, none of these challenges discouraged Bruno. Having been involved in the app’s development since its inception, he shares that his motivation to stay committed to the project came from a deep need to “feel that my technical knowledge and my work can have a positive impact on real people.”
Even with a tool tailor-made to meet their needs, it cannot be said that the technological dependency faced by Women’s Network of Maranhão has been fully overcome. Even after the project was delivered, RMM still requires tech professionals to maintain the server where the software is hosted, as there are currently no members within the cooperative who possess this knowledge. Additionally, the app developed by NT-MTST had to integrate with Google Sheets, since this is the software the RMM members are already familiar with, and migrating to another system would be more complex. Even among NT-MTST volunteers, this dependency was also felt, as many of the tools necessary for app development are created or sponsored by Big Tech companies.
A Dream You Dream Together Becomes Reality
The MTST Technology Nucleus is not alone in the struggle to develop popular digital technologies in Brazil. Another key player is Eita, a software development cooperative founded in 2011 based on the experiences surrounding the creation of cirandas.net, the first marketplace for products made by solidarity economy enterprises in Brazil. Since then, the cooperative has developed several projects and possesses a vast body of knowledge and technologies built upon Free Software solutions. “Our technologies follow the principles of Popular Education at every stage of development,” says Camilla de Godoi, a designer and member of Eita.
Important public institutions have also made efforts to promote the connection between the digital world and the solidarity economy. The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and the DigiLabour Laboratory have published the book Digital Solidarity Economy, which aims to present concrete initiatives for building a future free from the overwhelming dominance of multinational tech corporations. Additionally, the strengthening of the National Program to Support Cooperative Incubators (Proninc) aims to contribute to the “training and qualification of professors and researchers in topics related to the digital economy and platform cooperativism,” as stated by Adriana Brandão, a social policy analyst at the Ministry of Labor and Employment (MTE). Kaio Rosa, a researcher at Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), highlights that the incubators have a consistent track record of supporting solidarity enterprises “even during periods when public policy on the subject was abandoned, such as under the Temer and Bolsonaro administrations,” two former Brazilian presidents aligned with right-wing conservatism.
Drawing on over 40 years of solidarity economy tradition, cooperatives across Brazil are rejecting off-the-shelf solutions and building sovereign digital tools. It’s not easy. But from alleyways to favelas—and even inside train cars—people are dreaming together. And those dreams are becoming reality. Steering away from ready-made solutions, social movements, universities, incubators, and governments are discovering that the path to developing sovereign technologies in a dependent country is long and arduous — but possible. Little by little, people awaken from the conveniences that bind more than they liberate, begin to dream. From North to South, in alleys and street corners, in the heart of the cities, in the countryside, in the favelas, and even inside the wagons of a train — dreams are being dreamed together.
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