A unified, publicly legible view of how all 82 of Costa Rica’s municipalities actually perform — pulled from official sources, structured for the people who decide.
Costa Rica has 82 municipalities, each reporting operational indicators — budget execution, service delivery, population metrics — to a patchwork of national systems. The numbers existed, but no one place let you compare one canton to another, or a canton to itself last year. National policymakers, municipal managers, and the press were each rebuilding the same spreadsheet from scratch.
Municipal performance is the layer of the state citizens touch most and see least. Without a common, current, public view, accountability runs on anecdote. The hard part was not a dashboard — it was a trustworthy ingestion layer that pulls from official sources, validates what it pulls, and stays current as those sources publish.
Model the municipality as the unit of analysis, define a stable indicator schema, build a validated ETL from official sources into that model, and surface it as a dashboard structured for two audiences at once: a national view that ranks and compares, and a single-municipality view a local manager can act on.
Official sources are extracted, reconciled to canonical municipality IDs, and checked against validation rules before anything reaches the dashboard. The observatory is only as trustworthy as the layer underneath it.
The same indicator model drives a national ranking-and-comparison view and a focused single-municipality view, so a minister and a local manager read the same source of truth.
The pipeline is designed to absorb new official releases without a manual rebuild — an observatory, not a snapshot.
Stack
82
Municipalities covered
1
Unified public view
Active
Reference infrastructure, 2025
2
Audiences, one model
The Observatorio Municipal CR is active and serves as reference infrastructure for monitoring local-government performance across all 82 municipalities. It replaces ad-hoc spreadsheets with a maintained, public source of truth — the kind of civic infrastructure that is invisible when it works and indispensable once it exists.
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