I listened to the start of the Swahili course and it mentions that Swahili was the first one to be "commissioned", which I understand to mean that someone asked for it and paid for it specifically. It also said there was information about commissioning on the web site, but I couldn't find it. So it's a bit mysterious.

Commissioning a language course might be spare change for some government agency but I don't know whether they're allowed to spend money that way. They might be forced to put it out to tender and prefer domestic bidders or something like that.

I remember that somebody made a Language Transfer Portuguese course, but it was heavily criticised and never relaunched

Not crazy at all. Swahili is the Lingua Franca of Africa.