Digital Agricultural Services

Many smallholders in Myanmar have trouble makings ends meet due to lack of access to knowledge, market and finance. We propose an app that connects farmers to agricultural professionals, holistic farming services, input products, and marketplace which will help them increase their farm productivity and access to market. Our solution is already changing hundred of thousands of lives in Myanmar by raising their knowledge, improving their climate resiliency, creating stronger linkages with the market and ultimately increasing their income. With the right instruments, we believe our solution can be scaled globally to help millions of farmers while solving the food shortage problem across the world.

Agriculture contributes 25% of Myanmar's GDP and close to 35 million people are dependent on the sector for their livelihoods. Despite it being the key sector, the farming productivity is low and our average paddy yield is less than half of our neighboring country, Thailand's. The productivity issue is largely due to lack of knowledge about farming methods, lack of access to farming technology, lack of actionable guidance, and lack of access to finance. As Myanmar smallholders can't produce high quality crops at high yields, their net income at the end of the season is low, leading them to borrow money from informal lenders who charge high interest rates. This, in turn entrenches, them deeper into the poverty cycle. Moreover, the productivity problems are exacerbated by changing weather patterns due to Climate Change; exposing smallholders to climate-related risks. On the bright side, smartphone and mobile subscription penetration is ubiquitous in Myanmar; greater than 80% for the formal and more than 95% for the latter. This gives us a unique opportunity to disseminate farming knowledge and actionable information to smallholders at speed, scale and low cost. Moreover, the platform will also connect them to other farming services and market place.

Our solution, "Htwet Toe", is a mobile application that connects farmers to knowledge, personalized farm advisories, input products, farming services, online marketplace and digital financial products. It is a one-stop service for farmers where they can get anything they need for their farming requirements.  Farmers can ask any questions about their farms or farming methods and we have a team of agronomists employed to recommend the best solution that will help them overcome their challenges. The app is a mobile app developed for both Android and iOS devices. The app can be easily downloaded from the Playstore and from the Apple store (coming soon). 

The target population of our app are smallholders who are often overlooked and underserved by the government agencies. They often fall prey to the loosely regulated private entities and informal credit schemes. Moreover, they are most vulnerable to the effects of the climate change. They are underserved for a variety of reasons such as: 1. lack of infrastructure; 2. lack of funding at relevant government agencies; 3. lack of proper frameworks and policy to support the growth of farming businesses; and 4. alternative priorities. Farmers in Myanmar are not receiving the attention, help and financing they need to sustain through the farming season and the majority of the income they receive from harvest are mostly used to pay off the debts. They rarely get farm visits from government extension workers but do receive extension services from private agribusinesses which usually have an agenda of pushing for products/solutions that are not needed. We try to understand their needs by working closely with them through multiple channels: 1. call center; 2. field visits; 3. social media and; 4. our own app. We run surveys, interviews and study groups with them on a monthly basis to continuously keep track of their requirements and demands which we incorporate back into our business model and product iteration. To address their needs, we employed a dedicated team of agronomists that monitors their questions in our platform and responds to them with the most appropriate solution that has been personalized for the farmer based on his needs, wants and capacity. In other words, all our advisory services are personalized for each farmer. For farmers in Myanmar, just receiving the right information at the right time can help them significantly improve their farming efficiencies and boost their farming productivity. Our solution not only offers the information they need on demand, but also other products and services such as e-commerce and marketplace which will help them overcome their challenges.

First, our app not only promotes digital literacy amongst rural communities, which are overlooked by both private and public sectors when developing digital solutions, but also incentivizes them to participate in the wider digital economy by creating linkage with online marketplace to buy and sell.  Next, by helping create private digital identities in our platform for smallholders, smallholders can share the data about their crops, farming patterns and e-commerce transactions with financial institutions, which can then use the data for credit scoring. Therefore, the solution is aligned with two dimensions of promoting digital literacy and providing financial tools to thrive.

Our app "Htwet Toe" has already garnered more than half a million users across Myanmar, addressed more than 72,000 questions from farmers and generated more than 25 million screen views. Since launched in 2018, the service has cumulatively generated close to USD 700,000 in revenue from existing services. 

Our solution is the first ever attempt to provide satellite-based farm advisory services to underserved smallholders. Moreover, it brings holistic farming services to the farmers' fingertips where every needs of a farmer is easily accessible on demand. The solution also enables the farmer to make better and faster farming decisions, and provide easier access to the market to buy and sell. Moreover, it also enables other value-chain participants such as agri-retailers, machinery rentals, and financial institutions to engage better with their customers in our platform, which in turn helps improve the value chain efficiency across the sector. In short, our solution has the potential to disrupt the existing farming business processes and introduce a new farming ecosystem in Myanmar that is more productive, resilient, and sustainable. 

Our solution currently serves about 750,000 users in our platform. We hope to grow that number to 900,000 users in the next year and 3 million in the next 5 years. 

The measurable indications we will be using to measure our progress will be: 

1. Number of users (to measure the reach of our program on rural communities). This metric is linked to "Reduced Inequality"
2. Crop yield (or income) (to measure the increase in crop yield (income) after using our solution). This metric is linked to "Zero Poverty"
3. Farmer's profitability. (to determine if the cost per kg of food produced is reduced). This metric is linked to "Zero Poverty" and "Responsible consumption and production)
4. Number of reach for contextualized weather advisory services. This metric is linked to "Climate Action"
5. Number of loans distributed (to determine how many farmers managed to secure loans digitally). This metric is linked to "Zero Poverty"

12 full-time staff

2 contractors

Our team have worked with development partners, government, donor agencies in series of customized software development projects, Geodata and weather-data based projects and satellite image driven project, the solutions from which are by a wide range of clients that includes farmers, retailers, private sector, nonprofits and donor agencies. Our expert pool includes software developers, project managers, researcher and development practitioners who worked on the intersection of ICT, climate change, agriculture, and capacity building and has a very diverse working experience in the field of agriculture

Our core team which is providing farming advisory services and creating digital contents for farmers comprises agronomists with Bachelor Degree in Agriculture Science. Moreover, all of them came from farming families which means they understand all the challenges and needs of a typical smallholder in Myanmar. When we design our product and services for farmers, we draw inspirations from both the personal and professional experience of this team to make sure that our solutions are relevant for the target audience. 

Our entire tech team is composed of developers who came from digital financial service companies which provide digital financial tools for rural and unbanked customers. The concept of making the mobile app intuitive and simple for farmers is no stranger to them.

Lastly, our project management teams consists of a seasoned agriculture scientist who has worked on rural development projects in many developing countries and the CEO who was the former Chief Digital Officer of the largest agriculture company in Myanmar.

At Village Link, we believe having a diverse and inclusive workforce brings diverse viewpoints and perspectives to the company and it is essential for creating great products and new ways to cater to the customers. This is especially true for a company that aims to serve smallholders in Myanmar as there is such a wide range of diverse communities living across the country, and each community has different needs. More than 60% of our team are women, 3 out of 4 managerial positions are taken by women, each of us came from different States/Regions, and each of us are of different ethnic backgrounds. We are committed to maintain the current ratio of gender and for future roles, we plan to recruit more people of ethnic minorities. 

We are applying for Solve because we believe there is vast amount of knowledge to be gained by exchanging ideas with Solve's community of social impact leaders. We want to exchange ideas with other peers in the network and learn great deals about sustainable business models that create lasting impacts for vulnerable groups in our country. 

Our current struggle lies in creating a sustainable business model based on our existing userbase. Despite having large traction and user-base, we are struggling to monetize it and we hope Solve can shed light on how we can generate sustainable revenue going forward.

We want to partner with other Solve members and MIT faculty.