MIT Solve

Solution overview

Our Solution

MYEO

Tagline

Empowering Myanmar youths with the skills to acquire their next big opportunities

Pitch us on your solution

About 55 percent of Myanmar population is still under age 30, and most of them lack essential digital skills necessary for Industry 4.0 because of poor public education system. As we do not have enough human resources to share digital skills to millions of Myanmar youths, the most effective solution is by reaching out to them through online. Starting from 2017, we have been delivering Digital Literacy online courses which teach students to acquire basic digital skills such as using gmail, google cloud services and different social media sites. As most of the students are only familiar with facebook and messenger in Myanmar, we mainly use chatbot as a main platform for our online course services. With the help of advanced chatbots which can properly facilitate students along their learning process, we can change the lives of underprivileged youths by providing better career opportunities and essential skills.

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What is the problem you are solving?

There has been a wave of digital transformation in Myanmar after the country emerged from decades of isolation imposed by its military dictatorship in 2011. By 2017, about 90 percent of the country’s 54 million people had access to a phone with internet service. But the majority of internet users only know how to use Facebook, and lack essential digital skills necessary for Industry 4.0 because of poor public education system. Some do not even know how to open a Gmail account and use basic Google services for business operations. About 55 percent of Myanmar population are still under age 30, and it is our goal to provide them with digital skills so that they can thrive in constantly changing modern workforce. However, there is a big challenge to reach out to different parts of Myanmar to educate millions of youths as we would need a lot of human resources. It is also hard to rely on school teachers as they themselves lack digital skills, even worse than students who at least know how to use social media properly. It would take quite a long time to facilitate teachers first who can then share their knowledge to their students.

Who are you serving?

MYEO is a human capital accelerator, empowering youths with the skills and opportunities for their future career development, both online and offline. There are currently 89000 followers on our Facebook Page; 58% female, the majority age range is 18 to 34, and people from all 14 states of Myanmar including remote and conflict areas). Our page daily shares scholarship, internship, volunteering and training information eligible for Myanmar youths. Starting from 2017, we have been providing online “Workplace digital skills” course with an affordable price and need based financial aid with the aim of educating Myanmar youths with essential digital skills for their future career development. 800 students (mostly university students from all parts of Myanmar) have finished our online courses. We also have Campus Chapter Program (CCP) which is a student-led initiative operating program through training and onboarding youth student leaders on campuses across Myanmar, trained by the MYEO founding team to host monthly professional skill development workshops (CV writing, critical thinking, interviews) in their respective universities. 200 MYEO Campus Chapter Directors have shared these skills back to their student peer groups in respective universities which, in total, account to around 5000 students.

What is your solution?

As we do not have enough human resources to share digital skills to millions of Myanmar youths, the most effective solution is by reaching out to them through online. Starting from 2017, we have been delivering Digital Literacy online courses which teach students to acquire basic digital skills such as using gmail, google cloud services and different social media sites. As most of the students are only familiar with facebook and messenger in Myanmar, we mainly use them as main platforms for our online course services. We use messenger chatbots from Chatfuel to connect with students for information, registration and payment processes. The chatbot first teaches the students on how to open gmail account and then direct them to Google Classroom, which is the main platform for offering course materials and submitting assignments. We also create facebook and messenger groups for students to discuss and contact with admins if necessary. We currently have basic and intermediate courses for digital literacy and 800 students have successfully completed our online courses. Although the chatbot could automate registration and payment processes, human admins still have to help with students in messenger groups when they ask questions regarding to their course materials. Although it is currently manageable, we would need hundreds or thousands of admins/helpers when we reach our target limit students of 1 million. So, we are planning to use more advanced chatbot services which can provide machine learning training to our bots in order to connect with students more effectively. The bot needs to be trained with both Burmese and English so that they can have an interactive conversation with students effectively.We are still in prototype 1 chatbot, which can process some basic tasks, and now developing a chatbot to automatically send reminders, updates and deadlines to students.

Select only the most relevant.

Create or advance equitable and inclusive economic growth
Ensure all citizens can overcome barriers to civic participation and inclusion

Where is your solution team headquartered?

Yangon, Myanmar (Burma)

Our solution's stage of development:

Pilot