Proximity Designs
Proximity Designs has been serving Myanmar’s smallholder farmers for the past 20 years. Now an award-winning non-profit, it develops and sells locally made innovative agriculture technologies and services to help small farmers increase their productivity and incomes. Proximity Designs aims to help 500,000 more farming families – almost 2.5 million women, men and children – to lift themselves out of poverty by 2027.
proximitydesigns.org | Partner since 2018
Challenge
Myanmar is an agriculture-based, low-income country where the global challenges of food production, poverty, inequality, climate change and conflict all impact millions of small farms. Investing in Myanmar’s five million small farm families helps reduce the threats of food insecurity, widespread migration and entrenched poverty.
Response
Proximity Designs creates, produces and sells affordable, quality agricultural products and services to address the core challenges faced by many smallholder farmers in Myanmar: water management, soil health and crop nutrition, and pest and disease prevention.
Its field agents promote and offer advice on no-burn rice-farming, a regenerative practice that transitions farmers away from crop burning to prepare their fields.
The organisation has also developed and commercialises durable micro-irrigation systems and low-cost, eco-friendly biofertilisers and biofungicides for use as effective alternatives to costly chemicals. Proximity Designs' services to farmers include pest and disease diagnostics as well as an AI-powered chatbot called PoChat that helps farmers to adopt a set of profitable, climate-resilient practices tailored to their needs.
The organisation currently reaches over 150,000 farm customers per year.
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