The AgriTech Club – Village Link – Focused On Enabling And Uplifting Smallholder Farmers Using Digital Technology

Village Link is the leading Agricultural technology startup in Myanmar, supporting the rural and agricultural community of Myanmar to improve their agricultural planning and practices via mobile technology. The firm leverages the recently accomplished high mobile penetration in the country to help smallholders gain access to more information, better advice, and market opportunities.

Village Link -About The Company

Founded in 2017 and based out of Yangon, Village link is Myanmar’s leading AgriTech platform that provides farming assistance to smallholders and users. They consolidate advanced satellite technology, expert knowledge on meteorology and advice, and networking from business partners to deliver accurate farming advisory as well as market information and access to users. The company has innovated to take advantage of the increasing number of mobile users in Myanmar to reach more farmers effectively.

The Innovations

The firm has many innovative aspects on its platform that makes it an efficient and reliable virtual farming partner. This includes aids that will assist them with accurate data, advisory, and access to opportunities. The company advertises four main tools on their platform, all of which utilizes technological data and connectivity to assist users.

Village Link has a Digital Farm Advisory, which includes customized farm advisory services to agribusinesses and smallholders. They also utilize remote sensing data accessed from farming-related satellites to provide key insights to their business users. These insights may include terrain, weather data and other natural variables that help them make better agricultural decisions. They also help agribusinesses and enterprise users gain access to a larger audience, via partnerships, ads and e-commerce opportunities. The platform empowers these users in boosting their digital outreach, and promote their content and products of agribusinesses and social enterprises to the user base.

The Platform

Village Link has two key platforms, their farming app and their satellite services. Htwet Toe, their mobile app is the leading Farming App in Myanmar. It is easy to use and connects farmers to professionals, farming experts, information sources, products and other support structures to assist farmers in their work.

They also have their farming intelligence software, the Village Link Satellite Services. It helps in crop monitoring regarding automated classification, acerage measurements, growth stage monitoring, health assessment and other monitoring mechanisms for better crop growth. It also helps in monitoring farmland for terrain features, flood maps and other forms of risk assessment regarding the terrain. The same platform helps in weather monitoring, customised advisory services, weather prediction and countermeasures using satellite data.

Conclusion

The platform has received much praise and accolades for its efforts to boost the agro-based economy of Myanmar. Their list of achievements includes winning the Asia AgriTech Challenge 2020, Microsoft’s Emerge-X for Myanmar, Diamond award at the ASEAN-Korea Startup Week 2020, and many more. These achievements were in recognition of their innovation and how much their disruptive startup can boost the sector in their home market. 

The company is propelling agriculture in Myanmar to the modern era. By combining the increasing mobile penetration with expert knowledge, access to markets and technological data and innovation, they have eased the work of many farmers, boosting the sector and the economy in the process.