Author: Su Thin Zar Hlaing
Photo: Courtesy of Su Thin Zar Hlaing
My relationship with farming began in my childhood, watching my parents cultivate horticultural crops in southern Shan State, Myanmar. I grew up knowing the scent of soil and the unpredictable rhythm of agriculture. Years later, as I built a corporate career in marketing and telecommunications, a single question began to drive my choices: Why do good solutions fail to reach the front-line communities who need them most?
When I transitioned to working directly with smallholder farmers at an agricultural enterprise, the answer became clear. I realized a harsh truth about rural families across South-East Asia: women are the absolute backbone of agricultural labour, yet they remain an invisible workforce. Women handle the heaviest field tasks and manage household survival during crises.
Yet deep-seated cultural norms keep them in the shadows. They rarely receive formal agricultural advisory support, and they hesitate to attend public trainings or claim their worth. This makes information access a critical gender equality issue. When climate change hits, bringing erratic rainfall, sudden pests or severe flooding, women farmers face the greatest risk simply because they have never been included in the systems meant to protect them.
I refuse to accept a reality where technology leaves women behind. This determination drove me to pivot from the corporate world to innovate at the intersection of climate resilience, gender equity and digital agriculture. Blending my background in commercial brand management, NGO development programmes, and agricultural technology, I founded AgriMway. This digital agricultural extension platform is designed specifically for smallholder farmers in Myanmar, with women and youth as primary users.
To scale this wisdom, I developed Agri-EmPower under the UN Women EmPower Academy. Agri-EmPower acts as an AI-powered climate advisory layer built right on top of our digital community. Through this initiative, my team and I built a localized AI Advisory framework, using a method called retrieval-augmented generation that translates complex, global climate data and agricultural science into immediate, practical, locally relevant guidance for women rice farmers in Myanmar and Bangladesh.
Over eight years of fieldwork have taught me that digital tools alone do not change behaviour. Real impact happens when you design systems for how people actually live, combining technology with trusted community partners. I proved this model as the lead facilitator for a Waste-to-Wealth sustainable agriculture training workshop in eastern Thailand through the U.S. Department of State’s Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative (YSEALI) Reciprocal Exchange Project. By sitting down with Thai smallholder farmers, demonstrating biodecomposer methods to replace crop residue burning, and tracking concrete financial savings (~2,000 baht per rai), we demystified agricultural technology. Our post-training evaluation showed a 75.7 per cent aggregate increase in the farmers' understanding of soil biology, and 100 per cent of the participants committed to adopting these sustainable practices.
This human-centred approach is the engine behind AgriMway. We bootstrapped a community that now reaches over 15,000 followers, resolving 20 to 40 urgent crop and pest crises monthly. We are proving that when delivery is rooted in trust, communities adapt rapidly.
True youth leadership is about building bridges and systems change. My journey through the UN Women 30 for 2030 network, the UN Women EmPower Academy, the Harpswell ASEAN Women’s Leadership Summit, and the YSEALI Professional Fellows Program has solidified my belief that young leaders must move beyond treating AI and digital technologies as mere corporate tools. We must use them as infrastructure to translate global science into localized, front-line action.
I urge international institutions and governments to move past symbolic celebrations of youth and women in agriculture. We need genuine, systemic financial investment in digital agricultural extensions built intentionally for women.
To my fellow young change-makers: do not wait for permission to innovate. Use your digital literacy to break the silences in your communities, dismantle restrictive norms, and build the inclusive, climate-resilient future our region so urgently needs.
