Koe Koe Tech

Koe Koe Tech is Myanmar’s preeminent IT social enterprise, specializing in what ICTworks calls “local entrepreneurship”. Founded in 2013 by two cousins, Dr. Yar Zar Minn Htoo, a Myanmar national doctor and software developer, and Michael Lwin Esq., a Myanmar-American former corporate lawyer, today Koe Koe Tech has 120 employees, 113 of whom are Myanmar nationals, 60% of whom are women, with 50 software engineers and designers, 50% of whom are women. We are intentionally Myanmar-centric and diverse by design: we believe that the best solutions are locally made and driven, and that diversity is a strength for Myanmar, not a weakness. We have won the Echoing Green, Frontier Innovators, SPRING, Accelerate2030, Cordes, Unreasonable Institute, and GSBI Fellowships, among other honors.
We have extensive experience in successfully developing and implementing information and communications technologies for social and behavioural change in Myanmar. We have developed the maymay app, which is Myanmar’s most popular mHealth app. Maymay has 220,000+ users and 2+ million user engagements per month. 1.5 million maternal and child health quizzes have been taken, with about 200,000 quizzes taken per month. Maymay has been covered by The Economist, among other media outlets.
The core features of the app are a social feed that has content on maternal and child health, nutrition, infectious disease, non-communicable diseases (NCDs), family planning; and quizzes timed to the 9 months of pregnancy and the first three years of a baby’s life. maymay has a telemedicine feature, with PSI doctors and gender-based violence (GBV) specialists fielding about 8,000 messages and calls per month. Users write in the community chat groups every day. There are over 20 content providers for the maymay app, including PSI, DKT International, Save the Children, the Ministry of Health and Sports (MOHS), LIFT, UNICEF, and lactation expert Daw Thelma Tun Thein. Over 1,000 PSI Sun Clinic doctors are featured in the app. The maymay app has received funding from USAID, DFID, DFAT, Grand Challenges Canada, 3MDG fund, Echoing Green, PSI, among other organizations, and we are currently part of a $20 MM Jhpiego-led USAID-Myanmar consortium for Essential Health, with consortium partners PSI, Pact, and ThinkWell. maymay will be distributed nationally by the INGO field staff PSI, Worldvision, and Save the Children as part of a $800,000 LIFT fund.
We are also developing clinic management information system (CMIS) software with electronic medical records (EMR) in Myanmar, facilitated by the unusually high uptake of smartphones in the country. We will work with PSI to roll out the CMIS-EMR software in 1,000 PSI Sun clinics nationwide over 5 years.
For law, in 2016 we developed tax and utilities software, called MyanKhon (“fast tax”), for the Development Affairs Organizations (DAOs) in Myanmar in partnership with The Asia Foundation and The Renaissance Institute. Today, the MyanKhon app is being used in 12 townships in Myanmar, with 26 additional townships to be added in the next quarter. The app and its data have been covered by Frontier Myanmar and the Economist. We developed a web app for the DAO offices for the 4 townships so office staff could generate household tax demand letters digitally instead of via paper. We also developed a mobile app which is used by the tax collectors in the field when they actually go to collect taxes. The improvements for the DAO staff have been enormous: for the Taunggyi DAO, it used to take them six months to prepare 25,000 paper tax demand letters per township. Now it takes them only two months using the software, one-third of the time. The software has also increased revenues by 15-20% per township.
In addition to MyanKhon, we are rolling out MyoTaw (“capital city”), a Facebook chatbot and mobile app for citizens to pay their tax and utilities bills. MyoTaw integrates with MyanKhon, allowing for value chain integration between citizena and government.
We are also partnering with Facebook to develop natural language processing (NLP) Burmese language algorithms to detect hate speech and misinformation. Facebook has come under criticism for misuse of its platform to foment violence in Myanmar, but Facebook lacks localization experts in engineering. We are those experts. We also lead in helping Facebook consider the structure of its proposed independent board to review content decisions and interpret its Community Standards.