Over five million children in Myanmar are not in school more than one in three of every school-age child in the country. Since the 2021 coup, 217 verified attacks on schools have been recorded; some have been converted into military barracks, others bombed into rubble. Children as young as eight are working in agriculture and domestic service, and some are being forcibly recruited into armed conflict. A thirteen-year-old girl, quoted in a recent education report, said she had completed only Grade 3 and was too ashamed to return to a classroom full of younger children. She sells flowers instead. For these children, the school did not close. It was taken from them and every year it stays closed, the distance back grows wider.

The kyat has lost more than two-thirds of its value since the coup, and inflation ran at nearly 30 percent in 2024. For families already living at the margins, it is the difference between eating and not eating, between staying and fleeing. Before the coup, only 6 percent of Myanmar adults used more than one financial product. Since then, the banking system has been weaponised, capital controls imposed, and informal money networks criminalised. In conflict-affected areas, there is no bank branch, no mobile wallet, no mechanism for a displaced family to receive money, save it, or move it safely. Cash is the only option and cash can be taken at a checkpoint. When a population cannot hold, transfer, or protect money, poverty is not just a condition. It is a cage.

Myanmar ranks eleventh out of 191 countries most exposed to natural hazards and climate change, and between 1980 and 2020 experienced an average of 56 natural disaster events every year, half of them floods. Cyclones, landslides, and monsoon flooding now arrive on a near-annual cycle. Disaster preparedness remains critically low despite this exposure, and resources that should be invested in resilience are continuously redirected to address the immediate humanitarian crises that the disasters themselves create, a trap that compounds itself each season. In 2024, Typhoon Yagi alone affected 2.4 million people across 192 townships. Many of those people were already displaced by conflict. They had survived the war. The flood found them anyway. Without early warning infrastructure that reaches the last mile, the informal settlement, the IDP camp, the village the state no longer serves, the most vulnerable communities will keep absorbing disasters that, with hours of notice, they could survive.

Every civil society organisation and business in Myanmar that needs a digital tool builds it from scratch or pays someone to, because nothing they need already exists in a form that works for their language, their context, or their operational reality. Then the organisation next door does the same thing. The tool gets built twice, three times, ten times across the ecosystem, each time consuming budgets and staff capacity that could have gone elsewhere. Meanwhile, a generation of young Myanmar developers inside the country and scattered across the diaspora in Thailand, Malaysia, and beyond, trained on curricula disconnected from local needs and graduate into a market that gives them no pathway to build for community good. The talent exists. The problems exist. What does not exist is any infrastructure connecting them. Every solution built in isolation dies in isolation, undocumented, unadapted, unreachable by the next organisation that needs exactly the same thing. In an ecosystem already depleted by conflict, economic collapse, and displacement, this is not inefficiency. It is the compounding cost of a problem nobody has yet agreed to solve together.