Mee Panyar — a project recap
Empowering rural electricians to operate and maintain solar mini-grids with the Mee Panyar app
Mee Panyar supports rural communities in Myanmar in the operation and maintenance of decentralized solar mini-grids that provide reliable, sustainable energy for local communities. Leveraging the country’s existing 13,000+ diesel mini-grids, Mee Panyar rehabilitates or hybridizes these systems to harness solar energy, while providing support for long-term energy operations and maintenance.
In Myanmar, only one-third of the population has access to reliable energy. In rural areas, energy access amounts to as little as 10%. Current electrical systems in rural areas of Myanmar are community-maintained, typically by people with no formal training. Mee Panyar:
- trains rural electricians to incorporate solar power into their electrical systems
- finances the equipment and setup for this transition
- conducts education programs for rural electricians to maintain these systems.
This work not only helps rural electricians (known as meesayar in Myanmar) transition from diesel to solar (reducing carbon emissions by 60% and electricity prices by 50%), but also ensures long-term maintenance and proper operation of these new systems through formal education and support for rural electricians. Over two semesters, Blueprint partnered with Mee Panyar to work towards providing accessible renewable energy to rural Myanmar communities.
The Problem
Every month, electricians take meter readings, collects the resulting payments for each household, and performs maintenance and repair work so the electrical systems are long-lasting. To record all this information in a centralized location, electricians have been using an existing mobile app. However, the app relies on Internet connection to function, and many of these electrical sites are in areas with low connectivity. This limits when and where rural electricians can effectively record and report data.
The Solution
Blueprint has built an instructional PWA mobile app with offline functionality for local electricians and engineers to operate and maintain their community solar mini-grids. The app allows electricians to track logistics (e.g., customers, electrical payments, inventory) for electrical sites in low-connectivity and offline environments.
User Research and Design
The app was built with two main users in mind:
- Electricians are responsible for maintaining sites through conducting operations, incident management, and performance reviews. As the overseers of tracking logistics and recording site data, electricians need the tracking and logging process to be as efficient as possible.
- Administrators oversee and support the activity of all electricians and approve key reports for inventory supply on all sites.
Upon further conversation with the Mee Panyar team, we realized there would be limitations in how extensively we can user test with electricians due to language barriers and remote conditions. Consistent, transparent communication with the Mee Panyar team was essential to understanding the needs of users in local Myanmar communities.
We learned the importance of making our app easily comprehensive and accessible to both native English and Burmese speakers. As a result, we prioritized the use of visual elements and icons to communicate the app’s functionalities. To optimize site management, we also focused on designing the app so electricians could access and organize reports according to specific categories.
Customer Management
Electricians can view and add customers belonging to any of their electrical sites. Each customer also has a profile that contains all information relevant to their participation in the electrical system. The app also enables searching customers by their name or customer ID, in addition to editing customers’ data and assigned electrical plans.
Payment Management
Once the electrician owns a working electrical system, they can now supply energy to customers, who install household meters to track their energy consumption. Every month, the electrician reads the household meters, collects payments for each household, and performs necessary maintenance and repair work. The app’s payment portal allows electricians to do all these tasks on a single tab, in addition to providing customers a streamlined way to receive and pay their electricity bills.
Inventory Tracking
Our inventory tab allows electricians to record the use and purchase of items needed to operate and maintain their electrical systems. Using the inventory tracker, electricians can document new products and submit purchase requests for these products. Administrators can then approve or deny these purchase requests. Both users have the ability to submit updates to the inventory.
Technical Overview and Challenges
One technical challenge we experienced while building the Mee Panyar app was making its functionality translate across both English and Burmese.
Background
An encoding system is a set of rules a computer can follow to represent text. Unicode is the universal standard for modern character encoding schemes. Explicitly, it promises that any computer can display and share text, no matter what platform, device, application, or language. Naturally, all of the Internet internally uses Unicode to cover most of the world’s writing systems.
However, when Unicode was developed in 1991, Myanmar was closed off from the world from its coup in 1962. As a result, Myanmar’s local language Burmese was not included in the Unicode standard. Myanmar ended up developing its own Burmese encoding system Zawgyi, which 90% of Myanmar people use. Unfortunately, this creates significant inaccuracies in how Unicode translates Burmese text from the differences in how Unicode and Zawgi handle code points.
With 95% of our users being non-English speakers, we wanted the Mee Panyar mobile app to provide localized translation support for Burmese speakers whether they own Unicode-encoded or Zawgi-encoded phones.
How We Delivered Localized Translations
To provide seamless translation between Unicode and Zawgyi, we wrote a script in our app’s build command that pulls Mee Panyar's key-value store (KVS) mapping English words to their Burmese translations.
Using the react-i18next framework, we can detect a device’s native language encoding. Depending on a user’s language preferences on the app settings, we can translate between English and Burmese. Finally, we can apply encoding conversion rules to switch between the Unicode and Zawgyi. Abstracting all of this logic into a React hook allows us to reuse it throughout any text on the app.
Using only 3 lines of code, the Mee Panyar app can now easily translate between English and Burmese, all based on a user’s personal device. The result is an application that looks and feels native and accessible to users in Myanmar.
To learn more about how this translation hook works, read our developer Micah’s amazing writeup on how he designed and implemented translations for the Mee Panyar app!
Final Reflections
We’re excited to have handed off our mobile app to the engineering team at Mee Panyar, who is working on integrating the app into their operations in Myanmar! We hope by, providing an offline version of the app, rural electricians can perform their tasks anytime, anywhere. From this project, we also learned the importance of establishing a solid foundation when working on a constantly evolving application. While we initially believed the biggest challenge in building this app would be technically complex features like implementing offline functionality, we realized the largest hurdle was setting up our app’s foundational backend development and form-building. This way, our app would also be flexible to any changes — whether styling changes or feature redesigns — that had to be made in later development stages.
Overall, we’re happy to have built a project for a nonprofit doing so much work to make renewable energy more equitable and accessible in rural communities! Many thanks to the team at Mee Panyar for being so great to work with and for providing so much support and communication throughout the entire project development process.
Meet the Team!
- Jen Hoang (she/her): Project Leader (fa 20)
- Julian Kung (he/him): Project Leader (sp 21)
- Ashley Kim (she/her): Designer
- Tiffany Wang (he/him): Developer
- Kyle Hua (she/her): Developer
- Emma Stephans (she/her): Developer (fa 20)
- Annie Wang (she/her): Developer (sp 21)
- Micah Yong (he/him): Developer (sp 21)
To learn more about Blueprint and our projects, visit our website and follow us on our Facebook page!
All of Blueprint’s work is open-source because we believe in building technology that makes us more open and connected. You can view the Mee Panyar app and the rest of our projects on our Github.
Special thanks to Julian Kung, Micah Yong, Ethan Lee, and Frederick Kim
