The world’s poor don’t always need our charity. Proximity Designs, a design lab based in Burma, believes that the best way to address poverty is to design, build, and market affordable products that ...

“We identify with the people we serve,” says Jim Taylor. “We would never patronize them. Myanmar’s farmers want to catch up to the rest of the world. Our job is to help them.” Jim Taylor and Debbie ...

Proximity Designs is a for-profit design company whose goal is to create products cheap enough–and good enough–that they can be bought by poor farmers, instead of just giving them aid. This is the ...

When Jim Taylor moved to Myanmar in 2004, it was ”one of the most isolated and poor countries in the world.” Then known as Burma, the country was terrorized by a repressive military junta and ...