Introduction

Htee City is a program dedicated to the future of Yangon as a city in which all people work together to adapt to a changing climate. Yangon Htee City Facebook page is a climate adaptation awareness page as part of the Thaketa Climate Adaptation Project, that aims to raise awareness and provide education about climate change with a focus on water security and what we can do to better adapt to these risks through collective community action in terms of digital external communication. The page was started with a celebration post about World Environment Day on June 5^th 2020.

Content Creation Process & Capacity

The contents are created based on own-content writing and sometimes using (and translating) content from a reference. The contents are delivered in both Burmese and English. The main topics of the contents include:

• Importance of water (Supply, Usage, Availability, Safe drinking water, Health, Wastage)
• Climate Change & Adaptation
• Water Crisis (Impact of climate change on water specifically flooding, drainage)
• Participatory design/ Placemaking (Importance and Impact)
• Water Adaptation and Resilience (Rainwater harvesting, community-based adaptations, solid waste management, flood management)
• Integrated Urban planning
• Socio-economic Approach

The contents are delivered into different types of post types such as;

• Text-based or infographic posts
• “Did you know” posts based on data and facts
• “What you can do” posts – easy practical examples
• Community stories – storyline contents
• Cartoon Series
•  Interactive
  • poll
  • Open question

As a team capacity, the page was operated by the local team members of the project together with some content support of international experts, and external resources for cartoon series creation, video creation when it came to the Yangon Raincraft Program and Cartoon booklet printing services.

Unique Operations of Yangon Htee City

1. Yangon Htee City Cartoon Series

In July 2020, the second month of page launch, we introduced the first episode of our cartoon series. The cartoon structure was created as a conversation between the two main characters: Mr Htee (umbrella) and Ms Yaysat (water droplet). We aimed these cartoon series to be family-oriented, colourful, aesthetic with easy-to-understand content for the general audience. For each episode, the main water-related topic acted as a backbone and the content was delivered as a conversation between Mr Htee & Ms Yaysat and sometimes included the resident/ people character to represent the audience. There were a total of seven cartoon episodes and the contents were delivered in Burmese.

2. Yangon Htee City Water Bottles

There were two versions of Htee City Water Bottles. In January 2021, the page started a give-away campaign to reach more engagement with the community. The campaign was to share any favourite post that the page has been sharing until January and to mention the reason why it is a favourite by the audience so that they could have a chance to win the first version of the customized Htee City water bottle. 

Second versions of a hundred Htee City Water Bottles were produced around November 2021. This time, it was designed to collaborate both Yangon Htee City and our unique program of Yangon Raincraft Program which tend to give as a program participation gift and to the other community and project partners.

Impactful Htee City Writing Contest Campaign & New Cartoon Series

Htee City Writing Contest Campaign & New Cartoon Series Creation were able to engage more audiences around late October 2021. Both were organized under 5 main themes of;

• Flooding
• Water Security
• Groundwater
• Climate Change
• Solid Waste Management

In the writing contest, the participants were asked to write an informative and emotional story under the five given themes in the Burmese language.