Seizing Opportunity in Myanmar

Photographer Michael Heeck, 55, lives in central Germany. For nearly four decades, he has combined his twin passions of travel and photography in journeys across Africa, Europe and Asia.

As Myanmar opens to the world, companies from neighbouring countries are setting up branches across the country. Ever more goods are flowing into the country, most of them carried on Myanmar’s major waterways.

Kai, who two years ago struggled to make a living selling transport tickets, today runs a business helping truck drivers and boat owners load and unload their cargoes of flour, rice, cement and oil drums. Working ten hours daily with his four staff, his dream is to buy his own truck – a second-hand Tata transporter that he can use to move goods by expressway from Yangon, the Myanmar capital, to Mandalay, the economic hub of the country’s north.

Already he has found a mechanic to keep his truck maintained, and his thirteen-year-old son is studying English so he can help his father deal with foreign customers.

Text and photographs by Michael Heeck

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Michael Heeck, 55, lives in central Germany. For nearly four decades he has combined his twin passions of travel and photography in journeys across Africa, Europe and Asia. A member of DVF, in 2013 his photograph in the black and white category of the Hamdan international Photography award reached the final and was published in the B&W yearbook.

The Other Hundred is a unique photo-book project aimed telling the stories of people around the world who are not rich but who deserve to be celebrated.

The Other Hundred Entrepreneurs: 100 Faces, Places, Stories — the second volume in The Other Hundred series — focuses on the world’s everyday entrepreneurs. It captures the reality that small and medium-sized businesses, rather than tech billionaires or elite MBAs, contribute the majority of the world’s jobs, including half of all jobs in Africa and two-thirds in Asia.

The book offers an alternative to the view that most successful entrepreneurs were trained at elite business schools. Here are people who have never written a formal business plan, hired an investment bank, planned an exit strategy or dreamt of a stock market floatation. Some work for themselves, others employ a few people, still others a few hundred.

The book’s 100 stories were chosen from a pool of 10,000 images shot in nearly 150 countries. The book is published by Oneworld Publications in London and is available in bookstores worldwide and online.