Executive Summary M yanmar’s socio-economic landscape is shaped by overlapping pressures, including prolonged conflict, macroeconomic instability, recurrent natural hazards and the additional impact of the March 2025 earthquake. In such conditions, conventional monetary poverty measures have become increasingly difficult to estimate due to inflation volatility, market fragmentation and disrupted livelihoods. At the same time, income alone does not fully capture how crises affect household wellbeing, particularly where access to services, infrastructure and livelihoods has deteriorated. While monetary poverty measures whether households have sufficient income or consumption to meet basic needs, multidimensional poverty captures overlapping deprivations across education, health and living standards. In crisis settings such as Myanmar, these dimensions do not always move together. Households may retain some income while losing access to healthcare, education, adequate housing or basic services. This report complements monetary analysis by applying an adapted Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) to nationwide household data from the People’s Pulse Survey (PPS 2025). The analysis identifies where deprivations are most concentrated, how structural household vulnerabilities and contextual pressures interact to shape poverty outcomes, and which population groups face the highest risk. Together, these findings provide a timely evidence base for understanding poverty in Myanmar’s current crisis context and for informing more differentiated, context-sensitive responses. Multidimensional poverty is widespread, deep and persistent. Nearly one in three people in Myanmar (approximately 17.9 million people) are multidimensionally poor. A further 19.5 million are vulnerable to falling into multidimensional poverty, bringing the total share of the population experiencing or at risk of multidimensional deprivation to two-thirds (37.5 million). Poverty reflects overlapping deficits across health, living standards and education, rather than income constraints alone. Addressing multidimensional poverty therefore requires strengthening household capabilities alongside improving income security. Poverty patterns vary by geography, requiring attention to both severity and scale. In states experiencing heightened insecurity and access constraints, such as Kayah and Rakhine, poverty is exceptionally severe, combining very high incidence with deep deprivation. At the same time, the largest numbers of MPI-poor households are located in populous states/regions such as Ayeyarwady, Sagaing, Mandalay and Shan. Effective responses must therefore balance reducing the depth of deprivation in severely affected areas with addressing the large-scale burden of poverty in more populous regions. Structural household vulnerabilities and contextual pressures shape different poverty dynamics across Myanmar. Structural factors, including low education, insecure employment and weak income positions, interact with contextual pressures such as conflict, displacement, market disruption and 4 LAYERS OF DEP RIVATION : Mu ltid im e n s io n a l Pov er t y i n M y a n m a r