service fragmentation. In some states/regions, poverty is driven primarily by long-standing household disadvantages. In others, particularly conflict-affected areas, contextual pressures significantly elevate deprivation beyond what household characteristics alone would predict. These differences imply that poverty responses need to combine area-based approaches in context-dominated settings with targeted household-level interventions where structural disadvantages prevail. Repeated shocks amplify deprivation and erode household resilience. Economic shocks affect more than half of households nationally, while natural hazard shocks affect around one in five. Conflict shocks, although geographically concentrated, are associated with the highest levels of multidimensional poverty. As shocks accumulate, households with limited coping capacity experience worsening health, declining service access and deteriorating living conditions, reinforcing cycles of deprivation. Poverty risk is concentrated among specific socio-economic groups. Households in the lowest income quintiles, those relying on casual labour and those headed by individuals with limited education consistently face the highest multidimensional deprivation. Migrant households and vulnerable urban populations also exhibit elevated poverty risk due to settlement instability, informal employment and limited access to services. Effective targeting therefore requires recognizing the differentiated vulnerabilities faced by these groups. Poverty composition varies by context, pointing to different intervention priorities. Living standards and health drive the national picture, but the dimensional composition of poverty shifts systematically across contexts. In states/regions where survival-related deprivations dominate (Rakhine, Kayah, Chin, Kachin and Ayeyarwady), health and living standards together dominate the index, with education compressed. In others, such as Sagaing, Mon, Mandalay and Nay Pyi Taw, education’s share is comparatively higher, signalling a transition from survival deprivations to human-capital constraints. The remaining states and regions fall between these patterns. Income quintile decomposition reveals a structural deprivation trap, with the bottom two quintiles displaying nearly identical compositional structures: modest income gains alone are unlikely to reshape the underlying deprivation profile. Taken together, these findings point to four strategic directions. First, geographic responses need to balance depth-focused engagement in severely affected areas, where contextual pressures drive poverty far above structural predictions, with scale-oriented coverage in populous regions where the absolute number of poor remains large. Second, programming design should distinguish between context-dominant settings, where area-based restoration of markets, services and safe mobility is the primary entry point, and structure-dominant settings, where sustained household-level investment in education, employment and livelihoods addresses the foundations of deprivation; latent vulnerability in urban areas calls for resilience-building interventions that reach households before poverty transitions occur. Third, strengthening resilience to repeated and overlapping shocks is central to preventing transitions into deeper and more persistent poverty, with responses calibrated to the different amplification pathways of economic, conflict-related, natural hazard and health shocks. Finally, the composition of deprivation matters as much as poverty levels themselves. In areas where survival-related deprivations dominate, restoring services and basic infrastructure is the primary lever. Where education’s share rises, human capital investment carries greater leverage. Where states and regions fall between these two patterns, livelihood restoration and economic resilience carry particular leverage, since rising incomes reduce the depth of deprivation even where they do not change its underlying composition. L AYE R S O F DE P R I VAT I O N : M u l t i di m en si on a l Pov er t y i n M y anmar 5