the country’s largest urban centre. Poverty in Yangon is concentrated in peri-urban townships,5 where informal employment, migrant and displaced populations, housing precarity, and constrained access to formal safety nets generate a deprivation profile structurally distinct from rural poverty elsewhere, yet one that aggregates city-level figures can obscure and that the township analysis in Section 2.4 examines. Low severity, small scale: Nay Pyi Taw, Tanintharyi, Mon Nay Pyi Taw records the lowest MPI score nationally (0.087) with approximately 0.27 million MPI-poor people. Tanintharyi (MPI score 0.140) and Mon (MPI score 0.149) record moderate headcounts with approximately 0.46 million and 0.59 million MPI-poor people respectively. The comparatively lower severity in this quadrant should not be read as an absence of significant deprivation. Both Mon and Tanintharyi record deprivation intensity above the national average among those who are poor, indicating that households classified as MPI-poor in these states experience multiple overlapping deficits even where overall incidence is more contained. The gap between headcount and intensity is the analytically important signal here: aggregate MPI scores understate the depth of poverty among those who are affected. Table 3 Multidimensional poverty profiles (by geography) High severity, large scale High severity, small scale Low severity, large scale Low severity, small scale 5 14 State/Region MPI score (H x A) MPI Headcount (H) MPI intensity (A) MPI-poor pop. Union 0.150 32.6% 46.1% ~17.9 m — Rakhine 0.342 68.4% 50.1% 1.66 m High conflict exposure; pervasive deprivation; stateless and displaced populations Sagaing 0.196 41.2% 47.5% 2.38 m Structural deficits; high conflict exposure Ayeyarwady 0.183 40.7% 45.0% 2.65 m Structural rural vulnerability across large agrarian population Kayah 0.328 68.1% 48.2% 0.21 m High conflict exposure; severity concentrated in small population Chin 0.220 47.9% 45.9% 0.25 m Structural isolation; geographic and connectivity barriers Kachin 0.188 40.5% 46.3% 0.81 m Conflict exposure intersecting with geographic isolation Kayin 0.153 31.9% 47.8% 0.51 m Conflict and structural access constraints; moderate but persistent Mandalay 0.148 31.7% 46.6% 2.11 m Moderate structural deprivation; large population weight Shan 0.131 29.3% 44.6% 1.97 m Moderate structural deprivation; large population weight Magway 0.128 28.9% 44.3% 1.17 m Rural livelihood vulnerability; uneven service coverage Bago 0.118 26.5% 44.6% 1.34 m Rural livelihood vulnerability; uneven service coverage Yangon 0.092 20.4% 45.3% 1.73 m Urban and peri-urban concentration; low incidence, high scale Mon 0.149 30.4% 49.2% 0.59 m Moderate incidence; above-average intensity among the poor Tanintharyi 0.140 30.5% 45.8% 0.46 m Moderate incidence; above-average intensity among the poor Nay Pyi Taw 0.087 19.7% 44.2% 0.27 m Lowest severity nationally; small scale UNDP (2025). Urban Poverty: Unpacking Yangon. 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 Predominant deprivation profile