This report responds to these measurement and interpretation challenges by applying a multidimensional approach to poverty analysis in Myanmar. Drawing on the nationwide People’s Pulse Survey (PPS 2025), it uses an adapted Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) to assess overlapping deprivations across education, health and living standards. The objectives are threefold: to identify where deprivations are most concentrated geographically; to examine how poverty is shaped by structural household characteristics, contextual conditions and exposure to shocks; and to profile who is most affected, in terms of socio-economic and demographic groups. Structural factors refer to persistent household-level characteristics, including education, employment type, income position and demographic composition, while contextual factors refer to area-level conditions such as conflict, geographic isolation, market disruption, service availability and natural hazard shocks that shape poverty beyond household characteristics alone. The report is organized as follows. Section 2 examines where poverty In Myanmar, a household’s poverty risk depends is concentrated, presenting national, not only on its income and education, but on urban–rural, state/region and townshipwhere it lives, who controls that area, and what level patterns and distinguishing between the severity and the scale of shocks it has absorbed. The combination of deprivation. Section 3 examines how these forces explains why similar households poverty is generated and amplified, face very different outcomes across the country. distinguishing structural and contextual drivers and analyzing the role of shocks. Section 4 profiles who is most affected, examining variation across income groups, employment categories, education levels, migration status and gender. Section 5 goes beyond headcount to examine what kind of poverty these households experience, showing how the composition of deprivation shifts predictably across contexts and why similar MPI scores can reflect fundamentally different poverty dynamics. Section 6 translates these findings into four strategic directions covering geographic targeting, response design, shock resilience, and dimensional composition as a programming diagnostic. Section 7 concludes. 1.1 Data and Methodology The analysis draws on UNDP’s People’s Pulse Survey (PPS 2025), a nationwide telephone-based survey of 7,463 households across all 15 states/regions of Myanmar.2 The survey was designed to capture household well-being during a period of compounding pressures, including conflict, displacement and the March 2025 earthquake, with sampling stratified independently across urban and rural areas to support disaggregation by geography and socio-economic status. PPS 2025 captures emerging deprivations such as inability to access healthcare, deterioration in household food security, disruptions in schooling, and changes in access to basic services. These features make the PPS 2025 a valuable instrument for crisis-responsive monitoring and programme adaptation. Three limitations should be noted. First, phone-based sampling may under-represent households without functioning phones, who are more likely to be extremely poor or living in remote or conflictaffected areas. Second, self-reported housing and asset information may also be less detailed than information collected through in-person observation. Third, the sampling frame does not adequately reach stateless and displaced populations, including Rohingya populations in Rakhine, who face particular constraints on phone access and on participation in standard sampling frames; the 2 Myanmar is administratively divided into seven States (Kachin, Kayah, Kayin, Chin, Mon, Rakhine and Shan) and seven Regions (Sagaing, Tanintharyi, Bago, Magway, Mandalay, Yangon and Ayeyarwady). Nay Pyi Taw constitutes a separate ‘Union Territory’, but for simplicity, this report refers to them collectively as “states/regions”. 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 7