and health each carrying a larger share than living standards at that point. This sequence holds broadly regardless of states and regions, since average deprivation depth (intensity) varies little between them. For programming, this implies that living-standards interventions, namely housing, water and sanitation, address the binding constraint for most MPI-poor households, while education investment carries growing weight specifically among the most severely deprived, who require multisectoral support across all three dimensions simultaneously. Dimensional composition also clarifies the limits of income-focused approaches for the most deprived households. The bottom two income quintiles display nearly identical compositional structures, with the same combined health and living-standards share described above, meaning that income shifts the level of poverty across the distribution without shifting its dimensional structure. Housing, sanitation and health access deficits cannot be resolved through marginal income increases alone; direct investment in basic services and living conditions is required to alter the underlying composition of deprivation. The same principle applies across specific household groups. For migrant households, where living standards account for 46 percent of the MPI score, settlement insecurity and institutional barriers require responses beyond income transfers alone. Gender adds a further dimension: woman-headed households record lower poverty incidence than man-headed households but higher deprivation intensity among those who are poor, a directional reversal consistent with findings on food security from the independent evidence.23 As the crisis has deepened, women in Myanmar have taken on additional caregiving and household responsibilities without reducing their existing economic ones and without emerging care support-public, private or communal. This creates a double trap of income poverty and time poverty, leaving women without sufficient time to meet essential household responsibilities and without sufficient resources to purchase market-based substitutes. This depthover-incidence pattern indicates that interventions need to address the intensity of deprivation, including access to childcare, social protection and community-based services, not only coverage, if they are to reduce poverty among women-headed households effectively. Taken together, these four directions reflect a single analytical conclusion. Myanmar's multidimensional poverty is too differentiated to yield to uniform responses. Effective poverty reduction requires approaches calibrated to where poverty is severe versus where it is large-scale, to whether it is structurally embedded or contextually driven, to which shocks are compounding vulnerability, and to which dimension dominates in a given geographical context. Dimensional composition is the diagnostic that makes this calibration possible, translating multidimensional poverty evidence into context-specific programming across area-based recovery, livelihoods, resilience and human capital investment. 23 UNDP & UN WOMEN (2026). Uneven Burdens: Women in Myanmar’s Crisis Economy. 46 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