multidimensional poverty estimates presented for Rakhine therefore likely understate true deprivation in the state. These limitations are acknowledged throughout the analysis but do not affect the relative comparisons across geographies, household groups and shock-exposure categories that are central to the report’s findings. The Myanmar MPI follows the global Alkire–Foster methodology3 and retains the standard structure of three equally weighted dimensions, namely education, health and living standards, with two adaptations to reflect Myanmar’s context and the constraints of phone-based data collection. First, the global MPI’s nutrition indicator is replaced by the Livelihood Coping Strategy Index (LhCSI),4 which captures the use of stress, crisis and emergency strategies in response to food and income shortfalls and serves as a behavioural proxy for food- and consumption-related stress in the absence of anthropometric data. Second, the child mortality indicator is replaced by an indicator capturing whether households face barriers to accessing healthcare, which better reflects current servicedisruption realities and the constraints of the PPS instrument. The cooking fuel indicator is omitted as it is not collected in PPS 2025, with the remaining living-standards indicator weights adjusted accordingly while preserving the equal one-third dimension weighting. The full set of indicators, weights and deprivation thresholds is shown in Table 1. Table 1 PPS adapted MPI indicators Dimension (Weight) Education (1/3) Health (1/3) Living Standards (1/3) Indicator (Weight) Deprived if… Years of schooling (1/6) No household member aged 11+ has completed six years of schooling School attendance (1/6) Any school-age child (5–17) is not attending school in 2024–2025 Livelihood coping strategy index (1/6) Household has LhCSI classified as “stressed” or above (crisis, emergency) Inability to access healthcare (1/6) Household reports at least one barrier to accessing health services Lighting (1/15) Household relies on non-reliable lighting sources Sanitation (1/15) Household uses non-improved sanitation facilities Drinking water (1/15) Household uses non-improved drinking water in either season Housing quality (1/15) Household resides in non-stable housing Assets (1/15) Household owns fewer than one basic asset A deprivation profile is constructed for each household across all nine indicators, recording whether the household is deprived in each indicator according to the thresholds set out in Table 1. Household deprivation scores are then calculated by summing the weighted deprivations across the nine indicators. Following global MPI conventions, households are classified according to their deprivation scores: MPI vulnerable (20–<33%), MPI poor (≥33%) and MPI severely poor (≥50%). The MPI headcount ratio (H) represents the share of population classified as MPI poor; intensity (A) is the average proportion of weighted deprivations among MPI poor households; and the overall MPI score is the product of incidence and intensity (H × A). Standard treatment rules apply to non-eligible indicators (for example, households without school-age children are classified as non-deprived in school attendance). 8 3 Alkire, S., Mishra, R., Selden, L., and Suppa, N. (2025). A methodological note on the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) 2025 changes over Time Results for 88 countries 4 The Livelihood Coping Strategy Index (LhCSI) is a food-security–related indicator that captures the use of stress, crisis and emergency coping strategies in response to insufficient food or income. While it is not a direct measure of nutritional status, LhCSI is widely used in humanitarian and crisis contexts as a proxy for acute consumption- and nutrition-related stress when anthropometric data are unavailable. The deprivation threshold is set at “stressed or above” (i.e. households classified as stressed, crisis or emergency). This threshold was chosen because households already adopting stress-level coping strategies, such as reducing meal frequency, drawing down savings or selling productive assets, have compromised their food security and longer-term resilience in ways that align with the MPI’s intent to capture meaningful deprivation rather than marginal or transitory stress. 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