Are flawed statistics masking Myanmar's suffering?

The number of internally displaced persons in Myanmar has reached approximately 3.77 million as of June 2026, an increase from around 3.5 million in early 2025. However, the United Nations' 2026 Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan estimates the number of people requiring life-saving emergency assistance at 16.2 million, a decrease from 19.9 million in 2025. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has clarified that this reduction is solely due to a narrowing of the scope of analysis and does not indicate an improvement in Myanmar's humanitarian situation. Such findings, which contradict the reality on the ground, demonstrate how flawed data collection or changes in methodology can misrepresent the scale of hardship faced by the population. Accuracy and consistency in measuring the humanitarian impact of the conflict are crucial. These data can influence international policy interventions, donor decisions, and funding reductions. On the other hand, the Myanmar military junta may exploit the situation where statistics appear to be improving to legitimize its rule. Approximately half of school-aged children are out of primary education. However, according to the Human Development Index (HDI) by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Myanmar's score has remained stable during the military coup periods and returned to its 2019 level in 2023. The HDI is an index that combines life expectancy at birth, education levels, and individual national income. According to the UNDP report, Myanmar's HDI score was 0.609 in 2019, before the military coup, and 0.605 in 2021, the year of the coup. In 2023, it returned to 0.609, matching the 2019 level. However, during the period when the HDI score is reported as stable and recovering, the number of internally displaced persons has increased, and the number of people fleeing the country has also risen. According to UNDP's own estimates, the proportion of people living below the poverty line has nearly doubled, from 24.8 percent in 2017 to 46.3 percent. Furthermore, the number of children killed or injured in conflict has significantly increased, while meaningful indicators such as agricultural production, industrial activity, and the proportion of children attending school have declined. One indicator that appears to be improving is life expectancy at birth. According to World Bank data, Myanmar's life expectancy decreased from 66.612 years in 2020 to 65.553 years in 2021, the year of the military coup. It has since shown a year-on-year recovery, reaching 66.506 years in 2022, 66.889 years in 2023, and 67.095 years in 2024. However, during this period, hospital admissions have significantly decreased, and the risk of death has increased due to airstrikes and drone attacks. Therefore, the reported increase in life expectancy statistically contradicts the situation on the ground. This life expectancy statistic is calculated using the UN Population Division's cohort-component demographic method, which projects forward based on past mortality trends. The article also points out that Myanmar lacks a nationwide birth and death registration system that can reliably record deaths in conflict zones and disputed areas. The mean years of schooling, an indicator of HDI's education component, measures the completed years of schooling for the population aged 25 and above and has remained unchanged at 6.38 years from 2019 to 2023. However, on the ground, primary school enrollment has decreased from 9.7 million students in the 2019-20 academic year to 6.1 million in the 2025-26 academic year. The number of students taking university entrance exams has also dropped from over 900,000 in 2020 to only around 200,000 in 2025. With the declining number of students attending school and taking university entrance exams, it is logical that the average level of education will decline in the future. However, most children who are unable to attend school and have missed up to five years of education are not yet 25 years old, so this is not yet reflected in the statistics. Like other human development indicators, Myanmar's data on educational quality may not reflect the actual situation. The World Bank's Human Capital Project assigns Myanmar a Harmonized Learning Outcomes score of 424.6, which has remained consistent in 2017, 2018, and 2020. This suggests that data from before the military coup is being used in later updates and that the situation after the coup has not been re-measured. According to the Academic Freedom Index produced by the V-Dem Institute and Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Myanmar received a score of around 0.4 in 2020. After the military coup in February 2021, this score dropped to between 0.02 and 0.03, ranking it among the bottom three countries globally, alongside North Korea and Eritrea. According to Scholars at Risk, as of 2024, the number of university students in Myanmar has decreased by 90 percent from its pre-coup level. The discrepancy between misleading statistics and the reality on the ground is due to differences in data collection. The UNDP's November 2021 review of Myanmar also admitted that "current data limitations do not allow for an accurate portrayal of the impact of COVID-19 and the coup on human well-being." The UNDP's Myanmar Development Observatory also characterizes Myanmar's data situation as "long-term hardship, conflict, and data scarcity." A study on eastern Myanmar found that national statistics do not include data from conflict-affected areas along the Thai and Chinese borders or from areas controlled by non-state actors. Similarly, a review of Myanmar's health sector indicated that the population census was conducted 31 years