LocationsWhile we honour the resilience of women in Myanmar, true progress requires dismantling barriers and opening doors to equal opportunity.
From Uneven Burdens to Equal Opportunities
October 15, 2026
Women are the backbone of rural economies, yet they still face unequal access to land and farming resources. UNDP analysis found that in agricultural communities, only 49 per cent of women own land, in contrast to 64 per cent of men. Tackling these inequalities is crucial to building a future where women not only hold communities together but also have the power to transform them.
Photo: UNDP Myanmar
In villages and wards across Myanmar, women are carrying far more than their fair share. They care for children and older relatives, manage farms and small businesses, and hold families and communities together through one of the most difficult periods in the country’s history. Yet much of this work remains unseen, unpaid and undervalued. Too often, we simply call it resilience.
Rethinking What Resilience Means for Rural Women
Resilience is a word I have been thinking about a lot. It recognizes resourcefulness and the ability to keep going in difficult circumstances. But it can also obscure what communities, and women in particular, are being asked to absorb.
When we celebrate women for coping with conflict, displacement, economic pressure and growing care responsibilities, we risk treating their endurance as an unlimited resource.
The recent UNDP and UN Women report Uneven Burdens: Women in Myanmar’s Crisis Economy makes the scale of this imbalance difficult to ignore. Forty-two per cent of women have no income, compared with 23 per cent of men. Women who earn an income receive significantly less on average, while still shouldering most unpaid care work. Among women outside the labour force, 78 per cent cite caregiving as the main reason they are not participating, compared with just over a quarter of men.
For rural women, these pressures intersect with limited access to markets, finance, productive assets and public services, as well as insecurity and displacement. Care does not disappear when incomes fall, families move, or services become harder to reach. It expands.
Women continue to care for children, older family members, persons with disabilities and displaced relatives, often while protecting household food security and seeking new sources of income. Care is not simply a private responsibility. It is part of the foundation on which economies and communities function.
Women are effectively subsidizing families and communities through their unpaid labour, often at considerable personal cost. Time spent providing care is time that cannot be invested in education, training, paid employment, enterprise or community leadership. Conflict makes these inequalities even more pronounced. In areas experiencing high levels of conflict, women’s employment stands at 62 per cent, compared with 82 per cent for men.
Resilience is not an unlimited resource, nor should it become an expectation that women will continue absorbing every new pressure placed on households and communities. We risk asking too little of the systems around them and too much of women themselves.
Progress cannot be measured by how much more women can endure. It must be whether the burdens they carry are reduced and their choices expanded. These disparities are not inevitable. They reflect barriers we can address through deliberate choices about how recovery and development programmes are designed, financed, and measured.
Turning Support into Greater Opportunity and Choice
Our work at UNDP shows both what is possible and how much further we need to go. By the end of the third quarter of 2026, our agriculture-based livelihood support had reached more than 151,000 women across rural and urban communities. More than 3,100 women also gained technical and vocational skills; Cash for Work provided short-term income to more than 5,100 women. UNDP has supported 196 livelihood and small-business groups reaching more than 1,770 people, 99 per cent of them women.
Beyond income and skills, UNDP has supported women to participate more actively in their communities. More than 6,400 women were reached through community groups and mechanisms that support local participation and decision-making.
These numbers matter. They show women gaining access to livelihoods, skills and opportunities to have a greater say in decisions that affect their lives.
But participation is not the same as transformation. A training opportunity does not by itself overcome an unpaid care burden. A grant does not automatically give a woman control over the resulting income. Membership in a community group does not necessarily translate into influence over its decisions.
This is where our work must become even more intentional. Livelihood and skills programmes need to account for women’s time, care, mobility and safety constraints. Women-led enterprises need access not only to grants, but also to markets, finance, technology and productive assets. Community mechanisms must create space for women not simply to participate, but to influence priorities and decisions. And our monitoring must look beyond participation to changes in income, control over assets, agency, safety, leadership and time.
On this International Day of Rural Women, we should celebrate women’s contributions without romanticizing the burdens they carry. Myanmar’s women are already holding families and communities together. Our responsibility is not to ask them to be endlessly resilient. It is to ensure they have the resources, rights and voice to shape the country’s recovery and future.