CARE has worked in Myanmar since 1995 with the aim of improving living standards through cross-cutting measures, including: gender equality & women’s empowerment; public health and hygiene; water, sanitation; HIV/AIDS prevention and care; support for pregnant mothers and children; food and livelihood security (including support to develop agricultural and fishing practices); and disaster risk reduction.

CARE Myanmar’s Program Strategy is explicitly oriented around supporting particularly vulnerable and marginalized groups in Myanmar. CARE recognizes that the key to achieving equitable development outcomes lies in shifting deeply rooted, structural underlying causes of poverty which contribute to exclusion and vulnerability of particular groups in society. CARE Myanmar’s Program Strategy identifies the empowerment of women as a key pathway to equity; linked to two long term programs focused on achieving lasting change.

In response to the climate crisis, CARE Myanmar has started focusing on humanitarian response and disaster risk reduction. Longer-term, livelihoods-focused adaptation and resilience building has been very limited in the past. In 2019, CARE Myanmar launched both the Myanmar Climate Capacity Program and Mekong Climate Resilience Hub. The programs support CARE and partners in strengthening learning and organizational and regional capacities for climate resilience programming. One of the long-term aims of these programs is to improve the capacity of CARE Myanmar and partners to increase women and girls’ resilience to conflict and disaster.