On May 2, 2008, Cyclone Nargis struck Myanmar’s Ayeyar- wady Delta and swept across the region toward Yangon. By the time the storm had passed, it had killed over 140,000 people, tearing apart families, destroying homes, and shat- tering livelihoods. In the months and years following Nargis, communities, supported by the national and international aid community, worked to rebuild their lives and repair the devastation that the cyclone had caused.
By focusing on a panel of 40 Nargis-affected villages across time, five rounds of SIM have been able to track how village life has changed both post-Nargis and, in more recent years, as villagers faced both new challenges and continued recov- ery from Nargis. This fifth round of SIM (SIM 5) provides a snapshot of village economic and social life in 2017 and analyzes change over more than nine years since Nargis.