Military-first governments did not abandon social policy but refocused on priority areas, including food security, public health and education. Living standards improved compared to the famine years but not enough to allow most of the population freedom from economic insecurity. The core of government social policy was designed to improve food security and the core social group to which food security policies were addressed was children. Nutritional standards improved so that the threat of starvation as measured by what nutritionists call ‘wasting', which is a measure of the ratio of weight to height, fell below that of East Asia and the Pacific Asia as a whole. Improvements in nutrition were partly due to government interventions and partly because access to market opportunities for some of the population provided a safety-net that had not existed in the famine years.

Life expectancy diminished for men as well as women but the physical burden of market participation was disproportionately carried by women, especially mothers of young children who worked in markets and bore the brunt of heavy physical work in the home. One consequence was the persistently high maternal mortality rate and infant mortality rate (the death rate of children under one year old) that correlated with the poor health of mothers. Nevertheless, the underfive mortality rate, a standard international indicator of child wellbeing, steadily improved and this was partially because of the successful campaigns against tuberculosis, malaria and the effective national immunisation campaigns.

The government expanded education provision but educational facilities were under-resourced and nurseries, schools and colleges became reliant on locally acquired inputs. Enrolment remained high but attendance suffered as the educational institutions were without sufficient material resources and enough staff, many of whom had disappeared into the market. Children bene fited from the decreased ability of the state to exert suffocating levels of social control in the education system but parents had extra burdens as they had to help provide resources for schools in lieu of state-supplied inputs.