The benefits of empowerment for deprived people have often been put forward without the backing of a large and well-established body of empirical research. This article proposes indicators that could be added to individual or household surveys to generate internationally comparable data. Using such data, researchers could improve our understanding of connections between variables (such as empowerment and income, governance, health and nutrition outcomes) in different contexts and of their durability over time. The proposed indicators include: control over personal decisions; domain-specific autonomy; household decision-making; and the ability to change aspects of one’s life at the individual and communal levels.
Empowerment has been defined as having two components. The first is seen as agency – the ability to pursue whatever goals a person wishes to. The second component concerns the institutional environment, which enables people to exercise their agency successfully.
Criteria used to select appropriate indicators included their relevance to the lives of the poor, their comparability across countries; and whether they have been tested and found to be appropriate measures of empowerment for research purposes. The indicators proposed concern four possible exercises of agency, the increase of which could lead to empowerment: choice, control, change and communal belonging.
- Empowerment as control (power over): control over personal decisions. These indicators seek to assess to what extent the agency of individuals and social groups is constrained by local power relations and patriarchal social hierarchies.
- Empowerment as choice (power to): domain-specific autonomy and household decision-making. These indicators focus on the perceived ability of respondents to make decisions in their household and the factors underlying decision making processes.
- Empowerment as change (power from within): changing aspects in one’s life (individual level). This indicator addresses the ability to change. Indicator questions assess the willingness of the individual to change and the different aspects of which the individual wishes to change.
- Empowerment in community (power with): changing aspect in one’s life (communal level). This indicator is used to assess people’s ability to change things collectively in their community.
These indicators could be used to investigate the following examples of potential connections between empowerment and other aspects of wellbeing:
- The virtuous circle of empowerment and human development. Strong claims are made for increasing the agency of deprived people to render them able and committed to be effective agents of their own development.
- Whether individual empowerment can promote project effectiveness at the local level. Local participation is argued to influence development outcomes.
- Whether individual empowerment and good governance are mutually reinforcing.
- The link between empowerment and psychological / subjective wellbeing; we might expect empowerment to exert a positive effect on psychological states and perceived wellbeing.
- The impact of empowerment on pro-poor growth.
