How can empowerment be measured? This paper presents the experience of a social movement in Bangladesh, which found a way to measure empowerment by letting the members themselves explain what benefits they acquired from involvement and by developing a means to measure change over time. These measures have also been subjected to numerical analysis to provide convincing quantitative data which satisfies the demands of results-based management. The study shows how participatory assessments can empower and transform relationships, while at the same time generating reliable and valid statistics for what were thought to be only qualitative dimensions.
Empowerment is a contested concept and a moving target. It comprises complex, interrelated elements embracing values, knowledge, behaviour and relationships. The empowerment process is non-linear and depends largely on experience gained from opportunities to exercise rights that are inherently context-specific.
There is no common definition of empowerment; it is a value-laden term and the consequence of further value-laden processes such as ‘participation’ or ‘demanding and realising rights’. Furthermore, it is inappropriate for outsiders to pre-determine people’s experience of empowerment. At the same time, donors need to account for their actions to their governments and taxpayers. They need to be able to convince those who are uncomfortable with outcomes that cannot be expressed econometrically or numerically.
The approach in this study privileges people’s own experience, their perceptions and realities, resulting in numerical indicators which are derived from their own analysis of change. The process involves:
- A participatory procedure to gather perceptions and insights from people regarding the benefits and motivations of project participation. For example, participatory rural appraisal (PRA) approaches, drama or debate can be used to generate statements which describe people’s experience. The statements are clustered and re-worded in order to be meaningful to all project participants.
- Annual reviews of each indicator by project participants. This is taken seriously, as it leads to self-reflection and action plans for subsequent years. The process is self-facilitated and there is no deference to outsiders. There are no material benefits to be gained from exaggerating performance, so the scoring is realistic. The assessment process is regarded by group members as entirely for their own benefit, which as far as they are concerned is where it ends.
- The results of the self-assessments are collected with the permission of the groups, and are aggregated and processed to provide analysis for programme design, staff performance assessment and to satisfy donors’ need for reliable quantitative information. The data is categorised and weighted to enable trends, distributions and correlations to be reviewed.
Donors can support community-led monitoring and evaluation and assure transparency, rigour and reliability; this case demonstrates that numerical values can be given to outcomes that are primarily relational and behavioural as well as social and political in nature. Most importantly, this can be done without distorting the purpose of collecting the information, which is for the Movement members’ own use:
- By leaving the definition to those whose empowerment is being supported the problems of lack of common definition can be solved.
- A standard tool can be developed that lends itself to quantitative analysis by asking people whose empowerment is the focus of the programme to describe the process of empowerment.
- Self-assessed monitoring can meet the demands for rigour.
- The reflection process is empowering and itself adds value to the programme.
- Those undertaking the reflection process demand it. It is not for outsiders to suggest that this is too taxing.
- Donors must embrace new innovation and offer assistance where an organisation is pioneering something new.
- Monitoring and evaluation systems demanded from outside can distort the ethos of an organisation and its core values of rights-based programming.
- Monitoring systems must accommodate outcomes where they are context-specific, as is the case with many rights-based programmes.
