How can we determine whether and how projects and policies aimed at empowering stakeholders reach their intended goals? Empowerment is recognised by the World Bank as one of the three pillars of poverty reduction, and is found in the documentation of hundreds of its projects. This paper presents an analytic framework that can be used to measure and monitor empowerment processes and outcomes. It argues that the framework is useful both within single countries and for cross-country comparison of degrees of empowerment.
‘Empowerment’ can be defined as enhancing an individual’s or group’s capacity to make choices and to transform those choices into desired actions and outcomes. The degree to which someone is empowered is influenced by their capacity to make purposive choices (‘agency’), and the institutional context within which choice is made (‘opportunity structure’).
Agency can be measured by asset endowments of various types, and opportunity structure can be measured by the existence of formal and informal institutions. The degree of empowerment can be measured by the existence of choice, the use of choice, and the achievement of choice. Empowerment can be assessed in different domains of a person’s life (the state, market, society), and at different levels (macro, intermediary, local).
The ‘measuring empowerment’ framework can be used to evaluate the impact of a project that has empowerment as one of its goals, to conduct in-depth research, to monitor national-level concerns, and to track relative changes in empowerment among different countries. The objective and context of each activity will determine which aspects of the framework need to be used and how data need to be collected and analysed.
- To evaluate projects, the framework can identify empowerment impacts and causal relations. It can be adapted to fit the context and objectives of the intervention.
- As an in-depth research tool, it can be used to seek to understand whether, how, and to what extent marginalised people can be empowered.
- In a national level monitoring exercise, the framework can identify key indicators in each domain and be used to analyse empowerment at different levels. A survey module mapping institutions at a local level and with questions on agency, opportunity and degrees of empowerment can be added to generic living standards questionnaires.
- The framework’s concept of domains and levels allows comparative assessment of empowerment across countries. Some argue that such comparisons encourage governments to improve performance and help international donors to decide funding priorities.
Testing of this framework by the World Bank has yielded useful lessons. The concepts of domains, sub-domains, and levels provide a pragmatic solution to the fact that degrees of empowerment vary according to what people are engaged in and where the activity occurs. Further:
- The conceptualisations of assets and opportunity structure are useful for understanding the dynamics shaping degrees of empowerment, and for identifying strategies for improving people’s empowerment.
- Distinguishing between different degrees of empowerment is important because it helps to identify indicators that adequately reflect an empowerment outcome. It also makes it possible to capture gradual advancements in people’s empowerment status.
- Empowerment is a relational concept, and neither the actors nor the relationships are likely to be the same in any two countries. Hence, although domains, levels and degrees of empowerment may be generic, any measurement should be based on locally defined variables.
