Large-scale poverty reduction depends on the effective empowerment of poor people themselves. This publication sets out a conceptual framework that can be used to monitor and evaluate empowerment programmes, based on papers written by practitioners and researchers in a wide variety of fields, including economics and political science, sociology and psychology, anthropology and demography. These papers draw on research and practical experience at different levels, from households to communities to nations and in various regions of the world.

"Alsop and Heinsohn present an analytic framework that can be used to measure and monitor empowerment processes and outcomes. The measuring empowerment framework, rooted in both conceptual discourse and measurement practice, illustrates how to gather data on empowerment and structure its analysis. The framework can be used to measure empowerment at both the intervention level and the country level, as a part of poverty or governance monitoring. The authors first provide a definition of empowerment and then explain how the concept can be reduced to measurable components. Empowerment is defined as a person's capacity to make effective choices--that is, the capacity to transform choices into desired actions and outcomes. The extent or degree to which a person is empowered is influenced by personal agency (the capacity to make purposive choice) and opportunity structure (the institutional context in which choice is made). Asset endowments are used as indicators of agency. These assets may be psychological, informational, organizational, material, social, financial, or human. Opportunity structure is measured by the presence and operation of formal and informal institutions, including the laws, regulatory frameworks, and norms governing behavior. Degrees of empowerment are measured by the existence of choice, the use of choice, and the achievement of choice. Following the conceptual discussion and the presentation of the analytic framework, the authors show how the measuring empowerment framework can be applied using examples from four development interventions. Each example discusses how the framework guided analysis and development of empowerment indicators. They also present a draft module for measuring empowerment at the country level. The module can be used alone or be integrated into country-level poverty or governance monitoring systems that seek to add an empowerment dimension to their analysis. This paper--a product of the Poverty Reduction Group, Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network--is part of a larger effort in the network to conceptualize, operationalize, and measure empowerment"--Abstract.

Many development agencies design and implement interventions that aim to reach, benefit, and empower rural women across the value chain in activities ranging from production, to processing, to marketing. Determining whether and how such interventions empower women, as well as the constraints faced by different value chain actors, requires quantitative and qualitative tools. We describe how we adapted the project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agricultural Index (pro-WEAI), a mixed-methods tool for studying empowerment in development projects, to include aspects of agency relevant for multiple types of value chain actors. The resulting pro-WEAI for market inclusion (pro-WEAI+MI) includes quantitative and qualitative instruments developed over the course of four studies. Studies in the Philippines (2017), Bangladesh (2017), and Malawi (2019) were intended to diagnose areas of disempowerment to inform programming, whereas the Benin (2019) study was an impact assessment of an agricultural training program. The pro-WEAI+MI includes all indicators included in pro-WEAI, plus a dashboard of complementary indicators and recommended qualitative instruments. These tools investigate the empowerment of women in different value chains and nodes and identify barriers to market access and inclusion that may restrict empowerment for different value chain actors. Our findings highlight three lessons. First, the sampling strategy needs to be designed to capture the key actors in a value chain. Second, the market inclusion indicators cannot stand alone; they must be interpreted alongside the core pro-WEAI indicators. Third, not all market inclusion indicators will be relevant for all value chains and contexts. Users should research the experiences of women and men in the target value chains in the context of the programto select priority market inclusion indicators.

Given the lack of consensus around how to measure empowerment in WASH, mapping existing indicators to two frameworks frequently used in the empowerment literature illustrates knowledge gaps. We identified 290 gender-sensitive indicators across nine WASH themes that were mapped to the Reach-Benefit-Empower and Resources-Agency-Achievements frameworks. Most indicators measure “Benefit” and/or “Resources.” Existing gender-sensitive indicators capturing empowerment and agency in WASH are lacking; only 10.3% of indicators capture “Empower” and 24.8% of indicators capture “Agency.”

This publication contains a number of essays and supplementary materials based on a two-day working meeting, held in Washington D.C. in March 2004 and organised jointly by the World Bank and the UK Department for International Development, to consider the relationships between power, rights and poverty reduction issues in theory and practice. Issues addressed include: competing definitions and concepts of power and rights, using experiences drawn from different countries; ways of helping development practitioners to apply these concepts to their work; a summary of the major theoretical conceptualisations of power and a literature review on power and rights.

"This document offers an excellent explanation of the concept of empowerment and develops a very useful framework for disentangling and clarifying the concept. It is both practical and well justified on the basis of the literature. The approach and survey instruments developed to measure empowerment are innovative and very useful. Developing an approach to empirically measure empowerment, and to track empowerment indicators over time in a way that is operationally feasible and consistent with World Bank standards is certainly an outstanding achievement."Reginer Birner, Senior Researc.

Pakistan performs poorly withrespect to gender equality, women’s empowerment, and other gender-related indicators. Few studies in Pakistan measure the multiple dimensions of empowerment along which women are marginalized or disenfranchised, particularly in the country’s rural areas. Even fewer studies address the gender gaps in empowerment levels of men and women. This paper calculates a Women’s Disempowerment Index to examine women’s control over production, resources, income, household decisions, and time burden. The index is based on a slightly modified methodology than that used for WEAI calculation by Alkire et al. (2012). The analysis is based on a sample of 2,090 households in the rural areas of Pakistan. Data used for the study werecollected in three rounds of the Pakistan Rural Household Panel Survey from 2012–2014 by International Food Policy Research Institute/ Innovative Development Strategies for its Pakistan Strategy Support Program. The results show low empowerment levels of only 17 percent for women in the rural areas of Pakistan. The results also show very low empowerment of women in all indicators and domains except the time burden/workload indicator. We then analyze women’s disempowerment by subsamples based on individual and household characteristics. We also calculate disempowerment levels among men and compare it to disempowerment levels among women. Comparison within the household reveals large disparities in empowerment levels among men and women. In a comparative analysis, men are found to be more empowered in domains of production, income,and autonomy. Both men and women were found to be most disempowered in access to and control over resources. The paper provides a baseline for tracking women’s empowerment over time and identifies areas that need to be strengthened through policy interventions

Community empowerment has been frequently studied at subnational levels but it is less clear how to measure it at a national level. Mixed methods approaches would be advantageous using quantitative data from databases plus qualitative information to derive a range of variables and indicators. This report identifies assessment methods that have been used and evidence for integrating qualitative and quantitative data for national assessments. When resources are limited or there is no current practice of measurement of community empowerment the simplest approach is to combine a selection of quantitative variables and indicators available in statistical databases. When resources can be allocated a more systematic approach would supplement such accessible data with some form of rapid qualitative assessment. Ideally a formal national monitoring and evaluation system would be instituted that collects all the relevant quantitative and qualitative data and combines these into a regularly updated assessment.