enabling assessment of a wide range of its PRSP achievements.<sup>24</sup> However, despite the prominence of citizen empowerment, the action plan’s detailing of ten critical areas of information gathering and analysis includes little mention of empowerment indicators or measurement. In addition, recent work undertaken for the World Bank’s forthcoming Ethiopia Poverty Assessment demonstrated that direct indicators of empowerment are extremely hard to find. Where information is available, it is scattered and largely anecdotal.

To address this problem, which Ethiopia has in common with many other PRSP countries, a draft empowerment module has been developed for partial integration into other household survey instruments or use “as is” at the national level. The full draft of the module can be found in 5. This represents an early and as yet untested effort to develop an instrument that can either stand alone as a national household survey, or have selected components modified to become an integral part of an LSMS or other national survey.<sup>25</sup> The draft survey module contains two sections. The first describes tools for institutional mapping at a local level. The second contains a questionnaire. At present, the questionnaire is lengthy and is regarded as providing a set of base questions that can be added to or subtracted from in different countries and contexts.

# 2.3.1 Agency and Opportunity Structure

Many intermediate indicators of empowerment, especially indicators referring to a person’s agency, are already generated by well-honed and tested questions in tools such as the LSMS and social capital survey tools.<sup>26</sup> Rather than generating new indicators or survey questions, the draft module utilizes indicators and questions that have already been developed. In both cases, existing sources of information or survey questions are identified. In addition to recognizing the contributions of existing instruments, this approach reduces possibilities of duplication—where surveys are already undertaken in countries—and enhances opportunities to easily integrate parts of the empowerment module into other national-level survey activities.

Table 1 in annex 4 identifies and lists those asset indicators developed by the LSMS and social capital survey tools that have been integrated into the national module. They cover psychological, informational, organizational, material, financial, and human assets. For analysis, data on respondents’ assets will need to be disaggregated by respondent/group attributes such as social and economic variables in order to understand the empowerment status of particular types of individuals or groups within a country.

In the ME framework, opportunity structure comprises the presence and enactment of institutions, defined as the “rules of the game.” Table 2 in annex 4 lists a series of indicators to capture the opportunity structure in a given country (divided by domains and

> 24 Sustainable Development and Poverty Reduction Program (SDPRP).

> 25 Efforts are being made to test the module as part of monitoring systems in at least two PRSP countries during FY04. Feedback on content and use would be appreciated.

> 26 On social capital survey tools, see Grootaert and van Basteler (2001), Grootaert, Narayan et. al. (2004)

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