# **Measuring Empowerment in Practice:**

# **Structuring Analysis and Framing Indicators**

Empowerment—that is, enhancing an individual’s or group’s capacity to make choices and transform those choices into desired actions and outcomes—is an increasingly familiar term within the World Bank and many other development agencies.<sup>1</sup> Targeting practitioners engaged in the analysis of projects and policies that have empowerment components, this paper provides guidance on how to unpack the concept in order to measure related processes and outcomes.<sup>2</sup> First recognized by the Bank in its _World Development Report 2000/2001_ (World Bank 2000b) as one of the three pillars of poverty reduction, empowerment is now found in the documentation of over 1,800 World Bank-aided projects, and it is the subject of debate and analytic work within the development community (see annex 1 for a summary of efforts to measure empowerment).<sup>3</sup> Despite growing interest and increased investments in empowerment, the development of instruments and indicators with which to monitor and evaluate empowerment processes and outcomes is still at an early stage. Project teams and governments still lack the tools necessary for determining whether and how projects and policies aimed at empowering stakeholders reach their intended goals. This paper presents such an analytic framework. Rooted in both the theory and the practice of measuring empowerment, the framework demonstrates how practitioners can structure their approach to gathering and analyzing empowerment data. This paper also provides examples of indicators useful for tracking empowerment at both the project level and the country level.

The first section of this paper presents and explains components of the measuring empowerment (ME) framework. Section 2 illustrates how this framework has been interpreted and applied to projects in four countries. Corresponding empowerment indicators are presented in annex 2. The section also discusses using the framework to

> 1 The term empowerment is commonly used to indicate both a process (of empowering groups or individuals) and an outcome (a person or group is empowered).

2 This paper is an interim product of PRMPRs work on measuring empowerment. It supports and draws on evidence from a five-country study currently underway and managed by PRMPR. Country cases are managed by Lynn Bennett (Nepal), Arianna Legovini (Ethiopia), Mike Walton (Brazil), Mike Woolcock (Indonesia), and Emanuela di Gropello/Nina Heinsohn (Honduras). These task managers are working in collaboration with the following international and local consultants: Kishor Gajural, Kim Armstrong and Sandra Houser (Nepal), the Ethiopian Economic Association (Ethiopia), Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Shubham Chaudhuri, Patrick Heller and the Centro de Assessoria e Estudios Urbanos (Brazil), Patrick Barron, Leni Dharmawan, Claire Smith, Rachael Diprose, Lutfi Ashari, Adam Satu, and Saifullah Barwani (Indonesia), and ESA Consultores (Honduras). For additional information please visit: www.worldbank.org/empowerment/.

> 3 Following the publication of the _World Development Report 2000-2001_ , the World Bank launched _Empowerment and Poverty Reduction: A Sourcebook_ (Narayan 2002), an initial attempt to define and explain the concept of empowerment. The work presented in this paper compliments the _Sourcebook_ by providing a tool for analyzing and measuring empowerment. It also compliments the Bank’s work on measuring social capital.

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