What IS empowerment?

Sometimes things in development are foggy, specifically the jargon. There are a lot of terms that pop up in proposals, mission statements, and reports that carry a lot of weight among development folk, and a lot of time and effort is spent developing these phrases in order to pinpoint a very specific concept. My last semester in graduate school, I read a WorldBank report on "quiet corruption," a term coined to speak about corruption that occurs at the frontline of development programs in education, health and other sectors. Often when people speak of corruption, we imagine powerful men in big institutions, counting giant stacks of illegitimate money. I remember reading this paper and knowing exactly what this "quiet corruption" looked like (nothing like the stereotypical type), what detrimental effects it can have on a health system, and how the root causes are so vastly different from what we typically think of as corruption (the causes aren't as cut and dry as greed and hunger for power, it's often about lack of support and adequate compensation). It was a challenge I had seen time and again in different settings, but had never thought about in such a structured manner. So sometimes, jargon in development can help to clarify and categorize things, and maybe allow for better solutions to certain problems.

And while I honestly believe that these terms are always developed with the best of intentions, sometimes they end up being just plain confusing. Sometimes to the point of hilarity. What IS capacity building? What does it MEAN for a program to be sustainable? And currently, my own professional challenge: What IS empowerment??? A friend forward me a link last night on exactly this fogginess, and while it made me chuckle it also reassured me that I'm not alone in my frustration. Compiled by the development economist, Will Easterly, the AidSpeak Dictionary lists the main buzzwords in development, along with a tongue-in-cheek definition offered up by various people working in the development sector.

Some are pretty amusing:
“experienced aid practitioner” : has large number of air miles in account

“field experience” : I can’t bear DC anymore

“innovation” : we’re sexy, you want to be associated with us

“sustainable” : will last at least as long as the funding

But it was this one that hit too close to home:
“empowerment” : what is left when all the quantifiable variables give non significant results

One of my main projects at The Org is to identify how The Program may lead to improved women's empowerment among participants, and how this in turn may lead to improved maternal and child health and nutrition outcomes. Sound straightforward? Nope. As it turns out, "empowerment" has become quite the hot topic in development, with funders excited to support programs that foster "empowerment," and therefore, organizations excited to define components within their programs associated with "empowerment." But the task of actually studying "empowerment" for one of these organizations is really, really tricky.

First, back to my initial quandary, What IS women's empowerment? Conducting a brief literature review on the subject (well, 14 pages single spaced...) revealed that academics are also somewhat at odds over what to call it (you say autonomy, I say agency, etc.), but that most agree that empowerment relies upon the idea that a process of change occurs, whereby one moves from a state of disempowerment to a state of empowerment, and that this process occurs through human agency (Malhotra, 2002). The ability to become empowered is therefore dependent on the ability of an individual to make choices, and through this increase in ability to make choices and the act of choosing one becomes empowered. Which is especially interesting when you think of how many programs talk about empowerment as something they will provide ("This program will empower women/adolescents/minorities/etc"), but really empowerment comes from within an individual and can not be created by an external force. This all seemed pretty straightforward, until I starting digging deeper...

Next quandary, What leads to empowerment and how on earth would you measure this? This literature on this was a bit more discouraging. Most scholars argued that given the very definition of empowerment as a process of change in human agency over time it may not even be possible to measure empowerment; since it's a process one has to measure at several points in time, and since it's a change indicators will also evolve over time so one may not even be able to use the same indicators at each measurement! PLUS, it's argued that empowerment indicators are entirely context specific (what looks like empowerment in NYC is not what empowerment looks like in Cambodia), so it's difficult to standardize empowerment and compare levels of empowerment across regions. Sigh.

Despite this, The Org and I are going to try. I've identified some interesting indicators for empowerment, am finalizing the research tools, and beginning next month the data collection will commence. Because so much of this is exploratory, part of the process is finding out not only how The Program relates to women's empowerment, but also what are the appropriate indicators to measure it in this setting. I'm excited to see what we discover. And despite AidSpeak Dictionary, maybe just maybe, these empowerment variables will be significant.

Reference: Malhotra A, Schuler SR, and Boender C. 2002. Measuring Women’s Empowerment as a Variable in International Development. Gender and Development Group Working Paper. World Bank.