Empowerement :
An Analytic Framework
Reflection
• People in all walks of life often have difficult choices to make—but for some the range of options is more restricted than for others. In remote villages and urban communities, many women, men, and children have limited
Reflection
• The poor in particular have limited
employment opportunities, little voice in decision making over locally available
resources, often lack basic services, have
limited recourse to state-sponsored systems of justice, and are rarely able to exercise
Reflection
• These people suffer from inequality in terms of the power they have to change their lives and escape poverty. Some, such as women
Introduction
• Understanding and measuring empowerment and for framing action to further
empowerment of individuals or groups.
• Draws on a long sociological tradition of the analysis of power
Introduction
• Examining the concepts of agency and opportunity structure
• Considers the degrees of empowerment that can result from the interaction of opportunity structure and agency
• Outlines how this can be used to assess
Framework Overview
• The framework draws heavily on discussions of power in social theory literature
Framework Overview
• Empowerment is defined as a group’s or
individual’s capacity to make effective choices, that is, to make choices and then to transform those choices into desired actions and
outcomes.
Framework Overview
• Agency is defined as an actor’s or group’s ability to make purposeful choices—that is, the actor is able to envisage and purposively choose options.
