Measuring Empowerment

Empowerment, especially of women and girls, is an important - but hard to measure - development outcome. This page provides tips and resources for collecting data on empowerment.

Guidelines

JPAL prepared an excellent | Practical Guide to Measuring Women and Girls' Empowerment in Impact Evaluations. 1 provides example survey questions related to empowerment and tips on using them, including the following categories: Economic indicators, Social indicators, Intimate partner and family indicators, Political and civic indicators, Psychological indicators, Education indicators, and Health indicators. | Appendix 2 provides examples of non-survey instruments.

Oxfam has a | How-to Guide to Measuring Women's Empowerment, sharing the experiences from their own research. It includes details on their measurement tool, along with example survey modules and stata do files.

Oxfam's | Real Geek blog provides details of a recent discrete choice experiment to assign implicit weights to the empowerment indicators which reflect the views and the perceptions of the women interviewed in the survey.

IFPRI developed a | Women's Empowerment Agricultural Index, which measures the empowerment, agency, and inclusion of women in the agriculture sector in an effort to identify ways to overcome those obstacles and constraints. The | Instructional Guide provides details on survey methodology, adapting the tool to local contexts, training enumerators, data cleaning, and analysis.

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This article is part of the topic Questionnaire Design

Additional Resources

• DIME Analytics’ guidelines on survey design and pilot