Part I Defining "Empowerment" – the World Bank's perspective
Part II The Dialogue: Videoconference with World Bank representatives
– Introduction
– Transcript
Part I Defining "Empowerment" – the World Bank's perspective
The World Bank defines empowerment as "the expansion of assets and capabilities of poor people to participate in, negotiate with, influence, control, and hold accountable institutions that affect their lives" In simpler terms, this means strengthening the capabilities of the poor to exercise control over things that affect their lives. The World Bank admits that empowerment, as a term, has meaning that changes with social and political context, depending on its interpretation, but its core significance always remains the same – putting people on equal footing with each other, by giving marginalized or victimized people the opportunity, voice and power to rise above their challenges.Its place in the World Bank's framework
The World Bank recently decided to incorporate empowerment into its functional role as an agent of economic growth and poverty reduction. In doing so, the World Bank hopes to use empowerment as a style of treatment for its developmental functions, rather than as a separate function. The Bank has come to the realization that the best way to nurture sustainable development is to do so in a pro-poor way; by allowing the marginalized members of society to lend a hand in controlling the developmental process. Applying empowerment to economic growth and poverty reduction will also prove to be key in achieving the Millennium Development Goals. Areas in which the World Bank is currently focused on applying the empowerment framework include: the provision of basic services; improved local governance; improved national governance; pro-poor market development; and, access by poor people to justice.
Goals of empowerment
The main goal of empowerment is to develop the conditions necessary to facilitate poverty reduction and economic growth in such a way that poor people will have expanded choices and assets to be able to negotiate better terms for themselves in formal and informal institutions.
Elements of empowerment
Although there is no generally accepted framework for empowerment and no single institutional model, certain elements are almost always present when empowerment efforts are successful. Thus, the empowerment team has isolated four main elements, which are closely intertwined and act in synergy, and appear central to such a process. These four elements are:
- Access to information: it is a central element for an empowerment process to be successful, in fact, information from government to citizens and from citizens to government is critical for responsible citizenship and responsive and accountable governance.
- Inclusion and participation: Participation of poor people is the most developed of 4 elements in Bank projects. An empowering approach to participation treats poor people as co-producers, with authority and control over decisions and resources devolved to the lowest appropriate level.
- Accountability: There are different tools to ensure greater accountability. Amongst them, access to information allows pressure for improved governance and accountability, as well as access to law and impartial justice. When poor people hold providers accountable, control and power shifts to them.
- Local organizational capacity: It is only when groups connect with each other across communities and form networks or associations eventually becoming large federations with a regional or national presence that they begin to influence government decision- making and gain collective bargaining power with suppliers of raw materials, buyers and financiers.
Application of empowerment
The empowerment team focuses on application in five areas, which are: the provision of basic services (access and use of health, education, water, and roads ...); improved local governance; improved national governance; pro-poor market development; access to justice and legal aid. The empowering approach created the link between the supply and demand sides of development.
Examples: India and Ethiopia
For the moment, two examples of countries experiencing empowerment as such are given by the World Bank on its website. The first one is India , and in particular its 6th most populous state, Tamil Nadu, which is one of the better-off states in the country. In fact, this state has been quite successful in its efforts to address poverty. Yet, in spite of this good performance, poverty remains pervasive, and Tamil Nadu has to face the highest levels of inequality in the country. A large section of the population has not benefited from the economic and social development that the state has experienced. Within this context, the Government of Tamil Nadu in partnership with the World Bank is preparing the Tamil Nadu Empowerment and Poverty Reduction Project, which seeks to improve the livelihoods and quality of life of the rural poor (particularly women and other disadvantaged groups) through social, economic and democratic empowerment.
As for Ethiopia, the Bank and Government of Ethiopia opened discussions on the preparation of a civil society capacity building and empowerment program. These discussions mark a deepening of the Government of Ethiopia’s efforts to further political, fiscal, and administrative centralization.
Part II The Dialogue: Videoconference with World Bank representatives
Introduction
This video-conference was conceived and organized by Derek MacCuish, economic research and policy advisor at the Social Justice Committee of Montreal and Adjunct Professor at Concordia University, as a project for students of his seminar on global governance. The objective was to gather information on the topic, develop a deep reflection and above all, create a dialog between policy makers at the World Bank and the students, in order to have more precise information than what is given to the public.
Participants
On July 23, 2003 six students led by Derek MacCuish gathered in an audio–visual room at Concordia University for a one-hour long video-conference with two representatives from the World Bank. The World Bank was represented by two participants:
- Deepa Narayan, Senior Adviser in the Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network of the World Bank. She is also the lead author and team leader for the Voices of the Poor initiative, as well as the leader of the development of the empowerment framework for the World Bank and author of Empowerment and Poverty Reduction: A Sourcebook.
- Ruth Alsop, Senior Social Scientist and PRMPR Task Team Leader for Empowerment; she jointly manages the Empowerment Community of Practice.
All the students participating in this conference had put in weeks of preparation to familiarize themselves with the World Bank's work and, in particular, their empowerment framework. They had also reviewed the three books in the Voices of the Poor collection published by a team from the World Bank.
This final report of the conference was then prepared by participant Jessica Cohen.
The focus of the conference was on the new empowerment framework put together by the World Bank, its goals, how empowerment objectives are being implemented and how effects on developmental progress will be measured afterwards.
Choice of questions
After reading and studying the empowerment project and framework, each student chose an area she was most interested in and framed a few informed questions that were not answered to on the website, in the empowerment sourcebook or in the three volumes of Voices of the Poor. Each question was an informed question, students were ready to have follow-up questions according to the answers they were given, yet, since the questions were answered so thoroughly, there was no time left for these follow up questions. However, very often the long and detailed answers to first questions more or less answered some of the follow up questions.
After a round of introductions, the students sequentially delivered their questions to the two World Bank representatives. The questions presented maintained a continuity that matched up various themes into a smooth discourse. In the order in which they were asked, here are the questions and answers presented in the conference:
Transcript
Question 1
Jessica Cohen's focus was on goals of empowerment related to the World Bank’s general mission and means of implementation, as well as on the concept of empowerment:
Looking at the Empowerment part of the World Bank's website, it appeared to me that empowerment is not as much aimed to poverty reduction as it is to building/introducing democracy/democratic values in poor countries. (Access to information, participation and inclusion, accountability, rule of law ...).
Does it mean that democracy implies poverty reduction? This question was not addressed in the website until the recent workshop Moving Out of Poverty: Understanding Growth and Freedom from the Bottom Up. July 15-17 2003. Throughout different presented papers it appears clear that no automatic relationship is established between Democracy and Poverty, and that democracy has not often succeeded in poverty reduction. So why aim at creating democracy where it is absent? Why does it seem to be their method to empower people and eventually to reduce poverty?
Does this goal fit with the World Bank's goals and projects, which are mainly financial (through loans, credits, grants, technical assistance ...), since building democracy is political, and especially since the outcome of poverty reduction cannot be met for sure? And admitting that it could be part of the World Bank's role, is it in accordance with the right to interfere? The right to interfere is supposed to be forbidden, unless there is a major humanitarian crisis or a threat to world peace, and an interfering should only be authorized by the UN's Security Council. Is such an intervention in a country’s internal affairs possible?
Questioning democracy. Does it imply that the Western countries model (since what is described in the empowerment process resembles to what is experienced in these countries) is the best possible regime for the poor and that it is the way to empower them? How about participation in these countries? Do they really have their say? Does their access to vote and elections help things?
Response:
Deepa: The primary aim for focusing on empowerment is obviously, reduction of poverty; this has an obvious link with freedom and especially freedom to choose, in particular at the local level.
Going back to how they came up with the empowerment framework, we can find the origins of it in the Voices of the Poor study. The key findings that emerge from that study had to do with powerlessness and voicelessness, this study emphasizes the fact that income is central but there are many other important dimensions, such as market dimension relations. The issue of power appeared to be central, in terms of powerlessness, whether it is in a relationship between poor people and traders, between women and communities, women in households, etc ...
In the World development report 2000, the focus was put on three issues; opportunity, empowerment and security. Empowerment was the newest issue and I was asked to find out what does this mean for the Bank. In the definition of empowerment, there is a focus on an attempt to change people; there is a need for strengthening poor people and all classes' ability to influence and negotiate with government but also NGOs, etc ... to get a better deal for themselves.
Why have they decided to focus on government? First of all, because the Bank works primarily with governments, even though the framework is equally applicable to NGOs and traders. What is also very clear when we look at successes and failures across countries, and try to look for an approach that leads to successful empowerment of poor people, it is clear that there is not only one approach that works in all situations. Then, if there is not one single approach that works in every situation, are there common elements, trends that can be distilled and considered important?
The four elements the Bank has focused on are all elements that support democracy. The entry point is very clear, we want development to be effective, but how can we be more effective? How can we be effective in poverty reduction? If we decide to look at people as the most valuable resources, then we need to take obstacles out of the way to empower them and the whole issues of governance come in, and the very direct link to poverty reduction and the more indirect link to democracy, except at the local level, also do come in.
It is clear from Voices of the poor that poor people do not experience freedom even in democracies, so "big" democracy is not necessary if it does not translate into local democracy. What is also important is that empowerment obviously has implications for governance as well as local democracies but our entry point is not to support democracies but to support poverty reduction and more effective delivery of resources whether it is in health, education, rule of law or anything else.
In the book, if we do not say a lot about basic services it is because there is a much larger agreement that involving poor people in decision–making is key. The new areas are economic-wide issues, access to justice, which until very recently was taken primarily as a legal issue. But access to justice does not mean that only lawyers have to be involved. The fact of having a Supreme Court working and a very poor person access to justice are very different issues.
Ruth: Democracy and democratic frameworks are part of the multidimensional nature of strategies you have to engage in to pursue poverty reduction objectives. In the Sourcebook, this came out as being a critical area in which the World Bank in particular could become involved because democratic frameworks offer some of the formal, institutional frameworks which can provide an opportunity structure or be part of an opportunity structure which helps poor people use their assets to make effective choices, that is to transform the choices that they make into effective actions and outcomes.
Consequently, democratic legal formal institutional frameworks are part of the picture. Interactions between social norms/institutions that operate in societies and democratic and legal frameworks, which are supposed to improve poor people's access to development opportunities, often undermine the conditions that are set up by these formal democratic rules. So we know that the interplay between the formal and the informal will recognize that democracies where you have an overall framework do not always work and we had prophesized that they do not always work because you have these social rules amongst other things which undermine the macro–structures within which people operate.
Deepa: One of the explicit things I was asked to do is think of empowerment without touching on political systems because the Bank is supposedly a non–political institution and that is something we cannot, and do not, interfere in. So there is a fine line we should work on.
Question 2
Annik LeBlanc’s focus was on gender and culture.
The World Bank acknowledges that there is no single model for empowerment since social and cultural contexts differ from one member country to another. As such, the World Bank argues that state reforms aiming to alleviate poverty need to reflect local norms, values and behaviour. At the same time, the World Bank writes that certain empowerment approaches will inevitably cause controversy. For example, on page 13 of the empowerment sourcebook, it is stated that "local women's demands for autonomy and equal access to resources may run up against cultural norms of female exclusion".
Thus, my first question is "How can the World Bank help women become empowered when its empowerment approaches contradict cultural norms of female exclusion?"
Also, on page 13 of the Empowerment Sourcebook, the World Bank says that "reform processes must always try to build on cultural strengths to overcome exclusionary barriers and bring about pro-poor change". For my follow up question I might ask for some specific examples of how the World Bank plans to use cultural strengths to overcome exclusionary barriers or past examples of this.
Response:
Ruth: This is a really tricky area to become involved in. Obviously you can characterize the Bank as a large organization, which comes into countries and tries to change the cultural framework. We probably do not have a right to do that.
But I think that it is very widely accepted that women are deeply discriminated against in most cultures and particularly in most of our client countries. Deepa and I have worked in India and other countries as well, and discrimination on the basis of gender is not uncommon and we both feel that it is deeply unfair.
There was an early question raised on whether or not we perceive empowerment as having instrumental values, for example towards poverty reduction or if it has intrinsic value in itself, and in this case, I would argue that the interest in gender and improving women's positioning in society comes from a deep belief in the intrinsic value of improving gender relations in cultures, but how do we do that? As the World bank, we cannot come in and make specific recommendations to client governments about how they should improve gender relations, this is deeply offensive to people, but what we can do is we can work on what is generally already a move towards improving gender–equity within countries.
In many countries people are trying to change the cultural systems that already operate and do discriminate against women. We really try to improve understanding of gender relations in a country. Projects and programs now always have in them components that look at women's positioning, and beyond that, the positioning of other disadvantaged groups in society. And in some of the policy work as well, it is always a question that is raised, so we tend to play a facilitator role, building on what client governments are already doing although we know in our hearts that we are actually – and I should probably not be saying this – trying to change the cultures of some countries.
Deepa: We actually have a group working on issues of gender and poverty. Last year, there was a major report on issues of gender equity. They made a strong economic argument that without gender equity you are not going to get economic growth and performance. That shows that unless you invest in women, you are not going to get the outcomes that you desire.
On the practical level, I think a way to address your question is to marry economists and anthropologists. Because you have the economic policy but it has to be contextualized within the local context.
Let me give two examples. In Voices of the Poor's gender chapters, you will see that there are all kinds of issues on gender exclusion, violation of women, including domestic abuse. We have in the Latin American region as well as Indonesia, for example, programs that are dealing with issues of violence against women at the community level. It involves dialogs with men, women, community leaders, and sometimes it involves working with the village.
The distinction I make is we do not do it; it’s always the local people because the money goes through the government and once the government is in agreement, you try to find local solutions that work.
Another example is in India, in the state of Andhra Pradesh, there is a state'wide program that was financed by the bank and by the government of India, which consists in working with untouchable women, who are very poor. A lot of them are single or widows or have been separated. Starting with very simple questions: what is your problem? Can you solve your problem on your own? Or would it be helpful to work with others?
Out of this simple dialog, women get organized in small groups, work through micro–credit, and gradually, as they gain confidence in themselves, they start challenging authorities and requesting very basic services that they are supposed to be getting. So it's no new program, no new rules, but helping women access their rights.
Another example is Egypt, where very simple intervention helped empower women, which did not create conflict. There is most of the time, a latent conflict, but you start with relatively easy areas or areas in which there is energy amongst the women because they are the ones who are going to take action. In Egypt, women are entitled to all kind of government subsidies but they did not have identity cards so very simple movement of issuing identity cards helped women access all kinds of services including school for children.
In Africa they started working with widows and helped them organize to have a status in society, starting with a community, and from that building, it all comes down to building confidence and economic pace, which helps them to move out and start changing things. In all these situations, a conflict is inherent. But it has to be done only when governments say they want to address this issue, in order for it to work. So we do not go into the lead except for analytical work.
Question 3
Sophie Toupin focused on gender and empowerment in a series of question.
In the 1990s the World Bank shifted its feminist development theory from "Women in Development" (WID) to "Gender and Development" (GAD). Basically, programmes following a WID approach address women's practical needs. Whereas the GAD focuses on women's practical gender needs and strategic gender needs, by for instance challenging the existing divisions of labour or power relations. Although WID and GAD perspective are theoretically distinct, in practice it is less clear. Having said that my question is the following: What are the measures initiated by the World Bank to reduce the conceptual confusion between the WID and the GAD in the preparation of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) and Joint Staff Assessments (JSAs)?
If PRSPs are country-owned processes, to which extent do you believe the PRSP sourcebook can be perceived as infringing on the ownership of a country and more importantly, how the JSAs which comment on how rigorously PRSPs address poverty, environmental and other issues can be seen as interfering on the ownership of a country?
Rwanda's PRSPs is a good example that addresses gender issues commendably. It discusses gendered'budget, women's rights, and also promises to replace all laws discriminating against women, etc. However, even though Rwanda's PRSP is very progressive in terms of mainstreaming gender it, as well as other PRSPs, do not address and assess gendered impact of structural adjustment measures like privatization and trade liberalization.
My question is thus: How do you make sure gendered impact of structural adjustment measures like privatization and trade liberalization are addressed and assessed?
Gender budgeting is gaining increasing acceptance as a tool for engendering macro–economic policy–making. The 1995 Beijing Conference and the Platform for Action, called for a gender perspective in all macroeconomic policies and their budgetary dimensions.
Under the tools and practices of the empowerment sourcebook there is an emphasis put on participatory budget rather than on gendered–budget. Participatory budget can include civil society, vulnerable groups such as women, the general public, private sector, etc.
Having said that, how can one ensure that participatory budgets are gendered oriented?
With the present international context (i.e. unipolar world) what obstacles if any do you envisage in trying to implement the empowerment framework within the World Bank policies and programmes?
Response:
Deepa: I think we have made a lot more progress on the conceptual clarity. You cannot work only with women to improve their lives, you have to locate them in the broader context of households and society and understand men's complementary role that leads to this division of labor and status, etc ...
PRSPs are an evolving dynamic and I think the big shift and the big achievement has been the realization that the fact that the countries need to be in the driver's seat and countries need to own development is actually being put into practice. That is very simple but the reality is that development has been very donor–driven except in the large countries that were independent enough to say "no, we are going to do it this way". And now the PRSP processes are being defined.
It has been very difficult to get the donors to coordinate and collaborate. So once that foundation that the donors have to collaborate and harmonize their policies so they are not asking for 1200 reports after giving money has been laid, the discussion shifts to how can the strategies be defined, whether it is the growth strategies, whether there is enough infrastructure or is the gender issues permuting?
Gender has not featured prominently so far on the PRSP strategies. So the issues of refinement do not arise. First you have to get issues of gender in, and then you have to look at what it actually means in practice.
Ruth: I think the passage from WID to GAD is the reflection of a broader trend of understanding women and their position in society, economic relations within the households and within the community. There are many other people involved in analysis of women who were going through a similar thought process and similar experiences and I think this is what came out in seminar work, on differences between practical and strategic needs and interests. But it already pulled together a lot of our experience but in the bank I think all you see in the change from WID to GAD is the reflection of broader processes outside the Bank.
The Bank is learning and is usually somewhere behind other organizations on the learning curve because until recently we have not had a large staff of non–economic social scientists and our influence, while increasing, has not been strong. So when we have changed from WID to GAD inside the Bank, it was actually a major achievement to get that kind of transition in place and accepted. And the gender group in the Bank is doing a great job on that.
In terms of PRSPs, they are government documents. Usually (to explain the process), you have a macro–level economist leading a team which works with a government on a PRSP, so you have to understand that the government reflects its own cultural tendencies, some of which are against the inclusion of women issues in macro–policy issues. Moreover, they are people who are not from the World Bank or IMF side. They are professionals who are more interested in macroeconomic level issues than they are in insuring gender concerns appear in PRSP.
However there is an evolution. There has been an empowerment review of PRSPs and PRSCs that is now a document in draft and is under discussion within the bank before we get the public on it.
There has also been a social perspective review of PRSPs, which is also a draft document. So we are working within a context that hopefully is now supportive enough for us to try to push forward, based on the experience to date, to enhance the inclusion of gender issues in PRSPs that is not sufficient yet. PSIAs (Poverty and Social Impact Analysis) are being mainstreamed now as a prerequisite for PRSCs, this is credit lending that relate to PRSPs and gender is an important consideration within these PSIAs.
So this organization is slowly, because of its size and because of its history, moving towards a better understanding of how it can mainstream gender issues in some of its new lending instruments. The Bank is a huge bureaucracy and we are trying to work to change the way it operates.
Deepa: It is important not to overload one instrument with everything you want to achieve in a country. It is also very important to understand that these are government documents and that the role of outsiders is to facilitate and support government action so there are many social assessments.
They should also support PSIAs, which are both very rigorously using quantitative and qualitative methods, including modeling methods to assess the impact and tract impact of, both ex–ante and ex–post, particular policies including privatization or changing regulations that affect a particular commodity (butter, cashew, mohair or cotton), and all that work is being done.
I think it is very important that PRSCs and other new instruments that are being put into place do not become overloaded and become disguised conditionalities.
Question 4
Marieve Chabot focused on economic empowerment.
In the first pages of the empowerment sourcebook, it is mentioned that per capita output is reduced when an economy is dependent on the export of a "single primary commodity". The systematic exportation of raw materials combined with the importation of manufactured goods usually creates dependent economies. Are there any concrete ways in which the MIGA (Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency) and the IFC (International Financial Corporation) can re–direct foreign investment and the guarantees they offer towards sectors which will promote more diversified economies, therefore making host countries more autonomous and self-sufficient?
To what extent do host countries receiving IFC investment or MIGA guarantees participate to shape the projects designed by the investors and insurers. (Do they have any say in the type of sector that is going to be invested into? Are their experts designing the projects or are they merely endorsing the work of foreign experts?)
A couple of years ago, a bank's representative had mentioned that, if MIGA dedicated only 1% of its portfolio to Africa, it was because other private investors and political risk insurers were not interested in the region because it was too politically unstable. Besides marketing, is their any other step that MIGA took, or will take in the future, in order to promote investment in that region?
Does the IFC have an explicit set of indicators or guidelines that it could use to measure the developmental impact of its projects? How does it assess if its projects are efficient to alleviate poverty and if they really enhance sustainable development?
Response:
Deepa: This is a great question but I do not feel qualified to answer it. I do not work with IFC or MIGA and my only interaction with IFC have been at the level of their amazing capacity-building facility for particularly small'scale entrepreneurs. My contact with IFC was linked to globalization and how could globalization work for the poor, not indirectly but directly.
Are there any mechanisms that can help poor people access global markets? Over the last three or four years we've had workshops with leaders of large grassroots organizations as well as intermediaries and we were bringing them together to find out what are the barriers that constrain their work. And we are just about to create a global facility in India that will help poor people's organization connect to global markets but providing them the expertise they need and creating a network so that groups, poor people's organization, financial groups, large distributors, both agricultural and non–agricultural manufacturers can come together so we can actually finance some activities in a very practical way to connect buyers and distributors.
Ruth: I similarly cannot answer this question. I would suggest that you address it directly to them.
Question 5
Naa Ashorkor Tetteh focused on the role of the private sector in development and its implications for empowerment.
The World Bank's private sector development strategy is strongly in favour of privatizing infrastructure such as water supply and health care facilities. I understand how this is meant to improve their service quality and delivery and thus to empower – in particular, poor people – by giving them better quality and greater access to these resources. However, one of the great risks of privatizing these basic services is that affordability becomes a big issue. So I would like to ask you what kinds of safety nets have been put in place to protect the poor who cannot afford the costs of privatized basic services like water, and how the empowerment framework is responding to this problem to help the poor gain access to these services.
It is often the case that World Bank conditions for giving loans to developing countries include freeing up trade barriers for greater participation in the global market and devaluing local currencies. However, these moves eventually make developing economies more vulnerable to exploitation in the global market and are devastating for local enterprises. So I want to ask you how the empowerment framework can respond to protect standards of living and local economic downfalls when developing countries are asked to open up their economies to the global market.
Response:
Ruth: There is a big debate within the Bank on privatization as you may have seen from recent newspapers' articles where the World Bank has been pushed towards privatization particularly of key social sector services. The debate in health and education has been quite fierce within the Bank. If you sit in discussion around sector–lending activities, that is, loans from the government or health or education, you will find that some persons will say that privatization is the way to go and some who feel it is exactly the wrong way to go.
If you are concerned in investing in for example, human capital and education in order to provide poor people with a key asset which will help pull them out of poverty, some of the arguments for privatizing are, I think, quite strong and one of the strongest from an empowerment perspective is the enhancement of accountability through provision of services by the private sector.
Because the private sector is governed by market forces, the argument is that if people do not pay, that private sector organization will cease to function. So there is an inbuilt mechanism there and we can all be sceptical about that. The degree of scepticism there is has led to a consideration of safety nets in both health and education projects and programs.
At the moment the empowerment's staff in the bank is so small that we are not able to comment on providers of old sector loans. We are a small group with limited capacities so we have to be strategic. But if you go to websites and look at some of projects' documentation for social sector lending activities, you will find generally that there is attention paid to how you provide the safety net for very poor people when it comes to both health and education whether it is reduction of school fees, whether it is provision of mid–day meals to poor students or provision of text books to poor people. And similarly in health services, there are reductions of fees for consultations and prescriptions.
Deepa: The reason for privatization is the realisation that there are well–intentioned subsidies, if you look at the power sector in India, or use of irrigated water, they go to the rich. The rich get organised so it is very difficult to remove the subsidies.
The fundamental question is how can you harness the incentives that make the private sector work? Who provides services for poor people, as well as for others? So the schemes that work are systems of cross–subsidies, but actual design and delivery of that is very specific to the local context and I think in that way you can have private sector partnerships and privatization which makes services work for all but does not exclude the poor.
For example, roads in India. They have built a coastal highway in a southern state. India has the highest rate of road accidents in the world and they did not want to exclude poor people but wanted to improve the road (all done by Indian engineers). They came up with a design and had a choice between two roads: a two–lane highway and a four–lane one, which was very expensive and everyone would have to pay tolls. So they came back to the two–lane highway and charged the cars. And next to the big lane, they have created much narrower lanes on which cars cannot go, it is only for donkeys, bicycles, etc ... and they do not have to go through tolls gate. So this is a clever design issue where the private sector had the incentive to collect the tolls, a great incentive because of the nature of the contract to maintain the roads, so roads start functioning, there is a revenue being generated and the poor are not excluded because they do not have to go to the toll but there is still a road that they can use.
Look at South Africa, India, or Indonesia for example, if you look at water utilities reform, it is the same issue of cross–subsidies and one of the key things coming out is that information dialog and consultation is very good because it is out of this (particularly public consultation) that local design issues and ideas came out, which work in that particular environment.
So I think it is a very underdeveloped area where people have presumed that what has worked in the West has to be transferred to India, or Nigeria or Ghana, that is not true, the principles have to be transferred and then how those principles work and how they manifest themselves will only come out at local levels and in understanding what the local context is.
Question 6
Emilie Blais focused on the measurement of empowerment and how the World Bank plans to assess this measurement.
The World Bank recently held a workshop on how to measure empowerment. Since it is difficult to have access to what has been discussed during that workshop, I would like to ask you what were the main points of discussion in regards to the solutions proposed to measure the four elements included in your definition of empowerment, saying, access to information, inclusion and participation, accountability, and local organizational capacity.
What are some of the details for this analytic framework and methodology for measuring the outcomes of empowerment implementation?
What are some of the practical strategies you propose for measuring and assessing the effectiveness of empowerment on the development process?
Will the methodology for measurement be designed after the millennium development goals set by the United Nations?
What kind of empowerment is more the focus for measurement? I.e. community, individual, political ...?
What do you define as –developmental progress–? Why do you choose these terms to define it that way?
Response:
Deepa: That workshop did not get into details of measurement. Its big contribution was that they were able to engage serious economists, psychologists and anthropologists, all on the issue of "how do we measure empowerment" and then "what are the research designs that will enable us to decide if empowerment makes a difference in poverty reduction", which comes back to the first question that was asked.
So I think that those two questions were the ones that were really debated and we got into the details of methodology, in terms of quantitative and qualitative methodology. And then you try to conceptualize empowerment so can its impact can be separated from other variables because it is not empowerment alone that leads to development outcomes. You can have a group that is very organized and mobilized and still poor.
In terms of the social capital work, we know in Latin America that many poor communities are very organized, indigenous communities particularly, so they know what they want, they can express it, etc ... But they remain very poor because the broader social, political, and institutional context has not enabled them to access broader opportunities, etc ...
Ruth: One of the useful things that came out of the workshop to me is that there was a re–enforcement in the commonalities amongst conceptual frameworks that are currently being used for understanding empowerment. A lot of people are interested in empowerment now and a lot of people have even approached it through their analytical work.
Deepa has pulled together some of the leaders in the field at the February workshop on measuring empowerment and what came through that for me was that all of us, in a way or another, are focusing on one hand, on the multi–aspects of people and on the other hand, on the opportunity structures that people live and work within and it is the interplay between these two key aspects of anyone's life, any individual, or any groups' life, that can help them transform the decision they make into desired actions and outcomes. So that was very helpful.
There is a high level of abstraction but it does mean that we are then secure in the knowledge that any analytic framework we look at for measuring empowerment, based on this idea of assets and opportunity structure is going to be consistent with what other people are doing. By analytic framework, I mean the key elements you focus on when you are undertaking any kind of work which requires you to develop a research methodology, whether it is monitoring and evaluating system, or whether it is more in–depth research exercise.
We are currently involved in a five–country study, which has two objectives. The primary objective which is driven by organizational needs of the World Bank and client governments, is a need to develop indicators and instruments for measuring empowerment and measuring empowerment at different levels: at the macro–level, at the sector–lending level and for management purposes, at community levels and the local level, and also the implementation level. The five–countries study is attempting therefore to, at the end of two years, come out with indicators and instruments.
We have been doing some work on the analytic framework, that is the areas of focus for data collection and the instruments, which are appropriate for that. I have an overview paper, which identifies what it is across countries that you can look at.
Of course, there are huge problems in trying to measure empowerment in different environments. A woman in a village in India is very differently placed from a woman sitting in Uganda or Ukraine, or even from a woman sitting in a Western society. So it is fine to talk about abstract levels of empowerment when it comes down to measurement we are very aware that empowerment is relative and context–specific.
In the five–country study, this is a major challenge. What we have done is we are working with five-country teams, which are developing their own methodology to measure empowerment. But we have an agreed–analytic framework, which says it will make them focus on these particular areas of empowerment and empowerment outcomes and that development outcomes will be specified in terms of the particular set of activities that they are looking at.
We are looking at first, the impact of investment on empowerment itself and then we are also looking at the impact of investment in empowerment on development outcomes. So we are also implicitly looking at the relation between empowerment outcomes and development outcomes.
Briefly, on methodology, the way that we are managing to deal with this phony question of countries specifics, context specifics differences, is that we are looking at different levels of empowerment and different domains of empowerment. This ranges from the state level, empowerment and the state, power relations, relations with the state, below that, economic relations, and then social relations.
And there are a lot of sub–domains, such as intra–households relationships, relationships within the community, between the community and the political sphere. There are now about fourteen sub–domains. The idea is that these domains can be common across country but the way you measure empowerment, indicators that you use, any quantifiable indicators that you use within those broad domains, are context specific, country specific. I do not know where we are going to come out.
Concluding comments on the conference and conclusions by Jessica Cohen, who drafted this report:
This conference was very enriching for all of us since we had the opportunity to discuss an important topic with those directly implied and working on these issues. After a few weeks of information seeking and gathering, we had come to a point at which we knew what this project was, what the problems encountered were, what countries were at stake, what issues, and we were capable of thinking and questioning it by ourselves. We tried to make sure that our questions were pertinent enough and not already answered to, searched on the website but also elsewhere. Finally, we have all learnt a lot about this topic, and our area of focus in particular.
We were all happy to participate to this conference with Ms Narayan and Alsop, who were kind enough to grant us some time. Our questions were answered to thoroughly, which gave us the opportunity to go deeper into what we had been working on and to gain greater understanding of this topic. As a conclusion we would say it was a very enriching experience.