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The Many Dimensions of Poverty pp 120–139Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

On the Concept and Measurement of Empowerment

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Abstract

Empowering individuals and groups enhances their contribution to, and enables them to benefit from, poverty reduction. This chapter, which treats empowerment as ‘enhancing an individual’s or group’s capacity to make purposive choice and transform that choice into desired outcomes’, presents an analytic framework rooted in the concepts of asset-based agency and institution-based opportunity structure. After describing the framework and its component parts, the chapter references five country cases where the framework has been used to examine empowerment in a range of cultural and development settings.

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Authors
  1. Ruth Alsop
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Sydney, Australia

    Nanak Kakwani (Former Director) (Former Director)

  2. International Poverty Centre, Brazil

    Nanak Kakwani (Former Director) (Former Director)

  3. Bar-Ilan University, Israel

    Jacques Silber

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© 2013 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)

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Alsop, R. (2013). On the Concept and Measurement of Empowerment. In: Kakwani, N., Silber, J. (eds) The Many Dimensions of Poverty. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230592407_7

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