This paper explores the effect of increased household income on women’s economic empowerment in the context of complex household dynamics, and seeks to understand how access to economic inputs, information, opportunities or services impacts agency. It extrapolates learnings from data gathered by the Australia-funded Market Development Facility (MDF) which has been operational for six years across five Asia-Pacific countries. This report also establishes a foundation framework for understanding agency and lays the foundations for a tool to be developed that will allow projects to measure agency in a range of contexts. The extensive evidence used to build this model has been gathered by MDF teams in the field, and will be used to ensure that it can be practically embedded into Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) systems.

While the intended audience includes practitioners, implementers and programs looking to understand the impact of their interventions on agency and strengthen their WEE programming, the authors nevertheless feel that the paper’s relevance extends beyond the development field and encourages engagement, feedback and discussion from all interested parties and professions.