Aletheia Donald, Cheryl Doss, Marya Hillesland, Hazel Malapit, and Heather Moylan presented findings from the testing of several MAGNET tools at the Driving Change: Leveraging Personal Agency Approaches for Development convening at Johns Hopkins University on May 1, 2024. The two-day convening, which included Naila Kabeer and Kaushik Basu in its list of speakers, focused on perspectives on agency in development, the measurement of agency, and integrating agency in development. The MAGNET speakers introduced the MAGNET goals of broadening and deepening measurement of agency, and presented findings within three focus areas: preferences and internalized norms, decision-making, and sense of agency. The findings presented within each focus area helped provide evidence for several research questions, including how internalized norms can be accurately captured, how to capture agency through effective power when a woman is not directly involved in decision-making, and how to move past traditional time use surveys and understand an individual’s time agency. The presentation ended in a group discussion, which discussed priority questions that can be answered with existing data, as well as open questions about agency measurement.
International Food Policy Research Institute