The Psychology of Personal Agency
Anita Shankar on bringing self-empowerment to development & building a global movement.
Anita Shankar's mother married before completing high school. She rarely joined the family at the dinner table and never called her husband by his first name. And so, from an early age, Anita was exposed to a world where women played fundamentally different roles and had drastically different opportunities to men.
Born into a large family in a small Indian village south of Goa, her family moved to the United States when she was just a toddler. But for Shankar, the gender disparities were starkest when they visited their extended family in India.
“The women’s lives seemed so difficult,” she remembers. “So many bright women, but their lives’ focus seemed to be on getting a husband, and the main reason they should get a higher education was to get a better husband.”
On the one hand, Shankar felt lucky. Growing up in Maryland and Connecticut, she was a rebellious American teenager whose parents respected her refusal to have an arranged marriage – unlike friends who were sent back to India “to be tamed again.” On the other hand, she couldn’t dislodge the sense of injustice that her Indian cousins, like so many millions of women globally, had far less freedom over their own lives.
“I struggled to reconcile the disparate lives of these people I was so deeply connected to, and I wondered: why is it like that?”
Decades later, Shankar credits these early experiences with motivating a career dedicated to enhancing human agency. She founded and runs the Self-Empowerment and Equity for Change Initiative (SEE Change) – an initiative within the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health with a unique mission: to help people across the Global South build positive mental habits, realize their leadership potential, and achieve their personal and professional goals.
A roundabout path: from medical science to agency
While formally established in 2020, the idea for SEE Change was born much earlier. After studying microbiology as an undergraduate and getting a master’s in biology, Shankar realized that a life in the lab wasn’t for her. Eventually, she became interested in public health – particularly in how it manifests locally in low-income and rural settings. While pursuing her PhD in medical anthropology, she spent two and a half years living and studying vitamin A deficiency in a Nepali village, then spent more than a decade working on maternal health and childhood nutrition in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and India.
But despite her passion for public health, Shankar always sensed that something big was missing in her efforts.
“I realized that a lot of our outreach work and behavior communication programs were barely touching the surface of what was really going on,” she said. “We were making people a little bit healthier in poverty, but we weren’t addressing the core constraints that these women felt on a regular basis.”
In the late 2000s, Shankar – now married with four children – returned to the United States and found herself at a turning point in her career. Rather than working around the underlying challenges of gender inequality and disempowerment, she wanted to directly address their core constraints. She began researching the concept of agency – and found that, while many people talked about it in academic settings, there were very few attempts to operationalize it.
Connecting with psychologists and groups in the self-help movement, Shankar explored and participated in empowerment teachings, group counseling efforts, and leadership training. She found the lessons and workshops transformative. But Shankar felt they all had a serious problem. Virtually all of the approaches were largely designed for people living in the United States and Europe.
“I thought, let’s see if we can adapt some of these exercises for use in an international setting,” Shankar said – but rather than design and scale a global template, she sensed that customizing workshops to its own unique local context would be the most effective approach. “It’s not a silver bullet. This is complex. It requires human interaction and empathy. It deals with culture, which many researchers find too complex. But I knew that we needed to try local adaptation. And I knew that we needed evidence around whether it actually works.”
Formalizing a transformative approach, while navigating its challenges
After years of running pilots, generating evidence, and building a team of researchers and trainers, Shankar officially founded SEE Change at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Based at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she is an associate scientist, and funded in part by USAID, the initiative has run locally-adapted workshops and trainings in 25 countries to support personal agency, which it defines as “the capacity and motivation to take purposeful action and pursue goals.”
Working across a wide variety of contexts and groups, including entrepreneurs, private sector employees, government workers, and refugees, SEE Change workshops always start by helping participants understand how their thoughts, beliefs, values, and emotions impact their actions. From there, they offer tactics and strategies for reframing negative thought patterns, entering an agentic stance, setting goals, and taking proactive steps towards one’s positive vision for the future.
Shankar is acutely aware, however, that such personal transformations are easier said than done – and that agency can have real costs.
“There is often a social cost to being an agent,” she said. “People get angry and irritated with you. So you have to meet people where they are and just create the conditions for them to take the first step. Sometimes it’s a big step, sometimes it’s a little step. Some people will be ready to become agents, others will need more time. It can require real bravery. Often, this will be the first time they’ve asked themselves these kinds of questions. We deliberately want to bring people through their own personal journey, so they can identify the places they want to go and come up with a plan or behavior change that they can start taking action on immediately.”
Using agency to amplify development programs
SEE Change workshops always complement an existing development intervention, whether that means strengthening health outcomes, improving livelihoods, supporting climate change resilience, or other skills-building efforts. The team has worked with micro- and small entrepreneurs, large employers, rural energy and agriculture startups, governments, refugees, sex workers, US Peace Corps volunteers, women and youth community groups.
“Agency is foundational – that inner building of one’s capacity to be an agent is inherent to all human beings,” she said. “We see our work not as separate from other programs but as directly integral. If you build these capacities but don’t have anything to act on, you might lose the skills. These approaches can easily be filtered in and embedded into how organizations run, how programs run, how staff engage with participants, and how activities with participants are designed. It’s really just building the capacity so that you can do better, whatever it is that you’re doing and whatever mission you have.”
In addition to rigorous evidence of its positive impacts, SEE Change has collated a growing collection of informal success stories. After a workshop in an urban slum in India, one woman told Shankar about confronting her drunk and abusive brother-in-law – demanding that he sober up before taking his wife back. In a Congolese refugee camp in Rwanda, Shankar worked with participants who were deeply despondent and doubtful that anything about their situations could change – but after the workshop, they were 30 percent more likely to start a new business, and earned on average 34 percent more. After a tropical cyclone hit Mozambique, a female electrician who participated in a SEE Change training led a team of ten people, including five women, to restore electricity on her island within a week.
“I think there’s a hero, or many heroes, in every village,” Shankar said. “They just need the opportunity to strive. We don't need to empower everyone in the same way. We just need some critical people standing up and saying ‘Oh, listen! We can all do better as a community, for ourselves and for others.’”
Beyond its direct impacts, SEE Change emphasizes training trainers and building the capacities of frontline institutions and their embedded facilitators, mentors, and other connecting roles. All of its materials are open source, and Shankar envisions global hubs of personal agency trainers, supporting a broad range of development interventions. To help make that a reality, Shankar, her team, and SEE Change’s partners are working to build a global movement around agency.
“There’s a lot of momentum and excitement about the potential and possibility of this work,” she said. “We’re embedding ideas about agency into as many minds as possible, through development programs, school programs, governments – in the hope that they become a normal part of how we do business and reach our missions. The overall vision is to build an understanding of how central agency is for reaching things like the SDGs and for addressing the problems we’ll face in the future.”
Reflecting on a decade of this work and its successes, Shankar is focused on the next phase.
“We have already generated exciting evidence that this can work and have catalytic effects,” she said. “We're also focusing on how best to do this, based on extensive practice. The big challenge now lies in getting more people on board and bringing this to scale to help support resilient communities.”
Written by Greg Larson.
This blog is part of a series on Leveraging Personal Agency for International Development, a convening co-organized by The Agency Fund and the SEE Change Initiative at Johns Hopkins University.