Lessons in Agency
Insights from agency-focused training programs in India, Indonesia, & the Philippines
The Agency Fund was founded based on the emerging evidence that enhancing personal agency can be a powerful driver of human flourishing, especially in low-income settings. But there remains much to be learned about the practical efforts to support personal agency in the day-to-day operations of nonprofits.
One promising approach incorporates agency-focused content into training programs. These efforts emphasize technical skills but also personal strengths like self-awareness, confidence, and emotional resilience – with the goal of empowering marginalized individuals, particularly women and youth, to harness their inner capacities and take meaningful action in shaping their own futures.
The Agency Fund recently spoke with two expert trainers at the forefront of these efforts: Anna de Chavez, who leads the training component of the USAID Women in Waste Economic Empowerment (WWEE) initiative in Indonesia and the Philippines, and Philip Mathew, who leads the livelihood program at the Magic Bus Foundation in India.
In addition to their years of experience training women and youth from underserved communities, Anna and Philip are also both affiliated with the Self-Empowerment and Equity for Change Initiative (SEE Change) – an initiative within the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health with a mission to help people across the Global South build positive mental habits, realize their leadership potential, and achieve their personal and professional goals.
The following interview excerpts have been edited for length and clarity.
What are some of the critical ingredients for a successful agency-focused training?
Philip: It’s important to design a curriculum well-suited to the communities we are trying to help – unemployed youth and especially young women from low-income communities, particularly first-time job-seekers. We focus on building their agency, self-esteem, and confidence to understand themselves, set life goals, and think about their career choices while building competencies like communication, teamwork, and interview skills.
The technical content aligns with India’s National Occupational Standards but the components focused on agency and empowerment adapt SEE Change’s methodology to the Indian context. We start with social and emotional capabilities, like being aware of how thoughts, feelings, and beliefs influence our behavior, managing negative emotions, and dealing with criticism. Then: how do I overcome my limitations? What are my goals, and how do I achieve them? In case of obstacles, how do I overcome them? The trainings are highly participatory, with groups of about thirty youth, and includes practical applications to their day-to-day experiences. The trainers go through the methodology themselves, then are coached regularly by our master trainers.
Anna: Working with women waste collectors, we’ve found that making the trainings inclusive is often the first important step. Women often want to attend, but they might not if it means struggling to put food on the table for their families. So we always provide a stipend that will replace their lost income during the training. For mothers who are breastfeeding or need to bring their children to the training, we provide nursing rooms and childcare. And since this type of training can surface difficult emotions, we provide therapy sessions for any participants who are in need of that.
But even before the training, it’s important to recruit trainers who can succeed with these types of approaches – but it can be difficult to see these types of skills on an application. It usually only comes out in the interview, where we ask specific questions about their experience working with women in the field, how they think about empowerment, and their ability to adapt a training method to different contexts and audiences. These types of questions help us go beyond technical skills to understand: what are they capable of? How have they navigated their life? Are they hungry for change, and hungry for helping other people? You need trainers who are logical and organized but also passionate about what they're doing – people who are open and self-motivated to make and pursue goals, who can learn and try to understand themselves, and who can help other people cultivate these skills.
How did you become convinced in the value of agency-focused training?
Anna: I’ve been a business trainer for more than 20 years, funding micro- and small-entrepreneurs and often focusing on women-run businesses. But I can say, this is really different. I was surprised to learn new concepts – like ‘limiting beliefs’ and ‘intrinsic weaknesses.’ Ultimately, it’s about unlocking your fears and learning how to manage them to achieve your dreams.
For example, when I went through the training myself, I realized that one of my limiting beliefs was related to a medical condition I have, hypothyroid, which made me struggle to stay physically fit. By addressing those limiting beliefs, I’m much healthier now – and as a trainer, I see these kinds of changes in our participants. It helps their businesses, but it also changes them in ways that are hard to quantify. Initially, they think the concepts are trivial – but they eventually realize how powerful it can be to believe in yourself, to be able to set goals and objectives, and to make plans for achieving them.
Philip: I learned what agency is at an early age, growing up in a very rural village speaking only our local language. So when I transitioned to an English-only school, I failed – I just couldn't understand anything. Like most youth, I dreamed of earning a degree, but I really struggled with academics. Fortunately, I had two professors who believed in me. They guided me in learning English and remedial math courses, and taught me how to prepare for exams and have confidence in myself. When I look back now, having read the works of Albert Bandura and others for my PhD studies, I think that was the realization of my agency and the belief in my own self-efficacy. I learned that by setting a goal and striving for it, I could overcome any challenge or failure
And I’ve spent the last 25 years following that belief in my life and in my profession, using mentorship and psycho-social support services to help economically marginalized people gain that capability. I’ve seen how this can ignite people’s minds – it is a turning point in life, when you understand yourself, who you are, what your goals are, and how to achieve them. Now I’m working to bring that experience and approach to our 400 trainers, so we can pass it on to the youth our organization serves across India.
How does peer mentorship and collective agency figure into your training efforts?
Anna: Promoting a safe space for the participants to connect is a key part. On the first day of the training, the trainer explains that there is no right or wrong answer and that they won’t be exposed to discrimination, criticism, harassment, or any other emotional or physical harm when sharing. We remind them about this in every single session, while also emphasizing that it’s okay if they’re not ready to share. Once that’s established, these groups of women really come together and open up, sharing their experiences and challenges, including their experiences with gender-based violence. Most of them are not really asking for advice – they are just venting in a circle of trust and strength, and it can be really powerful to create a safe space for that.
They bond through their experiences, but also their shared dreams and the barriers they face in their families and communities. Together, they help each other overcome those barriers and find it in themselves to do more. Many come back, wanting to become trainers and help more women benefit from this approach. A recent participant said, “I have never held a microphone in my life” – because we use microphones when we have sharing sessions in open spaces – “I’m proud that I can now use it to tell my story.” They find their own voice.
Philip: When I worked with rural women entrepreneurs in India, having that peer support and mentorship from other women in their communities was always essential. They face so many challenges that go beyond running a business: gender discrimination, pressure from their families, domestic responsibilities. When community-based women collectives get trained in both business and psycho-social support services, these self-help groups – which involve a lot of one-on-one mentorship – can help fill that vacuum. For example, in many rural parts of India, women are not allowed to leave the village on their own due to discriminatory gender norms. But once they are in a group, the group is allowed to go out together. Getting that freedom and getting exposed to the outside world is a new beginning, and it gives them confidence.
The same type of mentorship and community-based psycho-social support is important for young people who are starting their career journey in new settings. At Magic Bus, our mentorship and “hand-holding” support continues even after they are hired and start their first job through regular calls, chats, and so on. This is very particularly important for young women, who often face gender discrimination in the workplace, to help them continue.
You’ve both referred to this type of training as life-changing. Can you share some stories of what that looks like in practice?
Anna: WWEE’s first-funded entrepreneur was Riza Santoyo, an informal waste collector in the slums of Quezon City. When we met her, she was working almost 24 hours a day to feed her children. She didn’t have tools for work, so she had to pay around $1/day to rent a bicycle with a cart to transport waste to the junk shop. But after the training and working with a mentor, things really turned around. With some basic business skills, she was able to save more, and that financial security allowed her to start investing in her business. She gained confidence in dealing with challenges, which enabled her to negotiate and speak up for herself more.
Now Riza’s working half the time, or even less, but earning double – over $120 per month, allowing her to save and spend more time with her family. She even has a better relationship with her husband, because she was able to explain that running her business was important for their family and for herself. More than anything, she says the experience gave her a new mindset – and you can see that she’s physically transformed into a more presentable woman, including investing in dentures. Now she’s a resource to other participants in our program. She isn’t formally recognized as a leader in her local community, but she's showing us how strong her leadership skills are.
A lot of our participants are also dealing with husbands who beat them when they’re angry or drunk. In this industry they're more vulnerable to it, not only at home, but also in the workplace. At the start of the training, they’ll often say that their families know they’re being beaten but don’t support them, saying that the marriage was their decision and they should accept things as they are. It’s the social norm. But during the training, many of these women say the most powerful part is the emphasis on self-love – learning to value yourself, to know that you are worthy, and to stand up and protect yourself. Often, this enables them to get help, either by asking their husbands to stop or reporting them locally, and many of our participants have said that their husbands have stopped hurting them as a result of that self-love they learned in the training.
Philip: Most of our youth trainees find sustainable employment, with an average salary of nearly $2,500 annually – a comfortable family income in India. So many of these youth, a majority of whom are young women, become breadwinners for their families. But they are learning life lessons, not just career skills, and the changes go beyond financial impacts. A lot of our participants, especially the young women, emphasize that the program helped them gain confidence. One of our recent participants, Kushi, talked about how before the training she would hesitate before engaging with strangers. “The training,” she said, “has equipped me with the skills to navigate social situations confidently.” In the words of another, Shilpa: “It wasn’t just about finding a job, but transforming myself – I learned how to interact with people confidently and set goals.”
Our training has scaled nationally, thanks largely to our long-standing and stable funding through our corporate social responsibility partners – in India, there is a requirement for large businesses to donate 2% of their profits to CSR, and we are a well-established recipient of this type of funding. Since 2014, we have trained nearly 375,000 youth, of which 300,000 have found sustainable employment.
Anna: Our USAID-funded program is newer and smaller, but our impacts are similar. We have data showing the quantitative effects on the women’s businesses and on the larger goal of the project, in terms of preventing plastics from polluting the oceans. But we are hoping to look beyond the women’s individual financial returns to the broader impacts – the “social rate of return” on their families, on their communities, and on really hard-to-measure factors, like whether a woman is spending more time with her children or whether her husband has stopped beating her as a result of her participation in the training. This approach is really different, and it can be expensive – there are a lot of processes, and implementing it can be tedious. But it’s by far the most effective approach, because the impact is lasting.
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.