Abstract

While many social science theorists have proposed individual and collective agency as drivers of development, only recently has an experimental body of evidence emerged on the social impacts of interventions designed to enhance people’s agency. Building on Sen's (1985, 1999) view of agency as the capacity to act toward self-valued objective, this talk presents two interdisciplinary experiments from Niger on how agency is understood within this cultural context and how psychosocial interventions reflecting such agency can impact development. Bossuroy et al. (2022) tests the addition of agency-enhancing psychosocial interventions (a community film event and soft skills trainings) to a multi-faceted national social protection program (including e.g., cash transfers, savings). Adding these psychosocial interventions yielded a more effective, and cost-effective, design for reducing levels of poverty, improving mental health, and increasing social cohesion. Thomas et al. (2025) further conducts an embedded experiment which finds that a resonant model of agency in this cultural context centered maintaining social harmony and respect over more individualistic features like showing self-initiative. A brief agency intervention built upon this culturally resonant model of agency effectively increased women’s economic outcomes over a year while one built on a Western model of agency yielded limited effects. These experiments illustrate how agency-building can be operationalized in a given cultural context and scaled by the state to enhance development efforts.