Agency is a person’s capacity to make choices and act in accordance with their values and desires. Agency is shaped by one’s social location, power, and material resources, and structural constraints. It can be individual or collective. 

Rights-based actors want to increase the agency of individuals who have one or more identities that lad to their having unequal power. For example, a girl from a minority tribe with a disability should be able to make as many decisions in her life as a boy from a majority tribe in her community who has no disabilities. (see intersectionality)

Feminists appreciate the power of collective agency, emphasizing how collectives and social movements navigate patriarchal power structures and create new possibilities for social transformation that are not possible individually. 

Gender transformative education builds the agency of individual young people and collectives to effectively navigate structural constraints and create social change.