Joint Land Certification Programmes and Women’s Empowerment: Evidence from Ethiopia

Abstract

This paper connects two important development policy issues: women’s empowerment and land certification. We use propensity score matching to study the impact of the Ethiopian joint land registration and certification programme on women’s empowerment. Data are collected using surveys and a field experiment, enabling construction of complementary indices for empowerment. Our main result is that joint land certification has significant effects on women’s empowerment, particularly on dimensions that indicate female participation and roles outside the home. This result is robust to various sensitivity checks and alternative model specifications.

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) for financial support. The data and code are available on request ([email protected]).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. A few papers document positive effects of the land certification programme, particularly on agricultural investment and productivity, and the workings of the land rental market (Holden et al., 2009; Holden et al., 2011; Melesse & Bulte, 2015).

2. The administrative structure of Ethiopia is in the following order: federal government, regional governments, zone, woreda (district), kebele (the lowest administrative unit).

3. Other index construction methods, like factor analysis, often allow reducing multidimensionality of an indicator (empowerment) and to capture only relevant variables (for a particular household). However, most of our outcome variables are binary, and are not suitable for such methods (Krishnakumar & Nagar, 2008).

4. Eqqub is a kind of rotating savings and credit association (ROSCA). It is often organised by members themselves and can measure women’s capacity to organise themselves in groups for mutually beneficial activities.

5. If the amount allocated to the common pool is C_i , then the amount an individual retains for himself or herself is 15 − C_i . The payoff function $\left(P_i\right)$ for each individual is given as $P_i=15-C_i+\frac{1}{4}\left(2\right){\displaystyle \sum _4^{J=1}{C}_i}$. This incentive structure was maintained in both parts of the game.

6. Dropping couples who make similar private allocation decisions should be random. We test this hypothesis using a simple two-sample t-test and Supplementary Materials Section C shows the balance test statistics for non-missing and missing couples. As expected, no significant difference was observed for key variables, indicating that the mechanism for missing was close to random. Alternatively, we construct another ‘experimental empowerment index’ for the entire sample by assigning 0.5 to both couples when private contributions are equal, and the results remain largely similar (results available on request).

7. The source of tenure insecurity (driver of certification) in Ethiopia has been the state itself through its frequent land redistribution policies (Deininger & Jin, 2006). Moreover, customary land laws do not exist in Ethiopia, owing to the discontinuous evolution of its tenure system (Deininger et al., 2008). Land proclamations do not leave discretion for making land distribution decisions beyond regional state administrations. All these features contribute to minimising potential roles of local level heterogeneity in certification uptake. Moreover, all sample households belong to the Amhara ethnic group and Orthodox Christianity.

8. NGO presence seems to impair women from receiving joint land certificates. We conjecture this association may be due to a selection effect. Our study districts are known for deep-seated early marriage traditions, and NGOs aiming to empower women are often directed to these villages where women are more marginalised and less empowered.

9. 15 women are off the common support region for the experimental empowerment index.

10. Many women respondents in our fieldwork confirmed this difference. One of the members of the ‘land use and administration committee’ at the kebele level in Jabitehinan district said that ‘after the land registration and certification programme, joint certified women tend to claim their rights confidently and dare to take any possible and affordable legal action when their husbands treat them unfairly and endanger their land rights’.

11. The bias is calculated as the difference of the mean values of the certified group and the unmatched/matched uncertified group divided by the square root of the average sample variance in the certified group and the unmatched uncertified group (Rosenbaum & Rubin, 1985).

12. We also checked the robustness of other women’s empowerment indicators to different matching algorithms and ATT estimates remained largely robust for the indicators (results available on request).

13. We also run the selection model with district fixed effects and find qualitatively similar results.

14. The Amhara region has a well-established customary conflict resolution system known as the Shimagelle system (Baker, 2013; Cecchi & Melesse, 2016). Both certified and uncertified communities have a long tradition of solving land-related and other types of conflicts.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) [453-10-001].