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ABSTRACT
Advancing women’s land rights is a priority for the international development agenda. Little consensus exists, however, on which rights should be monitored and reported, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa where individual property rights and customary tenure regimes coexist and where much agricultural land remains unregistered. In such contexts, land ownership statistics may provide only a limited picture of women’s and men’s land rights. While some surveys collect information on women’s land ownership, others collect information on women’s management of land or control over the output produced. Using recent waves of the Living Standards Measurement Study-Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) for six African countries, we examine who holds the different rights on each plot of agricultural land and the extent to which these rights are held by the same person. We focus on (a) reported ownership, (b) who decides and manages the agricultural activities, and (c) who controls the output of land. We find that these rights over land do not always overlap, indicating that concepts of ownership, management and economic rights should not be used interchangeably. Consistent measures of women’s and men’s land rights are fundamental for the development of policies to empower rural women and to contribute to poverty reduction.
Disclosure statement
We declare no conflicts of interest associated with this work.
Notes
1. In this paper, we focus on rights regarding agricultural land. Rights for common property resources, such as water or forests, are beyond the scope of this paper. See R. S. Meinzen-Dick et al. (Citation1997) for a discussion of property rights in these contexts.
2. Our findings are consistent with those of Doss et al. (Citation2015) who calculate the gender land gaps for earlier rounds of the surveys.
3. The complete references are: the 2013–2014 Ethiopia Economic Survey (ESS), the 2013 Malawi Integrated Household Panel Survey (IHPS), the 2011 Niger Enquête Nationale sur les Conditions de Vie des Ménages et l’Agriculture (ECVM/A), the 2012–2013 Nigeria General Household Survey (GHS), the 2012–2013 Tanzania National Panel Survey (TZNPS) and the 2010–11 Uganda National Panel Survey (UNPS). More information about these surveys, including the data, is available on: http://surveys.worldbank.org/lsms/programs/integrated-surveys-agriculture-ISA
4. See Deere and Doss (Citation2006) for a broad discussion of these issues.
5. The type of document that has legal standing will vary across countries.
6. This is an instance where the survey questions do not reflect the legal framework, since the law does not permit people to sell land. Nonetheless, there are informal land markets and people report having the right to sell.
7. The ownership document may be a title or a certificate of long-term land rights.
8. We use the term plot management to highlight that different family members may manage different plots. The definition is similar to that of FAO's farm manager, but for a smaller unit of analysis.
9. Who in your household makes the decisions concerning the use of [CROP] output from [PLOT]? (see also in the annex).
10. Who manages/ controls the output from this parcel, among household members? (see also in the annex).
11. When the information was collected for each crop on each plot, we aggregate the responses to the plot level so that any household member who decides about the use of any of the crops on the plot is said to control the output from the plot.
12. Unless specifically stated, the information in this section is derived from FAO’s Gender and Land Rights Database (GLRD) (http://www.fao.org/gender-landrights-database/en/) and the USAID land tenure and property rights portal (http://www.usaidlandtenure.net/country-profiles).
13. Villages can register their land and obtain certificates; in addition, individuals can obtain customary rights of occupancy certificates for village land.
14. New land bills were passed in 2016, but they did not apply when this data was collected.
15. Although we follow the framework of Doss et al. (Citation2015) for this section, our statistics reported here may differ because they report the distribution of the total area of land while we report the distribution of plots owned by the household. We also use a later round of data.
16. All adult individuals (ages 18 and over) listed in the household roster comprise the total number of adult men and women.
17. The response options for Niger are to identify either an individual or the whole household. When the latter is used, all adult members are treated as owners, possibly overestimating individual level ownership.
18. As noted above, in Niger, the only coding options were to list a single person or ‘the whole household.’
19. This is due, in large part, to the fact that the southern and central parts of Malawi, where the majority of the people live, are matrilineal and women are more likely to be identified as owners of land (Berge et al., Citation2014).
20. If the one right is held solely and the other is held jointly, we do not consider these as being held by the same person.
21. The table simply tabulates the gender of the plot owner and plot manager, but in almost all cases where the gender is the same between the owner and manager, it is the same person.
22. Because the question concerns the use of harvest, the decision-makers with regard to harvest are identified only for the crops on the plot which were harvested at the time of the survey, except in Uganda where information on the control of output was collected at the plot level regardless of whether or not crops were harvested.
23. As the responses about the control of the output of each crop were aggregated from the plot-crop level to the plot level (except in Uganda), the aggregated statistics show if women are involved in the decision about the use of at least some crops, but not necessarily all crops.
24. There is a small gender gap in the perceptions of land security in Nigeria, with reports for concerns of disputes for 41% of sole man-owned plots and 36% of sole woman-owned plots.
25. However, as mentioned in the previous section, the question about the control of harvest was only asked with regard to the crops that were already harvested (and not crops that were still in the field) and, therefore, the responses should be treated with caution.
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Notes on contributors
Vanya Slavchevska
Vanya Slavchevska is a gender and social inclusion economist within the Crops for Nutrition and Health Lever of the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT (the Alliance). Her current work focuses on gender and youth issues in cassava value chains in South East Asia and Latin America and aims to inform inclusive and equitable technology development and scaling. Her research interests also include rural transformation and migration impacts on labor dynamics and women’s empowerment, as well as the application of big data and other information technologies for gender research. Before joining the Alliance, Dr. Slavchevska worked in FAO’s Social Policies and Rural Institutions division in Rome and for the World Bank’s Gender Innovation Lab in Washington, DC. She has substantial field experience in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia; her research has been published in high regarded peer-reviewed journals. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from American University in Washington, D.C. and a B.A. in Economics (Summa Cum Laude) from Hood College, Frederick, MD.
Cheryl R. Doss
Professor Cheryl R. Doss is a development economist who works on issues of intrahousehold dynamics, the gender asset and wealth gaps, methods for collecting sex-disaggregated data for gender analysis, and agriculture and rural development, with a primary focus on Africa. She joined the Oxford Department of International Development, following 17 years at Yale University. She has an extensive publication record in the fields of economics, international development, and agricultural economics. She has also served in advisory and consulting capacities for the International Food Policy Research Institute, UN Women, UN Statistics, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, FAO, the World Bank, among others.
Ana Paula de la O Campos
Ana Paula de la O-Campos (Economist, ESA) is a Development Economist at the Agrifood Economics Division of FAO. As an econometrician, Mrs. De la O-Campos most relevant areas of work include the design of program evaluations and supervision of the surveying processes in the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa, food security analysis of countries in Central Asia, and analysis on gender inequalities in the rural labor market and the extent to which social protection programs empower women. Mrs. De la O-Campos supported the development of the Rural Income Generating Activities (RIGA) database and the Gender and Land Rights database. More recently, she worked as a policy analyst in FAO’s strategic program for Reducing Rural Poverty, leading FAO’s work on poverty analysis. She holds a MA in International Development from American University (Washington DC) and is currently pursuing a MS on Data, Economics and Development Policy with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Chiara Brunelli
Chiara Brunelli is a sociologist and holds a PhD on Statistics for Social Research. She works as a statistician in the areas of food security, agriculture and gender. She started her career with the World Food Programme in 2004 as a data analyst specialized in monitoring and evaluation and in food security. In 2011, she moved to FAO where she currently works as a statistician for the Statistics Division. In her present assignment, she supports national institutions in the design, implementation and analysis of large-scale agricultural surveys. In the field of gender statistics, she contributed to expand the statistics available on gender and land and she provided guidance on the monitoring of the SDG indicator 5.a.1. At the same time, she promoted the mainstreaming of gender into agricultural surveys and censuses through guidelines and in-country assistance.