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ABSTRACT
This study uses individual-level survey data from women and men in Uganda and South Africa to examine coupled women's joint ownership of land and housing. It compares women's control over and benefits from jointly held land and housing with those of coupled women not owning land or housing at all and coupled women owning them solely. The lack of a clear and consistent advantage of joint ownership potentially arises from frequent disagreement within couples about whether the land or house is jointly owned. The study serves as a reminder of the complexities of joint ownership in practice, particularly within families, that need to be considered in order for coupled women to benefit from joint asset ownership. Efforts promoting joint ownership, for example, joint titling and marital property laws supporting joint ownership, should not only consider these complexities but also establish and communicate clear and enforceable rules for joint ownership.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Krista Jacobs is a development economist whose current work focuses on gender and assets, including creating new methods to measure women's and men's asset rights and their linkages with economic empowerment, building gender capacity of community-based legal aid programs and assessing their effectiveness, and building the monitoring and evaluation capacity of local organizations engaged in promoting women's asset rights. Other work includes research in food security and HIV/AIDS. Dr. Jacobs holds a PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California, Davis.
Aslihan Kes is a gender and economics specialist whose work includes developing approaches to integrate gender considerations into agricultural projects, evaluating the costs of maternal mortality and gender-based violence, and measuring women's asset rights globally and their linkages to HIV/AIDS and gender-based violence. She holds a MS degree in Economics from the University of Texas, Austin.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors thank the journal editors, four anonymous reviewers, and participants at the Workshop for the Special Issue on Engendering Economic Policy in Africa (Cape Town, South Africa, May 2013) for their detailed and constructive comments. We also thank Paula Kantor for helpful guidance on early drafts and Laura Kaufer for ready research assistance. We acknowledge our colleagues on the Gender, Land, and Asset Survey (GLAS) project – Urmilla Bob, Herbert Kamusiime, Vadivelu Moodley, Sophie Namy, Margaret Rugadya, Meredith Saggers, and Hema Swaminathan – as well as the International Center for Research on Women who supported the project. All errors and omissions are our own.
Notes
1 The version of the Policy cited is from February 2013, the same month in which the Cabinet approved the Policy. The official version of the Policy has yet to be published on the website of the Uganda Ministry of Lands, Housing, and Urban Development.
2 The household head was defined as the person with primary responsibility to see that members are provided for (even though the person might not be doing the provision). The head could be either a man or a woman and was identified by the household members. Despite enumerator training on the above definition of head and discussion about different situations when women or men might be heads, it is likely households identified men as heads whenever an adult man lived in the household. The GLAS sought to capture a range of women in different social and familial situations – heads, partners of heads or women in the principle couple, widows, daughters, sisters, mothers, and mothers-in-law of the head (whether the head was a man or woman). For this reason, a woman from the household was randomly selected to be the second respondent.
3 In the South African sites, freehold tenure confers full ownership rights to landowners. Individuals, couples, or other holders have a written title and rights to develop and transact on the land as well as exclude others. Freehold does not include Permission to Occupy (PTO) tenure, which operated independently from deeds and registered lands. Under PTO, traditional authorities issued written permits that allowed people to occupy and use public lands. Though declared unconstitutional in the mid 1990s, PTOs are still awarded in some areas (15 percent and 17 percent of households in Inanda and KwaDube reported PTO lands).
4 The sample for KwaDube was confined to the Dube Tribal Authority rural area.
5 We believe polygyny is underreported in the Butenga sample. Rates from the 2011 Demographic and Health Survey report 15 percent of women in the region where Butenga lies in polygynous marriages (CitationUBOS and ICF International 2012).
6 Their partnerships could be categorized as cohabiting, but we leave them as is to highlight the fluidity of partnerships in South Africa.
7 We also computed Kendall's tau-b and Kruskal and Goodman's gamma as proxies for correlation between categories of women's ownership and their asset rights, but do not report them because they do not substantially add to findings. Results available upon request.
8 The t-statistics values in report on the two-sided difference in means test. Because each comparison of two groups for each right for each asset in each site has its own degrees of freedom, for convenience we use the asymptotic critical values for t-statistics of 1.645 for significance at the 10 percent level, 1.960 for significance at the 5 percent level, and 2.576 for significance at the 1 percent level. Because of the small sample sizes and subsample sizes, these critical values will overstate statistical significance of comparisons of means.
9 The survey question about who decides land inheritance had no time restriction and could include decisions made before the current owner(s) died.
10 For each transaction, the GLAS asked, “If you wanted to … this plot, could you do so, even if you needed to seek permission?” “Would you need permission to … it?” and “Whose permission?” Although enumerator training discussed distinctions among permission, consultation, and informing, emphasizing that the question was asking about permission, we use the more conservative interpretation of “consult with” for two reasons. First, during fieldwork, several Butenga enumerators were replaced; new enumerators may not have had the same discussions. Second, even if questions were asked as intended, distinctions among permission, consultation, and informing are blurry, and the main intent is to capture that the respondent could not decide alone.
11 Results available upon request.
12 Only eight couples had partners of different religions. We use the woman's religion to represent both partners’ religion.
13 Sharia and statutory law for Muslim marriages in Uganda allow for polygyny; have prescribed fractions for the land and estate that wives, sons, and daughters inherit different from the Succession and Inheritance Act; and assume that property acquired during marriage is jointly owned unless otherwise stipulated.
14 Results based on the homestead are representative of all plots of land in each site.
15 The “Neither partner says joint with partner” category includes claims of no ownership or sole ownership as long as no member of couple claims joint with their partner.
16 Results available upon request.
17 We compared types of documents reported for land and housing to check whether people were referring to one document for both assets. Comparisons indicate that women are referring to different documents.