Who Owns the Land? Perspectives from Rural Ugandans and Implications for Large-Scale Land Acquisitions

Abstract

Rapidly growing demand for agricultural land is putting pressure on property-rights systems, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, where customary tenure systems have provided secure land access. Rapid and large-scale demands from outsiders are challenging patterns of gradual, endogenous change toward formalization. Little attention has focused on the gender dimensions of this transformation. However this contribution, based on a 2008–09 study of land tenure in Uganda, analyzes how different definitions of land ownership – including household reports, existence of ownership documents, and rights over the land – provide very different indications of the gendered patterns of land ownership and rights. While many households report husbands and wives as joint owners of the land, women are less likely to be listed on ownership documents, and have fewer rights. A simplistic focus on “title” to land misses much of the reality regarding land tenure and could have an adverse impact on women's land rights.

Keywords:

• Gender
• land acquisition
• land ownership
• land tenure
• tenure security
• Uganda

JEL codes:

• Q15
• Q18

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Cheryl Doss is Senior Lecturer in African Studies and Economics. Her current research focuses on the gender asset and gender wealth gaps. She has worked extensively on intrahousehold issues and issues of women and agriculture, especially in Africa.

Ruth Meinzen-Dick is Senior Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and Coordinator of the CGIAR System-wide Program on Collective Action and Property Rights (CAPRi). She is a development sociologist who has conducted interdisciplinary research on water policy, local organizations, property rights, gender analysis, and the impact of agricultural research on poverty, with fieldwork in Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe, Kenya, and India, where she was born and raised.

Allan Bomuhangi is Teaching Assistant at Makerere University and holds a Master of Science degree in agroforestry and a bachelors in community forestry and extension. His research interests include policy and institutional change, gender and development, community-development modeling, poverty reduction, and conservation mechanisms.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank Gorettie Nabanoga and Justine Namaalwa for their collaboration on the broader project on women's access to assets in Uganda. This publication was made possible by support provided in part by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) Agreement No. EDH-A-00-06-0003-00 awarded to the Assets and Market Access Collaborative Research Support Program (AMA CRSP). All views, interpretations, recommendations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the supporting or collaborating institutions.

Notes

¹As of May 2012, the Land Matrix listing of verified cases (http://landportal.info/landmatrix/get-the-detail/by-target-country/uganda) lists only four acquisitions accounting for 76,512 hectares, including the Kalangala project.

²This definition of access differs from the common discourse on land rights for women, which often refers to women having “access” to land, implying some set of (unspecified) rights that are less than full ownership (John W. Bruce 1993), although it usually includes some decision-making power over production process, products, and use of that land.

³Klaus W. Deininger, Daniel Ayalew, and Takashi Yamano (2006), in their paper on legal knowledge and economic development in Uganda, distinguish between tenure security and transferability, noting that they are not the same.

⁴As noted below, this does not mean that they are entitled to own land, but they are entitled to land that they can farm. For the ways in which women, in particular, are entitled to land, see LEMU (2009).

⁵The Northern District was not included due to security concerns at the time of the survey.

⁶Table 2 does not consider the marital status of the respondents, and we might expect that individual ownership for a woman who is married may have different implications than for a woman who is unmarried. The patterns of ownership (and inheritance) by marital status are explored in depth in a companion paper: Cheryl Doss, Mai Truong, Gorrettie Nabanoga, and Justine Namaalwa (2011).

⁷Thus, this matches with the findings of John Pender, Ephraim Nkonya, Pamela Jagger, Dick Sserunkuuma, and Henry Ssali (2003), who claim that the most common forms of tenure in Uganda are relatively secure.

⁸If we were interested in the question of whether all of the rights were correlated on a single plot, we would need to do the analysis using the plot as the unit of analysis. Instead, we are interested in whether individual men and women have these rights on any of their parcels.