Land Tenure Insecurity and Formalizing Land Rights in Madagascar: A Gender Perspective on the Certification Program

Abstract

This contribution examines Madagascar's land tenure reform – aimed at reducing land tenure insecurity – from a gender perspective. In particular, it investigates the certification program issuing formal land title deeds (land certificates) to landholders. Drawing on a household survey with gender-disaggregated asset data conducted in the rural municipality Soavinandriana, the analysis suggests that the certification program has strengthened both men's and women's formal claims to individually held land. However, the lack of gender equality principles and, in particular, of mechanisms to ensure that couples’ jointly held land is jointly secured, seems to have reinforced primary ownership of land by male household heads, at the expense of women's land rights. Furthermore, the land tenure reform does not address some of the most important threats to tenure security such as colonial titles and commercial pressure on land, and large parts of the country are still not covered by the certification program.

Keywords:

• Gender inequality
• land
• intrahousehold allocation
• survey research
• institutions
• rural economic development

JEL Codes:

• Q15
• D13
• B54

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank the Madagascar Land Observatory, and especially Rivo Andrianirina Ratsialonana, for the cooperation and support during the fieldwork; as well as ONG HARDI, ONG EFA, Plateforme SIF, and Programme SAHA. I would also like to thank everyone working with and participating in the survey. I am grateful to Tsisetraina Rakotoarimanana for translation and research assistance and to Maria Sagrario Floro and Marya Hillesland for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this study. Many thanks to the editors, three anonymous referees, and participants at the Land, Gender and Food Security workshop in Barcelona in June 2012 for their comments and suggestions, which have been very useful in improving this study. The Nordic Africa Institute and Uppsala Centre for Sustainable Development funded my fieldwork in Madagascar, which I gratefully acknowledge.

Notes

¹ Tenure security here is in the first place protection against eviction (UN-Habitat 2003).

² Jennifer Burt Davis, Corporate Social Responsibility Advisor, Social Department, Ambatovy Project, interview by author, April 2011.

³ Author's calculation using the dataset from ROR (2008), available upon request.

⁴ For example, in Amparafaravola the number was two of 1,605 certificates (Amparafaravola Land Certificate Database 2010), and in Antetezambaro one of eighty certificates (Antetezambaro Land Certificate Database 2011). The Amparafaravola Land Certificate Database (2010) was collected and compiled by Randrianarimanarivo Faniry Anja. The Antetezambaro Land Certificate Database (2011) was collected and compiled by NGO EFA and the author in cooperation.

⁵ The 2011 Soavinandriana Household Survey and Soavinandriana Land Certificate Database were collected and compiled by the author. Data are available upon request.

⁶ About 2,500 applications have been made at the LLO, but due to missing information – for example, because some applications were rejected immediately – some observations have been excluded.

⁷ Note that I do not make any distinction between issued certificates and applications at this stage; but since the key issue concerns the decision to certify plots, this is not crucial.

⁸ Some of these 360 persons belong to the same household as another person on the list, which is not possible to track in the records. When this occurred, an additional household with a certificate was selected in the same fokontany.

⁹ This is not a strict probability sampling method, but has been shown to give accurate and precise estimates and has been widely used by the World Health Organization (Paul Milligan, Alpha Njie, and Steve Bennett 2004).

¹⁰ Consortium certificates are treated as individual certificates in the name of the person registered.

¹¹ When there are two household members of the same sex, the highest age and education is used.

¹² That an individual man or woman has acquired a plot, the household composition, and that the plot is a rice field have the most important impacts on the certification decision. The positive effect of total land holdings is statistically significant, but very small.