Gender Issues and Best Practices in Land Administration ... · Department), by Renee Giovarelli, Susana Lastarria-Cornhiel, Elizabeth Katz, and Sue Nichols (consultants), under the

Gender Issues and Best Practices in

Land Administration Projects

A Synthesis Report

June 2005

Prepared for

Gender and Rural Development Thematic Group (PREM/ARD) and the Land Policy and Administration Thematic Group (ARD) of

The World Bank

Acknowledgments vAcronyms vii

Executive summary ix• Why does gender matter in land projects? ix• Priority gender issues in land administration projects x

1. Introduction 1

2. Why does gender matter for land policy? Theory and evidence 3• Gendered economic and social benefits of land rights 3• Regional challenges to gender equity in land policy 5

3. Actors in the struggle to improve women’s land rights 11• State institutions 11• Labor organizations 12• Legal aid organizations 13• Customary institutions 13• Women’s organizations 14• Donor organizations 14

4. Priority gender issues in land administration projects 17• Intrahousehold legal and customary rights 19• Identification of property holders 26• Methodology for gender-disaggregated field assessment of land rights 31• Adjudication and registration processes 32• Education, training, and communication 35

iii

Table of Contents

5. Lessons learned and recommendations 41• Legal foundation 41• Identification of property right holders 42• Research 42• Adjudication and registration processes 43• Education, training, and communication 44

Appendix 1: Summaries of country case studies 47

Appendix 2: Case study methodologies 55

Appendix 3: Sample template for gender-specific baseline social 57assessment

Appendix 4: Sample gender-specific indicators for monitoring and 59evaluation of World Bank land administration projects

Appendix 5: Sample questionnaire for data collection for baseline 59and impact evaluation

Endnotes 83

Bibliography 85

List of Figures• Figure 1: Conceptual framework for potential effects of the formalization 4

of women’s property rights in land• Figure 2: Primary land administration activities related to gender issues 17• Figure 3: Land distribution, by gender of household head, in Azerbaijan 21• Figure 4: Amount of land titled, by gender and farm type, in Bolivia 22• Figure 5: Registration documents in Ghana 32• Figure 6: Field adjudication and survey of boundaries, World Bank Land

Management and Administration Project in Cambodia 34• Figure 7: Training of registration staff in Kazakhstan 37• Figure 8: Participation in information meetings, by gender, Lao PDR Land 38

Titling Project• Figure 9: Information campaign in Peru 39• Figure 10: Participation in land adjudication in Lao PDR 39

List of Tables• Table 1: Forms of property ownership 20• Table 2: Location of land, by gender of registrants, in Ghana 23

iv Table of Contents

This report was prepared under the direction of Eija Pehu(Task Team Leader, Agriculture and Rural DevelopmentDepartment), by Renee Giovarelli, Susana Lastarria-Cornhiel, Elizabeth Katz, and Sue Nichols (consultants),under the aegis of a joint partnership between the Genderand Rural Development Thematic Group and the LandPolicy Thematic Group. The guidance, process oversight,and feedback provided by the members of the Task Team(John W. Bruce, Klaus W. Deininger, Nora Dudwick, Lu-cia Fort, Jorge A. Muñoz, A. Waafas Ofosu-Amaah, An-drea Silverman, and Wael Zakout), and the support andinsight given by the leadership of the Land Policy The-matic Group (Edward C. Cook and Isabel LavandezPaccieri) are gratefully acknowledged.

Additionally, for help within each country, addition-al materials, and support with data, field logistics, andinput, the following people are acknowledged: Azer-baijan—T. Sampath; Rufiz Chirag-Zade and Saida R.Bagirova of the World Bank country office; and GyulaNadjafova, Rena Ibragimbekova, and Rasim Ramaz-anov of Sigma Research. Bolivia—Daniela Camachoof INRA, and Rosario Salazar. Ghana—Charles Bo-akye and Edward Dwumfour of the World Bank coun-try office; Rebecca Sittie, Head Land Registrar; andMichael Forsen of the Land Registry Office. LaoPDR—James Chamberlain, consultant; Gillian Brown,

World Bank Gender Focal Point for the SoutheastAsian Region; Nalinthone Phonyaphanh and ViengkeoPhetnavongxay from the Lao PDR World Bank office;Chris Lunnay and Peter Cox of LandEquity; JaneDavies, Director of the Australian Agency for Interna-tional Developent, Lao PDR; and Keith Bell, WorldBank Task Manager.

Gratefully acknowledged are the comments andsuggestions from the following people during thepreparation of this report: Frank Byamugisha, MichaelCarter, Kevin Cleaver, Carmen Diana Deere, GershonFeder, Sushma Ganguly, Renate Kloeppinger-Todd,Anne Kuriakose, Nwanze Okidegbe, Rogier J. E. vanden Brink, and Liz Alden Wiley. Also acknowledgedare Arunima Dhar for technical comments and for fa-cilitating the study, and Sanjiva Cooke and MelissaWilliams for their help with the logistics and produc-tion of the report. The editing and formatting of the re-port were carried out by Christine Cotting and Upper-Case Publication Services, Ltd. Veronica McGinn,Centre for Property Studies at the University of NewBrunswick, coordinated the process of the study andthe project team appreciates her ongoing assistanceand the work of research assistants Sarah Hilliker, Gio-vanna Limongi, Olena Sloan, and Jennifer Sturdy.

v

Acknowledgments

ARD Agriculture and Rural Development Department

AUSAID Australian Agency for International Development

CEDAW Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women

CEPES Centro Peruano de Estudios Sociales (Peruvian Center of Social Studies)

CIDA Canadian International Development Agency

CONTAG Confederação Nacional dos Trabalhadores na Agricultura (National Confederation ofAgricultural Workers)

FIDA-Kenya International Federation of Women Lawyers-Kenya

FSU Former Soviet Union

GRID Gender Resource Information and Development Center

INCRA National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform

INRA Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria (National Institute for Agrarian Reform)

LTP Land Titling Project

LTP1 First Land Titling Project

LTP2 Second Land Titling Project

NGO nongovernmental organization

PESANTEch Paralegal Education Skills Advancement and Networking Technology

PETT Programa Nacional de Titulación de Tierra

TAWLA Tanzania Women Lawyers Association

UN United Nations

UNIFEM United Nations Development Fund for Women

All dollar amounts are U.S. dollars unless otherwise indicated.

vii

Acronyms

ix

This report is a synthesis of information gleaned fromfour case studies of World Bank-financed land pro-grams in Azerbaijan, Bolivia, Ghana, and the LaoPeople’s Democratic Republic. (See appendix 1 forsummaries of these case studies.) The case studieswere designed to both broaden and deepen our under-standing of how land policies affect women and men,with an aim to applying this knowledge in very practi-cal ways to World Bank-supported land projects. Thecase studies are essentially program evaluations fo-cusing on how each project approached gender issues,what the gender-differentiated issues are in terms ofproject participation and benefits, and what lessonscan be learned from these diverse experiences. (Seeappendix 2 for a discussion of the methodology usedin preparing the case studies.)

Why Does Gender Matter inLand Projects?Land ownership confers direct economic benefits as akey input into agricultural production; as a source ofincome from rental or sale; and as collateral for creditthat can be used for either consumption or investmentpurposes. However, women may not fully participatein these benefits as members of a household if they donot share formal property rights over the land; only in-dependent or joint ownership can ensure that womenhave access to control over land-based earnings. For-mal rights to land for women can have an impact onintrahousehold decision making, income pooling, andwomen’s overall role in the household economy.

But land is a particularly critical resource for awoman when the household breaks down—that is, forexample, in the event of male migration, abandon-ment, divorce, polygamous relationships, or death. Inboth urban and rural settings, independent real proper-ty rights under these circumstances can mean the dif-ference between dependence on natal family supportand the ability to form a viable, self-reliant, female-headed household. Indeed, women’s land rights withinmarriage may afford them greater claims on the dispo-sition of assets upon divorce or death of the husband,as Fafchamps and Quisumbing (2002) found to be thecase in rural Ethiopia.

In addition to the direct economic benefits of landownership, property rights may serve to empowerwomen in their negotiations with other householdmembers. Even beyond increasing bargaining powerwithin the household, land rights may empower indi-viduals to participate more effectively in their imme-diate communities and in the larger civil and politicalaspects of society. From a gender perspective, facili-tating women’s greater participation in these extra-household institutions has both the value of diminish-ing male dominance of community-level decisionmaking and the benefit of building up women’s orga-nizational skills, social networks, and social capital.Women with property rights are more likely to be ac-tive members of their communities, and as a result,community institutions themselves are more likely tobe responsive to the needs of women.

Although the basic principles of the direct and in-direct benefits of independent land rights for women

Executive Summary

are global in nature, there are important regional andsubregional gender-related differences in land tenureregimes, legal structures, and household resource al-location that should be taken into consideration in theformation of land policy and land administration ini-tiatives. Ultimately, the specific local, national, andreligious laws, customs, traditions, and institutionsgoverning land rights must be identified throughfield research and interviews with women who willparticipate in and benefit from the land project. Un-derstanding gender differences requires gatheringhousehold-level information at the earliest stages ofthe project.

Priority Gender Issues in LandAdministration ProjectsIn the design and implementation of a land adminis-tration project, there are many issues that should beaddressed to increase the participation of women andthus improve the project’s ability to recognize and le-galize women’s rights to landed property. Land ad-ministration is concerned with the management ofthe landholding system for land, natural resources,and fixed improvements such as buildings. Land ad-ministration projects might involve

• individualization or privatization of land rights;• formal recognition of rights based on occupation

and use;• conversion of rights from one legal system to an-

other;• introduction of a land registration system or con-

version of the documentation of rights from oneform of registration to another;

• introduction or strengthening of land valuation andtaxation systems;

• development or enhancement of land use planningand regulation, including land consolidation andreordering;

• development or enhancement of dispute resolutionsystems;

• changes in organizational structure and procedures(institutional strengthening and re-engineering).

The projects reviewed for this research includedcombinations of most of these issues. Gender issuesarise in all of these activities because of the ways inwhich rights are held, transacted, and managed, or be-cause of the varying roles played by women and men

in the land administration processes, in either thepublic or private sector.

In several of the projects evaluated here (that is,Azerbaijan, Ghana, and Lao PDR), gender was notconsidered explicitly at the time of project design. Inmore recent land administration projects undertakenby the World Bank and other donors, more direct at-tention has been paid to including a gender compo-nent. Explicitly recognizing gender as an issue to beconsidered at the outset will allow better monitoringand evaluation of project impacts and will enable therequired financial costs and the required expertise forprograms to be included. This synthesis report isstructured to address the central gender issues facingpolicy makers and project managers sequentially asthey arise during the course of a prototypical landproject.

Intrahousehold Legal andCustomary RightsLand projects usually review and provide input intoland legislation and policy. To specifically considergender, the project must also understand formal lawand customs related to intrahousehold property. Lawsand customs related to marital property and inheri-tance will have the greatest impact on women’s rightsto own land within a household and when a house-hold structure breaks down. Customs or traditionsconnected to intrahousehold relationships are not eas-ily changed, and most land projects will have to workwithin the existing legal and cultural framework, atleast initially.

Identification of Property HoldersAs land administration projects have increasingly ap-preciated the importance of formalizing women’srights to land, there has been the recognition that thepractice of issuing titles to just one person in thehousehold (the household head) may be denying oth-er people their land rights. Identifying property hold-ers requires looking deeper than the household levelto the individuals within a household or community.Questions such as the following will all lead to a bet-ter understanding of how to best identify and formal-ize women’s land rights: Who has communal and whohas individual rights to land? What are the inheri-tance and marriage practices? How much of a role doconsensual unions that are not formalized play within

x Executive Summary

this social system? and What are the variations be-tween urban and rural areas?

Methodology for Gender-Disaggregated Field Assessment of Land RightsThe collection of appropriate gender-disaggregateddata is essential for all land administration projects,and should be a World Bank priority, given the invest-ments in the land sector. The main issues are (1) howland rights are distributed among different groups ofwomen and men, and (2) what effects differentiatedland rights have on gender equity and on women’s ca-pabilities. Collection of this information should bedone during land administration project preparationto guide the design of the project, during project im-plementation, and after the project is completed.

Adjudication and Registration ProcessesIn land administration, gender issues have often beenrelegated to women’s organizations, nongovernmentalorganizations (NGOs), or female staff. Gender equity,however, should not be seen as a separate subproject.Instead, it needs to be mainstreamed throughout theproject and the organizations involved. At the sametime, one cannot expect a land administration projectalone to change social policy or law.

During design and implementation of adjudicationprocesses and registration systems, project staff needto be aware of the complexity of tenure, the variety oflocal customs and practices that can exist within acountry. Project staff, community leaders, and projectbeneficiaries need appropriate information about theformal and informal laws.

The scheduling and location of public meetings,site adjudication, and registration processes shouldalso consider such limitations as household dutiesand transportation costs. Documentation, such asidentity cards, can also be difficult for women to ob-tain, especially in rural areas. Ways to mitigate thisproblem need to be addressed early in the project de-sign. In dispute resolution, women may have rightsunder formal law, but either do not have the knowl-edge or do not have the money to pursue their rightsthrough the courts. Lack of support from family andcommunity can deprive women of rights even aftercourt rulings.

Education, Training, andCommunicationThe training of implementers and communicationwith beneficiaries are key to ensuring gender equityin any land administration project. Training for andcommunication with beneficiaries of the project helpensure that women can make informed decisions andcan help enforce accountability and transparency ofthe project. Well-informed beneficiaries can makethe project sustainable and more effective.

The content of the community training and com-munication will vary, but, at a minimum, specifictraining for women should include the following:

1. the legal rights of women specifically, includinginheritance and divorce;

2. special problems encountered by women (forexample, documentation, location of registra-tion offices, access to credit);

3. the involvement of women and men in the adju-dication process and in registration of rights;

4. potential benefits of participation.

In addition to the message of the training or com-munication, timing, location, and gender of partici-pants can all have an impact on whether the messagereaches women, especially those women who arepoor, illiterate, or vulnerable.

Lessons Learned andRecommendationsProbably the most important lesson and recommen-dation that can be made regarding the integration ofgender in land administrations projects is to makegender an integral part of the project from the begin-ning and in all of its phases and components. One un-derlying lesson from all four land projects and the lit-erature review in relation to legislation is that formallaw that requires gender equity in property rights ismostly ineffective in the face of customary law thatdoes not recognize equitable property rights for menand women. Another key finding is that land legisla-tion may conflict with family or personal law, andboth types of legislation must be reviewed for theirimpact on women.

The importance of identifying property holders onthe ground before starting a land administration pro-gram cannot be overstated. That is, who has what rightsin the bundle of rights associated with land? Land ad-

Executive Summary xi

ministration programs should consider ethnic and cul-tural variations that influence norms and practices re-garding land rights. These include access rights acrossdifferent ethnic groups, inheritance practices in patrilin-eal and matrilineal societies, and marriage practices. Inaddition, customary norms and practices tend to changeas populations move from rural to urban areas. Thesedifferent norms and practices will influence who areconsidered legitimate landed property holders, and theymay conflict with formal legal norms.

Strategies that focus on gender training, education,and communication for project designers, implement-ers, and beneficiaries will include having a plan forcommunicating the importance of gender issues; ad-dressing different levels of target audiences; includingboth men and women in any training; ensuring thatgender issues are mainstreamed; and ensuring that lo-

cal and regional variations in cultures, socioeconomicconditions, and traditions are included and respectedwithin any information campaign.

ResearchPerhaps the most valuable lesson learned regardinggendered land rights is that lack of information canlead to policies and projects that either limit or reducewomen’s economic and social opportunities. Few, ifany, projects gather gender-disaggregated informa-tion at the beginning of a project and then throughoutits life. But not understanding women’s rights as sep-arate from the household’s rights risks disempower-ing the most vulnerable—although often most eco-nomically active—members of society.

xii Executive Summary

Over the past 10 years, the World Bank has undertak-en a tremendous expansion of its lending portfolio inthe areas of land policy and administration.1 Thereare currently 44 approved projects with land as a pri-mary component, more than 100 projects with land asa secondary component, and in the pipeline morethan a dozen projects dealing with both urban and ru-ral land issues.2

In its flagship publication on land policy, the Bankrecognized that past initiatives have often failed to ap-preciate the importance of the way in which control ofassets, and in particular land, is assigned within thehousehold (Deininger 2003). The 2003 Policy ResearchReport argued that strengthening women’s land rightsis important both for potential gains to agriculturalproductivity and for household-level human capitalinvestments such as nutrition and child schooling. Itadvocated legal measures, education, and capacitybuilding, as well as preferential treatment of women inpublic programs, such as titling and land reform.

This synthesis report on gender issues and bestpractices seeks to both broaden and deepen our un-derstanding of how land policies affect women andmen, with an aim to applying this knowledge in verypractical ways to World Bank-supported land proj-ects. The study is built around four case studies ofBank-financed land programs in Azerbaijan, Bolivia,Ghana, and the Lao People’s Democratic Republic.The case studies are essentially program evaluationsfocusing on how each project approached gender is-sues, what the gender-differentiated impacts havebeen in terms of project participation and benefits,

and what lessons can be learned from these diverseexperiences.

Drawing on insights from the case studies, alongwith a review of existing literature and comparative ex-periences of other countries and international develop-ment agencies, the report is structured to address thecentral gender issues facing policy makers and projectmanagers sequentially as the issues arise during thecourse of a prototypical land project. Following thisbrief introduction, chapter 2 deals with the question ofwhy gender matters for land policy and administration,and identifies specific regional challenges facing thegender equity goals of land programs. Chapter 3 dis-cusses the distinct roles of government, nongovern-mental organizations, and international donors in pro-moting gender equity in the formalization of landtenure systems. Chapter 4 then takes up the gender-specific concerns at the various levels and stages of aland project: the legal framework; the field identifica-tion of property rights holders; the baseline studies,monitoring, and evaluation of projects; the formal ad-judication and registration of land rights; public infor-mation campaigns; and beneficiary and implementingagency training. Set forth for each of these phases ofproject implementation are a checklist of gender-specific information needs and recommendations forhow to incorporate such information into project de-sign and implementation. Chapter 5 summarizes thelessons learned and policy recommendations. Sum-maries of the individual case studies, along with a de-scription of the studies’ methodologies, are includedas appendixes to the main report.

1

1

Introduction

In most developing countries, land is a critical assetfor women and men, and especially for the urban andrural poor. Property rights in land—whether these arecustomary or formal in nature—act both as a form ofeconomic access to key markets and as a form of so-cial access to nonmarket institutions, such as thehousehold and community-level governance struc-tures. Figure 1 illustrates this conceptual framework.Because of land’s fundamental importance in confer-ring such access, it is essential that policies that seekin any way to alter the distribution or to formalizeproperty rights in land take great care not to inadver-tently disenfranchise the most vulnerable members ofthe target population, including women. Indeed, ifsuch land programs form part of an overall povertyreduction strategy, it is incumbent upon policy mak-ers to understand the ways in which these most vul-nerable groups gain access to land, the particularchallenges facing their claims to land rights, and therole that effective rights to land can play in securingtheir livelihoods and those of their families.

Gendered Economic and Social Benefits of Land RightsLand ownership clearly confers direct economic ben-efits as a key input into agricultural production, as asource of income from rental or sale, and as collateralfor credit that can be used for either consumption or

investment purposes. Depending on the norms gov-erning intrahousehold decision making and incomepooling, women may not fully participate in thesebenefits if they do not share formal property rightsover the land; only independent or joint ownership canassure women access to control over land-based earn-ings. Comparative analysis of data from Honduras andNicaragua, for example, suggests a positive correla-tion between women’s property rights and their over-all role in the household economy: greater controlover agricultural income, higher shares of businessand labor market earnings, and more frequent receiptof credit (Katz and Chamorro 2002).

In addition to the short- and medium-term eco-nomic gains generated by greater access to product,capital, and land markets, women with stronger prop-erty rights in land are also less likely to become eco-nomically vulnerable in their old age, or in the eventof the death of or divorce from a spouse. In her studyof gender and inheritance in rural Honduras, for ex-ample, Roquas (1995) found that widows (and wom-en landowners, in general) are more likely to worktheir lands indirectly, relying on some combination ofhired labor, family labor, and rental to generate in-come, and/or use the property as collateral for loansfor nonagricultural undertakings. Moreover, for wid-ows, land ownership may be one of the few vehiclesthrough which elderly women can elicit economicsupport from their children, either in the form of la-bor contributions to agricultural production or cashor in-kind transfers. In the absence of other forms of

3

2

Why Does Gender Matter for Land Policy?Theory and Evidence

social security, the elderly rural population reliesheavily on intergenerational transfers for their liveli-hoods; and children are more likely to contribute totheir parents’ well-being if the latter retain controlover a key productive (and inheritable) resource suchas land (Lucas and Stark 1985).

Land is a particularly critical resource for a womanin the event that she becomes a de facto householdhead as a result of male migration, abandonment, di-vorce, or death. In both urban and rural settings, inde-pendent real property rights under these circumstances

can mean the difference between dependence on natalfamily support and the ability to form a viable, self-reliant, female-headed household. Indeed, women’sland rights within marriage may afford them greaterclaims on the disposition of assets upon divorce fromor death of their spouses, as Fafchamps and Quisumb-ing (2002) found to be the case in rural Ethiopia.

In addition to the direct economic benefits of landownership, property rights may serve to empower wom-en in their negotiations with other household members,and with the community and society at large. Intra-

4 Gender Issues and Best Practices in Land Administration Projects

FIGURE 1 Conceptual Framework for Potential Effects of the Formalization ofWomen’s Property Rights in Land

Land-Based Collateral

ConsumptionCredit

InvestmentCredit

Expansion ofFemale-Owned

HouseholdEnterprises

Economic Benefits

Land-Based Income

Agricultural Production and Sales

Land Rental/Sales

Income

Community Level

Greater Participation

in Community-Level

Organizations

Greater Influence ofFemale Preferences

on Expenditures and Investments

Social Benefits

Household Level

Enhanced Bargaining/

Decision-Making Power vis-à-vis

Spouse

Enhanced Fallback Position

in Case of Divorce

Enhanced Old-Age Security

Women’s Property Rights in Land

household economic theory suggests that the strengthof spouses’ “fallback positions” or “threat points”—how well they can do in the absence of economic co-operation with their partners—is an important deter-minant of their ability to shape household preferencesand therefore shape resource allocation decisions (cf.Katz 1997). Data from Central America, for example,have indicated that greater female landholdings areassociated with modest increases in food expendituresand child educational attainment, controlling for otherrelevant household characteristics and unobservedpreferences, with elasticities in the 0.01–0.05 range(Katz and Chamorro 2002). Quisumbing and Maluc-cio (2002) also found a positive relationship betweenthe amount of assets (including land) that a womanpossesses at the time of marriage and the shares ofhousehold expenditures devoted to food, education,health care, and children’s clothing.

Even beyond increasing bargaining power withinthe household, land rights may empower individuals toparticipate more effectively in their immediate com-munities and in the larger civil and political aspects ofsociety. From a gender perspective, facilitating wom-en’s greater participation in these extrahousehold insti-tutions has both the value of diminishing male domi-nance of community-level decision making, and thebenefit of building up women’s organizational skills,social networks, and social capital. Women with prop-erty rights are more likely to be active members oftheir communities, and as a result, community institu-tions themselves are more likely to be responsive to theneeds of women.

Although it is imperative that land administrationand other land-related policies and projects support-ed by the World Bank be mindful of the potentiallynegative consequences of excluding women fromsuch programs, the formalization of women’s proper-ty rights in land should not in and of itself be seen asa panacea for gender inequality—just as land marketreform in general is not a panacea for poverty (cf.Boucher, Bradford, and Carter 2005). On the onehand, there may exist multiple barriers to women’sability to translate formal land rights into the kinds ofeconomic and social access discussed above, includ-ing gender-specific social norms that circumscribewomen’s economic activities and decision-makingroles, as well as discrimination in the markets for land,labor, and capital. On the other hand, even where en-hanced property rights do generate positive outcomes

for women, these must be complemented by initiativesin areas such as education, reproductive health, andpolitical representation in order to realize their full po-tential for reducing gender inequality.

Regional Challenges toGender Equity in Land PolicyAlthough the basic principles of the direct and indi-rect benefits of independent land rights for womenare global in nature, there are important regional andsubregional gender-related differences in land tenureregimes, legal structures, and household resource al-location that should be taken into consideration whenforming land policy and land administration initia-tives. Ultimately, the specific local and national insti-tutions governing land rights must be identifiedthrough field research. What follows are findingsfrom the secondary literature regarding general pat-terns and trends in the major regions of the develop-ing world.

AfricaThe rights of African women regarding land owner-ship and management vary dramatically according tothe cultural and historical context of the region theyare born into, as well as the region they marry into. Inhis survey of land tenure rights of African women,Kevane (2004) divided Africa into six specific re-gions: those influenced by Islamic law, the matrilin-eal areas of Africa, the house-property systems ofEast Africa, the cocoa- and coffee-producing areas ofWest Africa, Sahelian West Africa, and southernAfrica. Although tenure systems vary greatly evenwithin these regions, these six classifications arehelpful in developing a general base for understand-ing the diversity within Africa.

Of the six regions outlined above, those areas in-fluenced by Islamic law, matrilineal areas, and thehouse-property systems of East Africa each offerwomen greater opportunities for land rights than dothe remaining three regions. The specific regions ofAfrica where Islamic law favors women are thecoastal eastern region, Northern Nigeria, NorthernSudan, Chad, and the area from the Sahelian coun-tries to Senegal. According to Islamic law, a daughteris entitled to inherit a share of land equal to half of theshare of land bequeathed to her brothers. The varia-

Why Does Gender Matter for Land Policy? 5

tion in size results from the cultural understandingthat a woman is provided for by her husband, whereasa man must provide for his wife, his mother, and hisunmarried sisters. In addition to this, a woman insome areas is also entitled to one-eighth of her hus-band’s land, should the woman be widowed. Howev-er, Islamic communities throughout western Africatend to avoid adhering to Sharia law by forcingwomen to cede or sell inherited land to their brothersor other male relatives. In Sudan, recent conflictwithin the country has reduced the possibility of indi-vidual ownership of land by women, even through di-rect inheritance (Mwagiru 1998).

In addition to African Muslim societies, matrilin-eal areas throughout Africa also offer women moreopportunities regarding land rights. Where we tend tosee patrilineal societies bequeath land only to malemembers of the family, matrilineal communities tendto bequeath to both male and female members of thefamily. In areas throughout central Africa, where ma-trilineal descent is highly concentrated, the villagesalso tend to be matrilocal, with women living in theirhome villages after marriage. These areas tend to seea higher incidence of female retention of land owner-ship after marriage or through inheritance.

Eastern African countries, including Kenya andTanzania, have an entirely different cultural foundationregarding land ownership. Under the house-propertysystems of these areas, a husband may have severalwives, yet must provide some portion of his cattle,farmland, and homeland to each wife. In this scenario,each wife maintains control over the production of herallocated property—conditional on her bearing sons.Although the wife does not own the property in thetechnical sense, such as with a land title, she doeshave veto power over the husband’s decisions regard-ing her property. In addition, it is customary in manyhouse-property communities for the husband to offerproperty as compensation upon divorce.

Although the house-property system appears to of-fer women greater control over land in some areas, itmust also be mentioned that most customary lawthroughout East Africa is patriarchal, with rights ofwomen limited to their status as daughters and wives,rather than individual members of the community. Awoman’s inheritance rights to land may be weakenedby claims made by male relatives of her deceasedhusband, or by claims made by her brothers to her fa-ther’s property (Tsikata 2003).

The cocoa-producing regions of West Africa tend tobe areas where women lack basic rights in regard toland ownership and management. There is also virtual-ly no variation in the rights granted to women in matri-lineal or patrilineal communities, as men successfullygain individual ownership rights over the land andwomen tend to gain communal rights in the name oftheir matriarchy. In patrilineal communities, womenwith a claim to land are actually representing an absentbrother or other male relative. Courts in these regionsalso tend to favor the rights of men over women.

Another major factor affecting women’s rights toland in Africa is the landholding patterns. Most farmand residential land is customarily owned by individ-uals by virtue of inheritance of ancestral land. Thereare also common areas owned by communities at cus-tom. In these communities, women tend to have equalaccess for gathering or grazing, and in fact may relyupon this access disproportionately. There are coun-tries where all land is owned by villages, or held bythe village for the state (for instance, Ethiopia andTanzania), but they are almost entirely products of so-cialist reforms.

Individualization of land has not always resulted inan increase in women’s ability to own and controlland. If common land is titled to the head of thehousehold, wives may lose their property rights, espe-cially if joint ownership is not compulsory. Second,customary rights of women for seasonal or othershared use of land can be cut off by individualizationof ownership rights. If these “secondary” rights arenot specifically preserved (for instance, by register-ing them), they can be lost. In fact, formal ownershipof land and property generally has strengthened thecontrol of already powerful groups, has renderedwomen’s rights and access to resources less secure,and has led to loss in many cases.3

In much of Africa, men determine user rights forwomen and children. Married women may have useor cultivation rights to the land of their husbands, butdifficulties arise when there is a divorce or separa-tion.4 Access, acquisition, holding, and use are sub-ject to the superior right of the family, group, clan, orcommunity.

As land becomes more valuable because of cashcropping and an increase in population growth,women may lose their rights to land. This may occureven in communal systems of land ownership. For ex-ample, in Tanzania, widowed women who had previ-


ously been allowed to stay on their husbands’ land arenow being dispossessed of that land as it increases invalue.5

In Ethiopia, the most recent laws have movedwomen’s rights to land and property forward. TheFamily Code (2000) puts civil law ahead of custom-ary law, and mandates joint tenure for married cou-ples and those living in long-term (more than threeyears) consensual unions. However, Ethiopia’s consti-tution (1995), which calls for equality for men andwomen, opens up the door to customary law for in-trafamily relations by stating that, with the consent ofthe parties, disputes relating to personal and familylaws can be resolved in accordance with religious orcustomary laws.6

Because much of the land in Africa is ancestralland, the majority of countries do not have maritalproperty regimes. That is, property acquired during amarriage remains the separate property of one of thepartners. This system can greatly disadvantage wom-en in patrilineal, patrilocal societies.

AsiaWomen’s property rights in Asia are heavily influencedby religion and custom, and many countries have plu-ralistic legal systems codifying the various customaryor religious family laws. Inheritance schemes vary, de-pending on religion or customary lineage patterns (pa-triarchal or matriarchal).

Hindus, Muslims, and Christians in India are eachgoverned by different testamentary and intestate suc-cession laws. Hindu personal law divides propertyinto two classes: separate (usually self-acquired)property and joint family (ancestral) property. Mus-lim intestate succession is governed by uncodifiedMuslim personal law, which grants widows anddaughters the right to a share of some family proper-ty, although a share smaller than that of men. The In-dian Succession Act of 1925 generally governs thesuccession of property if a Christian dies intestate. Ifa Christian man dies without a will and he has chil-dren, his widow receives one-third of the estate andsons and daughters get equal shares in the rest(Brown and Chowdhury 2002).

Sri Lanka has a pluralistic system like much ofAsia. Under one inheritance scheme, women cannotinherit from their deceased spouses unless their hus-bands provided for them in a will. If a husband is miss-

ing or his death is undocumented, women cannot ob-tain title to property. Other inheritance regimes ariseunder other customary laws. Land distributed by thestate is distributed to male heads of households andjoint ownership of land is not provided for in law.7

In parts of Asia, such as Cambodia and Lao PDR,women and men traditionally had an equal right toland. In many of these countries, community proper-ty regimes are recognized in formal law. This is thecase in Indonesia, Lao PDR, and Vietnam, for exam-ple. However, even when under both customary andformal law men and women have equal rights to land,in titling programs land is often titled to male headsof household only. This occurs for several reasons, in-cluding because titling is a formal, public process andtherefore is the responsibility of the head of thehousehold, usually a male. Public education, genderawareness training at all levels of the project, and us-ing local approaches for gender inclusion are strate-gies that encourage joint titling of land to men andwomen, especially where it is culturally acceptable(Tinker and Summerfield 1999).

In India, land law is legislated at the state level, notnationally, so the legal land rights of women vary.Several states in India, such as Madhya Pradesh andWest Bengal, have promoted the joint titling of landin their land reform programs. The state of West Ben-gal has implemented one of the most extensive redis-tributive land reforms in India since the 1950s. How-ever, Indian law also recognizes the personal law(inheritance and marriage, divorce, separation, and soforth) of its different ethnic and religious groups(Agarwal 2003). These personal laws are often inconflict with the gender-equity provisions of land re-form legislation. In a land reform program in Kar-nataka State, women received title to land when thegovernment distribution program focused exclusivelyon women (Brown and Chowdhury 2002).

In Nepal, equal property rights are constitutionallyprovided, although neither formal nor customary lawotherwise provides for equal rights (Shrestha 1999).

In China, although land use rights were theoreti-cally allocated to farm households for a period ofyears, approximately 80 percent of Chinese villagesadopted the practice of periodically readjusting land-holdings in accordance with changes in householdmakeup as part of the household responsibility sys-tem. As originally implemented, any changes in thenumber of members in a household, such as by birth,


death, or marriage, were to be followed by an imme-diate adjustment of the size of a family’s landholding.This system of immediate readjustment was hard tomanage and was later replaced in most villages by asystem of reassessment and readjustment of the entirevillage every few years (Prosterman et al. 2001).

In most cases these land readjustments ensuredthat women did not lose their rights to a share ofhousehold land upon marriage, because their hus-bands’ households would be entitled to receive addi-tional shares of village land upon their entry into thehouseholds. However, even the practice of land read-justments did not ensure that all women received landshares in their husbands’ villages. Women who weredivorced were particularly vulnerable. By custom,they returned to their families, but their land sharesmay have already been readjusted in that community,causing them to create land pressure on their parentsor their brothers (Li and Bruce 2005).

Because the practice of readjustments caused a sig-nificant overall reduction in land tenure security onfarmland in China, a new Rural Land Contracting Lawwent into effect on March 1, 2003. This new law pro-tects contracted land rights from readjustments, whileallowing villages to reserve land to help newly addedpopulations to the village. To protect a woman whomoves away to her husband’s village but is no longerable to receive land in the new village, women are ableto keep the portion of the land belonging to their birthfamilies that was allocated for them. However, land isseen as belonging to the household, and when a womanleaves the household, the land is no longer consideredto be hers. According to interviews with women farm-ers, few women will exercise this right (unpublishedfield research)8 (Li and Bruce 2005).

Central and Eastern Europe and theFormer Soviet UnionThe shift from collective to individual agriculture inthe transition economies has brought about the priva-tization of land rights and varying degrees of landtransaction liberalization. Whereas the gender-differ-entiated impacts of this radical and far-reaching assetredistribution process are just beginning to be studied,in several Former Soviet Union (FSU) and EasternEuropean countries there are indications of unequaltreatment of men and women in the implementation ofthe new land laws, and evidence of the resurgence of

local-level patriarchal norms and practices with re-gard to women’s rights to land, even where the formalprivatization rules do not disfavor women.

In most of the FSU and Eastern Europe, inheri-tance laws are similar to those of the Western Euro-pean civil codes. Property is generally to be dividedequally among the spouse and children. However,where customary law differs, formal inheritance lawsare rarely followed. This is true, for example, in boththe Kyrgyz Republic and Azerbaijan where youngestsons generally inherit land and immovable property,and daughters receive a dowry.

Distribution of state land to private individuals andthe impact on women varies from country to country.In Uzbekistan, for example, where there is a gradualtransition from centralized to market-based propertyand production, former agricultural collective landhas been divided and leased out to families, and un-paid family labor has largely replaced wage labor andmachinery. In the absence of state policy to maintaingender equity with regard to land rights, men aregaining control of land: Leasehold contracts and thehousehold parcels are overwhelmingly in the name ofthe male head of household. Very few women aregranted leases and very few women manage farms(Kandiyoti 2003).

In other transition countries, titles and deeds to pri-vatized land are not always made out in the name ofboth husband and wife, and women may also not beallowed to lease land. In Albania, for example, familyland was issued according to the number of familymembers, but titled and registered only in the nameof the head of household (Lastarria-Cornhiel andWheeler 1998). The male household head, generallythe oldest man in the family, is able to exercise cus-tomary rights over that family land, and it remains un-clear whether individual family members have a rightto withdraw, sell, or lease their land shares.

In the Kyrgyz Republic, although the legal rulesprovide for individual rights within the family and theland titles list the names of all family members, indi-viduals actually only have the right to the value oftheir portion of the land, but not to demarcate or par-tition this land.9 In the Kyrgyz Republic, womenleave their households to join their husbands’ familiesupon marriage. For a woman to receive the value ofthe land she leaves, the remaining co-owners of theland plot must purchase the land from her. The pri-mary impetus for this rule was a concern about frag-


mentation of land, but cultural norms played an im-portant role as well. Very few women request the val-ue of their land when they leave their households tojoin their husbands’ households because it would beshameful for them and for their families if they did so(Giovarelli et al. 2001).

In much of Eastern Europe, however, individual ti-tles to land have been distributed and women have thecultural and societal right to own land. State land wasdistributed to individuals in the Russian Federation;in Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Romania,land was restored to whomever were the rightful heirsto the land, regardless of gender or household status.In these cases, women are able to exercise full owner-ship rights to their land because, in addition to the le-gal right to land, they have a socially accepted right tothe land distributed to them.

In much of Eastern Europe, community propertyfor marital couples is compulsory (Bulgaria, Croatia,Czech Republic, and Russia, for example). On theother hand, although marriage registration in EasternEurope and the Former Soviet Union was mandatoryunder the old regimes, research indicates that legalmarriage rates are decreasing in many of these coun-tries. In Bulgaria, legal marriage dropped from 9.0per 1,000 in the 1970s to 4.2 per 1,000 in 1997. Sta-tisticians assume that the decrease in the number of-marriages is partly the result of an increase in thenumber of couples who cohabitate but are not mar-ried (South Eastern European Women’s Legal Initia-tive 2005). According to May 1999 sociological re-search on tendencies among young people, 60percent of the respondents stated that they did notprefer marriage as a form of cohabitation (Giovarelli2004). In unregistered marriages, the compulsoryjoint title provisions will not take effect.

Latin AmericaHow do Latin American women acquire land? Datafrom several countries indicate that inheritance is themost important medium through which women be-come independent land owners: 54 percent of female-owned land in Brazil was inherited, 84 percent inChile, 43 percent in Ecuador, 57 percent in Honduras,76 percent in Mexico, 47 percent in Nicaragua, and75 percent in Peru (Deere and León 2002; Katz andChamorro 2002). Laws and customs governing inher-itance are therefore key to the gender distribution of

land.10 Women are eligible to receive property prima-rily in their roles as wives and daughters.

Many Latin American countries limit the portionof an individual’s property that she or he can freelywill to others, and subject the remainder to certainrules regarding the distribution to surviving spousesand children. In Honduras and Nicaragua, for exam-ple, property owners may cede up to 75 percent oftheir estate—high by Latin American standards—towhomever they choose, and the remaining 25 percentis set aside for widows (porción conyugal) (Deereand León 2001).

In the case of an intestate death, all Latin Americancountries designate the legitimate children of the de-ceased person, regardless of sex, as the first benefici-aries of equal shares of the property (less the maritalshare). However, given widespread land scarcity, it iscommon for families to consolidate inherited proper-ty either through sales or more informal arrangementsthat allow one or several (usually male) siblings to re-tain control of the farm. In most of the region, only ifthere are no living children do wives become primarybeneficiaries, eligible to share the estate with the par-ents of the deceased husband.

It is also noteworthy that the laws governing inher-itance of property in general do not necessarily applyto land acquired under government-sponsored agrari-an reform programs; provisions for the latter are of-ten more geared toward preventing fragmentation ofholdings by limiting the number of inheritance bene-ficiaries to a surviving spouse and/or single child.

From a gender perspective, the upshot of all of thelaws governing inheritance is that landowners wholeave wills have a fair amount of discretion regardingthe disposition of their property—and are thereforelikely to be influenced in their decision by intra-household norms and expectations—whereas thosewho die intestate (especially common among thepoor) are subject to national law that gives priority tochildren and some protection to spouses.

Deere and León (2002), who pioneered the re-search on gender and land in Latin America, arguedthat intergenerational inheritance patterns appear tobe demonstrating greater gender equality over time.They attributed this trend to four factors: (1) risingliteracy, which raises wives’ and children’s awarenessof their legal rights regarding inheritance; (2) smallerfamily sizes associated with decreasing fertility,which leads parents to divide property more equally


among siblings; (3) higher migration rates of youngpeople, which further reduce the number of potentialheirs interested in remaining in the agricultural sec-tor; and (4) the declining importance of agriculture inthe livelihood strategies of rural households, whichreduces the income value of land and therefore makesland less coveted by male family members.

A second important means by which women inLatin America acquire land is through compulsorymarital property regimes. Civil or family laws thatmandate joint ownership of land acquired during amarriage for married couples or couples living in con-sensual unions automatically give women some con-trol over land while married and a share of the land incase of divorce or abandonment. Most Latin Americancountries have some form of marital property laws.

State-sponsored redistribution and titling pro-grams have recently begun to target women. Dating

back to the 1960s for most Latin American countries,the majority of agrarian reform legislation privilegedmen by designating only household heads with agri-cultural experience as potential beneficiaries (Deereand León 2001). Women, therefore, make up fewerthan 20 percent of the beneficiaries in 10 countriesfor which gender-disaggregated data are available(Deere and León 2001, table 11). However, a “secondgeneration” of agrarian reform—one in which theclarification and legalization of property rights hastaken precedence over redistribution—has seen theshare of allocations and titles issued to women in the1990s increase to close to 40 percent. Continuedprogress in the alleviation of legal, institutional, andsocial barriers to women’s land rights is crucial toreconciling the gap between women’s participation inthe rural economy and their access to productive re-sources.11


In the last few decades, a number of institutions andorganizations have become involved in programs toimprove women’s land rights. These range from gov-ernment institutions to civil society organizations todonor agencies.

State InstitutionsBeginning in the 1980s, international organizations,such as divisions of the United Nations, took up the de-mands of the women’s movement for equity and havebeen successful in pressuring member governmentsaround the globe to modify laws and codes to explicit-ly recognize gender equality, including equity with re-gard to property rights. At the national level, manycountries created women’s offices, usually attached toministries or to the presidential office, which advocatefor and promote gender equity. These offices have usu-ally dealt with basic legal rights, such as general equal-ity clauses in constitutions and civil codes and with so-cial services for women, such as health care. They havealso been active on equal property rights, lobbying forand promoting gender equality clauses in family andinheritance laws as well as in such land legislation asland reform laws and titling laws. An example of thevery active role such institutions have had in the imple-mentation of a land administration program is the LaoWomen’s Union in Lao PDR, with representatives inthe communities. The provincial-level Women’s Feder-ation in China, for example, plays an important advo-cacy and mediation role in difficult cases of inheri-tance, land disputes, and allocation of apartments.

One of the distinguishing features of the Land Re-form Law in Bolivia is the explicit recognition ofwomen’s and men’s equal rights to land. Article 3,paragraph V, states that equity criteria in favor ofwomen will be applied in the distribution, administra-tion, tenure, and use of land, independent of women’scivil status. Women are not required to be heads ofhouseholds or married in order to be eligible for landrights. The gender provisions of the INRA (NationalInstitute for Agrarian Reform) Law are supported byother Bolivian legislation, such as the 1994 constitu-tion (article 6)12 and the ratification of the UN’s Con-vention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimi-nation against Women (CEDAW)13 by the BolivianState in 1989.

Other state institutions can also play an importantrole. In India, for example, West Bengal promoted thejoint titling of land in its land reform programs. Be-ginning in 1992, at the petition of peasant women’sorganizations, directives were issued from the WestBengal government that land was to be allocated towomen as individuals or jointly with their husbands.Local land reform offices, however, largely ignoredthese directives, claiming not to have knowledge ofthem or maintaining that the local planning commit-tees (panchayats) at the village and district levelsshould draw up the list of eligible land reform benefi-ciaries. If these local committees do not find eligiblewomen, local land reform officials maintain thatthere is little they can do. Several studies have foundthat even when a wife’s name is included on land re-form documentation, she often is not informed of that

11

3

Actors in the Struggle to Improve Women’s Land Rights

fact or is not made aware of her property right to theland (Brown and Chowdhury 2002; Gupta 2002). Inaddition, her name is entered in an ambiguous man-ner that does not make it clear whether she is includ-ed because she is a joint owner or because her inclu-sion will merely help in identifying her husband(Brown and Chowdhury 2002).

Labor OrganizationsA number of civil society organizations and institutionshave also engaged in the struggle to recognize and im-prove women’s rights. Among these are NGOs and la-bor organizations. In this section, we will examine theambiguous role that labor organizations have played.

Labor organizations (particularly rural workers’unions and peasant groups) have been active in ef-forts to gain land rights for landless and landpoor ru-ral workers. Although women are very active in thesestruggles, these organizations have often failed torecognize women as full members and to make theirneeds and demands a priority. Urban labor organiza-tions, which generally have more active women’sgroups within them, have not always supported ruralwomen’s demands. The experiences of rural womenin Brazil with regard to their land rights within theagrarian reform process are examples of the conflict-ing trajectories of labor organizations as class-basedorganizations and of women’s efforts to gain effectiverights to land, not just legal recognition.

Brazil is the most recent country in Latin Americato implement a redistributive land reform. During thefirst years of the reform, most of the redistributedlands were estates already occupied by rural familiesorganized into peasant groups. In the early 1990s, theagrarian reform effort slowed considerably, pickingup again in the mid-1990s with the Cardoso govern-ment. In contrast to most other countries, at that timethe implementation of agrarian reform in Brazil wasdelegated to state governments instead of the nationalgovernment.14 The language of the agrarian reformlegislation and the procedures followed by the agrari-an reform agency (the National Institute of Coloniza-tion and Agrarian Reform [INCRA]) were to adjudi-cate land to the household head. As a result, as of1996 only 12.6 percent of agrarian reform benefici-aries were women (Guivant 2003).

At the same time, however, efforts were undertakenby various organizations, including labor organiza-

tions, to legally recognize women’s rights to land. Inthe 1988 constitutional convention, the national agri-cultural workers’ union, Confederação Nacional dosTrabalhadores na Agricultura (National Confedera-tion of Agricultural Workers [CONTAG]), togetherwith the governmental women’s office, Conselho Na-cional dos Direitos da Mulher (National Council forthe Rights of Women), lobbied strongly for inclusionof an article (article 189) in the new constitution thatwould recognize women’s rights to agrarian reformland, including joint ownership. The joint titling ofland to couples is optional, however, not mandatory.During the early 1990s, the two main labor organiza-tions, CONTAG and Central Unica dos Trabalhadores(Central Workers’ Union), called for the inclusion ofwomen’s names on agrarian reform certificates and ti-tles; neither organization, however, made this issue aprincipal priority (Deere 2003).

The number of women who have received legalrights, whether by individual or joint titles, remainslow. One reason is that the agrarian reform agency didnot modify or change its norms and procedures in theidentification of beneficiaries or in the issuance ofcertificates and titling.15 In addition, there was littleinstitutional, political, or grassroots pressure for IN-CRA to recognize women as legitimate agrarian re-form beneficiaries or to recognize their rights to jointownership. The rural labor organizations and the peas-ant organizations pressing for land redistribution, in-cluding the women’s wings of these organizations,failed to follow up on the opening that the constitutiongave rural women. In part this was because of the lowpriority given to women’s land rights and to other gen-der issues by the leadership of these organizations.

According to Deere (2003), a decade after legalrecognition of joint ownership, the national leader-ship of CONTAG finally took up the recommenda-tions of its women’s commission and, at its SeventhNational Congress in 1998, approved the specific de-mand that the names of both spouses be included inthe land registry. Over the next few years, CONTAGparticipated in a number of national women’s events,such as International Women’s Day on March 8,2000, and the Marcha das Margaridas in August ofthat same year. As a result, INCRA finally acknowl-edged the legal norm of joint property established inthe 1988 constitution by announcing that it wouldchange its titling procedures to include on propertydocumentation the names of both spouses (Deere


2003). Although no official gender-disaggregateddata are available for the period after 1996, some pre-liminary data for several states cited by Deere (2003)indicate that not only has the number of beneficiariesincreased significantly, but also the proportion ofwomen beneficiaries has increased.

Legal Aid OrganizationsLegal aid organizations are generally NGOs that pro-vide free or low-cost legal counsel and advice togroups and individuals who are resource poor. Onemechanism for providing legal counsel that has becomequite widespread among legal organizations is thetraining of paralegals who work with communities anddisadvantaged groups. Many of these legal organiza-tions also engage in advocacy for women’s land rightsand in lobbying legislative bodies and state land pro-gram officials to legally recognize women’s equal landrights as well as marital property and joint ownership.

In the Philippines, the Paralegal Education SkillsAdvancement and Networking Technology (PESAN-TEch) produced a study on the agrarian reform pro-gram that found the legal system had failed to prop-erly handle land and agrarian cases. The paralegals atPESANTech provide farmers (male and female) withthe basic knowledge and skills necessary to improvetheir tenure arrangements and entitlements. The para-legal organization was set up to further the effective-ness of land literacy efforts by providing advocacy aswell as information.

In Kenya, the International Federation of WomenLawyers (FIDA-Kenya) undertakes advocacy andcivil litigation on women’s land rights. Their activitiesinclude research; training of community and opinionleaders, monitors, and paralegals; advocacy in publicinterest cases; and extension of legal awareness.FIDA-Kenya has undertaken a number of cases in therecent past that clearly show how traditions perpetu-ate injustices against women in relation to propertyrights. They have focused more on rural than on ur-ban areas, and are trying to stop husbands and fathersfrom selling off land that sustains families. This oftenentails engaging with local land boards that are gen-erally made up only of men. Paralegals are chosenfrom the communities, receive regular training, andare given certificates. These paralegals take care ofminor legal actions and report violations. FIDA-Kenya has also produced a primer on property law. Its

policy recommendations include the formulation ofmore gender-responsive policies in land reform proc-esses; the automatic inclusion of women as joint own-ers in family properties; and the adoption of an inher-itance law that makes it mandatory for women to havea share of their parents’ ancestral land.

Another legal aid organization, Tanzania WomenLawyers Association (TAWLA), has played an impor-tant role in extending gender awareness regardingproperty rights. The Gender Land Task Force, whichwas coordinated by TAWLA, issued a series of recom-mendations for the 1999 Land Acts. Most of its rec-ommendations were adopted, including legal aware-ness programs (leaflets, posters, and radio messagesin simple language) and legal aid desks in villages toprovide timely legal services. Other recommendationsincluded training of trainers, law enforcers and opin-ion leaders; production of a booklet of procedures anda training manual; and the formation of a village in-formation center. These actions should facilitate theobservance of the joint property presumption betweenspouses, which is contained in the 1999 Land Act.

The principal objective of the Women’s Legal Cen-tre in South Africa is to remove barriers, through ad-vocacy and litigation, to women attaining substantiveequality. The organization lobbies parliament for landreform on issues affecting women’s rights and con-ducts impact litigation on women’s rights issues, in-cluding land rights. As the Women’s Legal Centretakes up test cases, it has found that customary tenureand law were difficult to litigate against because ofstrong opposition and the lack of a coherent law re-form process. For example, the center has not beenable to bring a case to court on customary inheritancepractices that discriminate against women as bothdaughters and wives.

Customary InstitutionsCustomary institutions are often very important forenforcing women’s land rights or making changes tolong-held cultural norms. They are local and there-fore accessible, the leaders are generally respected bythe community, and women are less ashamed to ap-proach village leaders than to participate in a formalcourt hearing. There may be a number of different in-stitutions that enforce customs in villages. Customaryinstitutions may include councils of elders; mahallya,or neighborhood, committees (generally in Muslim

Actors in the Struggle to Improve Women’s Land Rights 13

countries); tribal councils; clan leaders; religiousleaders; and informally identified leaders such asteachers or other educated professionals. These tradi-tional institutions can have more power to changecultural norms than do legislative bodies or moderninstitutions. Traditional leaders are able to speak withauthority for the whole community and can therebyinstitute fundamental, socially agreed change.

Women’s OrganizationsWomen’s organizations have also been active inpressing for women’s rights to land, particularly afterthe declarations of the Fourth World Conference onWomen held in Beijing in 1995. For example, wom-en’s organizations in almost all the countries of LatinAmerica have lobbied government and pressed forwomen’s land rights.

In Guatemala, the Coordinadora de Mujeres por elDerecho a la Tierra y la Propiedad (Organizing Com-mittee of Women for the Right to Land and Property)has been working with the Land Fund to ensure thatwomen are treated equally with regard to access tothe fund and to ownership. In Panama, successfullobbying by the Coordinadora Nacional de MujeresRurales (National Committee of Rural Women) re-sulted in the inclusion of mandatory joint titling inthe reform of the Agrarian Code.

In 1993, Peru began implementation of a rural ti-tling program with two main objectives: to title theland adjudicated to farm workers and peasants duringthe agrarian reform of the 1970s, and to regularizethe rights of smallholders who occupied land withoutlegal title. The language of the titling program is gen-der neutral in the sense that gender is not mentionedas a requirement of eligibility for title. The titling pro-gram, however, did not consider the cultural con-straints that women, particularly rural women, mayface in having their names included on land titles.16

In addition, titling program officials did not receiveany gender-sensitivity training at the ministerial andprogram levels or at the ground implementation lev-el. Anecdotal evidence indicates that the large major-ity of titleholders are men, and that spouses are notbeing included in title documents.

In 1996, under the umbrella of the Red Nacionalde la Mujer Rural,17 a national forum of 130 peasantleaders, presented a series of demands regarding therural titling program. Among the demands was that ti-tles be issued to both spouses (whether spouses by

civil marriage or consensual union), that sale con-tracts of land purchased by women be recognized aslegal for title purposes, and that inheritance of landbe equally divided among all sons and daughters(Deere and León 1998). The Red Nacional de la Mu-jer Rural also brought attention to the fact thatwomen were not being targeted in the informationand education campaigns organized by the ProgramaNacional de Titulación de Tierra (National Programof Land Titling [PETT]). In 1997, the Red Nacionalde la Mujer Rural began a national campaign de-manding joint titling of marital property, and startedto pressure PETT officials to adopt norms and proce-dures to ensure the joint titling of spouses (Fernandezet al. 2000). The Red Nacional de la Mujer Rural, to-gether with the rural research facility Centro Peruanode Estudios Sociales, also organized a series of re-gional meetings around the country with womenpeasant organizations and, with the regional PETTagency, they highlighted the productive role ofwomen in agriculture, the importance of land rightsfor women, the participation of women in the titlingprocess, and the need for gender-sensitivity trainingfor titling officials (Fernandez et al. 2000).

Donor OrganizationsDonor organizations can play an important and some-times inadvertent role in improving women’s landrights. A project in Honduras funded by the CanadianInternational Development Agency (CIDA) providesan example.

In 1992, Honduras passed an “agricultural modern-ization” law that established a program for the pur-chase and titling of occupied public lands by small-holders. These lands were to be adjudicated withoutbias to women and men, and could be jointly titled to acouple. Joint titling was only optional, however—available only if a couple requested it. Because ofwomen’s subordinate status in Honduras and the lackof information regarding the joint titling option amongrural women, very few joint titles were issued duringthe first few years of the titling program.18

In the Guayape Valley of Honduras, a rural develop-ment project19 funded by CIDA had begun operationin 1991. In its first phase (1991–5), the project focusedon diversifying and stabilizing agricultural productionin the valley, mainly through irrigation and technicalinnovation. This phase gave some limited support toland titling, mainly to facilitate borrowing for farm im-


provements. Ninety percent of the titles were issuedsolely in the name of the male member of the couple,with only 10 percent issued to couples.

The project’s second phase (1996–2001) focusedon the development of a replicable model for sustain-able natural resource management. Experience in theearlier phase made it clear to NGO staff that complet-ing the titling process was important for all aspects ofthe valley’s sustainable socioeconomic developmentand for setting up the basis for investments in agricul-ture and natural resources management and conserva-tion. CIDA also realized that the project’s success de-pended on the participation of both spouses within ahousehold, and that couples in comparison to individ-uals had a better credit repayment record. In the sec-ond phase, therefore, couples with joint titles weregiven preferential status for credit. In this way, CIDApromoted the option of joint title in the Guayape Val-ley. Through a combination of innovative agreementsand initiatives between the NGO and governmentagencies involved in the titling process, the numberof titles issued to women more than doubled, com-pared with other regions in Honduras.20 By the year2000, women were included on 56 percent of titlesthat were issued for 2,500 parcels covering almost20,000 hectares: 36 percent of titles were issued tocouples, 20 percent were issued to women only; 44

percent were issued to men alone (Secretaría de Agri-cultura y Ganadería, Honduras 2000).

The United Nations Development Fund for Wom-en (UNIFEM) Project in Tajikistan conducted a na-tional consultation on rural women’s rights in Tajik-istan, with the participation of representatives fromthe Government of Tajikistan, UNIFEM headquar-ters, local NGOs, and UN agencies and internationalorganizations operating in Tajikistan. The purpose ofthe national consultation was to highlight women’slack of empowerment, land rights, and economic se-curity. The consultation attracted many participants,and further plans for action were made to advocatefor rural women’s interests and concerns related tothe land reform in Tajikistan. The UNIFEM Projectdeveloped official commentary, related to women’sland rights, to the Family Code of Tajikistan and tothe Land Code.

In addition, an agreement has been signed betweenUNIFEM and the Women and Family Affairs Com-mission under which information and counselingcenters will be established in 11 districts of Sogd andKhatlon provinces and in some other regions of Tajik-istan. The centers will offer free legal counseling onland, loans, and farming, and should help the fledg-ling Tajik female farming sector grow.

Actors in the Struggle to Improve Women’s Land Rights 15

In the design and implementation of land administra-tion projects, there are many issues that should be ad-dressed to increase the participation of women andthus improve the projects’ ability to recognize and le-galize women’s rights to landed property. At the sametime it should be recognized that land administrationprojects alone cannot change, nor should they neces-sarily change, the culture and traditions of the country.They must act within the existing legal system, but atthe same time, they can promote reviews of the lawand of practice to make them more gender inclusive.

Land administration is concerned with the man-agement of the landholding system for land, naturalresources, and fixed improvements such as buildings.The main processes in land administration reformprojects (for example, Nichols 1993) are illustrated infigure 2.

The following reforms are common (individuallyor in various combinations) in large projects and pro-grams:

1. individualization or privatization of land rights(that is, from collective, state, large estate, orcommunal landholding patterns);

2. formal recognition of rights based on occupa-tion and use (these may be group or individualholdings);

3. conversion of rights from one legal system toanother (for example, conversion from lease-hold to a form of ownership or from customaryto formal law);

4. introduction of a land registration system orconversion of the documentation of rights from

one form of registration to another (for exam-ple, deeds registration to title registration);

5. introduction or strengthening of land valuationand taxation systems;

6. development or enhancement of land use plan-ning and regulation, including land consolida-tion and reordering;

7. development or enhancement of dispute resolu-tion systems;

8. changes in organizational structure and/or pro-cedures (institutional strengthening and re-engi-neering).

17

4

Priority Gender Issues in Land Administration Projects

FIGURE 2 Primary LandAdministration ActivitiesRelated to Gender Issues

Organizational Reform

Procedural Interventions

• Project design and targets• Land rights holder identification• Monitoring of impacts• Adjudication processes• Dispute resolution• Education, training, and communication• Providing support services (e.g., microcredit)

Legal Reform

The projects reviewed for this research includedcombinations of most of these activities. For example,Ghana involved sporadic conversion from a document-based to title-based registration system, whereas theprojects in Bolivia and Lao PDR entailed adjudicationand formalization of rights, resulting in registration.The Azerbaijan project was concerned with privatiza-tion and registration. In Azerbaijan and Lao PDR, theprojects also explicitly dealt with new organizationalstructures and institutional capacity building. Thiswas one of the limiting features of the land registra-tion project in Ghana, which was hindered by the ex-isting structures, mandates, and procedures.

Gender issues arise in all of these activities becauseof the ways in which rights are held, transacted, andmanaged, or because of the varying roles played bywomen and men in the land administration processes,either in the public or private sector. Traditionally,land administration organizations are male dominated,in large part because of the importance of fieldwork(often in rough conditions) that was deemed unaccept-able for women (and is still unacceptable in somecountries and regions).

These factors lead to several issues in land admin-istration reforms that have a gender dimension, in-cluding

1. a lack of understanding of the complexity anddiversity of land tenure patterns, including wom-en’s rights, by most land administrators, by proj-ect managers, and by those providing technicalassistance;

2. a belief that addressing gender issues onlymeans issuing titles or co-titles to women, withlittle appreciation, for instance, for what hap-pens (a) in subsequent transactions, (b) in en-forcement and actualization of those rights, (c)in realizing the benefits that may stem from for-malizing women’s rights (such as access to cred-

it), and (d) in altering decision-making powerswithin households;

3. a belief that addressing gender issues withinland administration is ensuring that women arehired (for example, as clerks, interpreters, socialspecialists), rather than mainstreaming equalopportunities for all employees in all types ofactivities.

Overcoming these misconceptions at all levels is thereal challenge for land administration projects withrespect to gender.

In several of the projects evaluated in this study(that is, in Azerbaijan, Ghana, and Lao PDR), genderwas not considered explicitly at the time of project de-sign. The need to address gender issues in Lao PDRarose from social studies made in parallel but not aspart of the project. In Ghana, the inclusion of womenin the titling project was a result of the nature of urbanlandholding and general recognition of women’s prop-erty rights. It did not result from any specific interven-tion or targets. In Bolivia, gender concerns were dis-cussed during the project preparation, but it appearsthat these concerns did not translate into guidelinesand procedures specifically focused on women. It wasonly after the project was several years into imple-mentation that the implementing agency began to takesome measures to modify titling procedures so as toincorporate women into the titling process and gettheir names on titles.

In more recent land administration projects under-taken by the World Bank and other donors, more ex-plicit attention has been paid to including a gendercomponent. There have been generally three majorapproaches: (1) specifying enhancement of women’saccess to land and credit as project targets (for exam-ple, Brazil, Mozambique, Vietnam); (2) analyzingimpacts from a gender perspective through parallelstudies or demonstration projects (for example, LaoPDR, Kyrgyz Republic, Zimbabwe); and (3) making


The emphasis in most land administrationactivities has customarily been on the technicaland legal components, rather than on the social,economic, or environmental impacts of theseactivities.

There has been a lack of understanding of thediversity and complexity of tenure and a beliefthat gender issues can be solved easily throughco-titling or employing women on the projects.

gender a cross-cutting theme in all project activities(for example, Brazil, Cambodia). Each approach hasits strengths and weaknesses, and the approach (orcombination of approaches) taken will depend on thescope of the project, the political will of the projectdesigners and implementers, and the particular cul-tural issues within the country and region. The mainpoint, however, is that explicitly recognizing genderas an issue to be considered at the outset will allowbetter monitoring and evaluation of project impactsand will enable the required financial costs and therequired expertise for programs to be included.

Priority issues outlined in this section include the le-gal (both formal and customary) framework regardingwomen’s rights to land, the process and methodologyfor identifying rights holders on the ground, and theactual formalization and adjudication of land rights,and education and training during implementation ofthe project. In addition, there is the critical issue ofmonitoring and evaluating project activities and resultsduring the life of the project to ascertain whether gen-dered activities and procedures are effective and to in-troduce midstream adjustments where needed.

Intrahousehold Legal andCustomary RightsThe first question facing policy makers and projectmanagers during the course of a prototypical landproject is what are the formal legal rights to land forindividuals and households? If gender is taken into ac-count, the next set of questions would concern therights to land within a household or community, andhow those rights differ for men and for women. Thisinquiry would look at both formal legal land rights forwomen and customary or socially acceptable rights toland. Specifically, the questions would be these:

• Do women have a basic formal legal right to holdland (to own or to use over the long term)?

• What rights are included—the right to use, tomake decisions about, to pass by inheritance, topartition, to transfer, to receive the benefit of or in-come from?

• What land do women have a right to own or use?• What rights do women have within their natal fam-

ily, within their marital family, or outside of these?That is, what do the inheritance laws, marital prop-erty laws, polygamy laws, and laws related to di-

vorce say about women’s rights to own ancestralproperty and/or marital property?

Cultural prohibitions against women’s ownership oruse of land are often more powerful than written law.Customary law may determine which rights to land awoman may freely exercise—perhaps the right to usethe land or the right to gather fruit from it, but not theright to bequeath the land through inheritance, for ex-ample. Women may also have inferior legal rights toland as a result of outright discriminatory policies atthe central or local level because of case law that rede-fines the written law, or because of poorly drafted reg-ulations governing land and property rights.

Land projects generally must deal with formal lawand customs related to intrahousehold property asthey exist, and they must work within them. Muchcan be done within land legislation to encouragewomen to acquire joint title to marital property, andexamples of this follow. Family law, inheritance law,or customary law, however, may have a more signifi-cant effect on women. Although changing family lawand inheritance law may be necessary, such changesdo not come easily and in some cases would be out-side of the realm of a land administration project.

What follows is a review of these legal and custom-ary issues in the four cases undertaken for this report.In all four case studies, both formal law and custom-ary law had an impact on women’s rights to land andon the implementation of the land project. This sec-tion discusses the two central legal norms relatedspecifically to women’s ownership21 of property with-in the household unit: (1) marital property rights and(2) inheritance rights.

Marital Property RightsMarital property can be held in common ownership,joint ownership, or separate ownership. Each of thesecan be voluntary or compulsory rights in law. Com-mon ownership means that each person owns a por-tion of the whole of the property (not yet demarcat-ed). The owners can do as they want with theirportion of the whole, and upon death, their portion ispart of their estate. Joint ownership means that morethan one person owns the whole of the property. Themain difference between these forms of tenure is thatin the case of joint tenure, the land can only be actedon with the consent of all the owners because eachowner is acting for all owners on the whole property

Priority Gender Issues in Land Administration Projects 19

(see table 1). For example, for land to be disposed of,all joint owners must agree to do so. While still alive,joint owners may transfer their interest to all the oth-er owners but to no other person. In some propertysystems, if a joint owner dies, his or her interest in theland will vest in the surviving owner(s). In others,upon the death of one of the owners, the propertymust be divided equally among all owners and thejoint tenure becomes common tenure, with the de-ceased owner’s share being inherited by his heirs(usually spouse and children). The law may mandatea type of ownership in certain circumstances (such asmarriage). Compulsory joint ownership for marriedcouples is sometimes referred to as community prop-

erty, and often some land is excepted (that which isbequeathed or gifted to one party only).

Compulsory joint or common ownership can occurin one of two ways. First, the state could distributeand title state land to private individuals and requirethat the land be distributed and titled to all membersof the household, or to all qualifying members of thehousehold (regardless of gender).

In Azerbaijan, a former Soviet republic, the 1996Land Reform Law required that land, which had beenheld in collective ownership, be divided on a per capi-ta basis and distributed to rural residents. Under theWorld Bank Farm Privatization Project, all membersof a household who were above age 16 or 18 received


TABLE 1 Forms of Property Ownership

Common Ownership Joint Ownership Separate Ownership

Tenure Parties own a separate Parties own the property Parties own propertyshare of the whole together as a whole separately

(each owns the whole)

Compulsory or Usually voluntary Can be compulsory Can be the presumptionvoluntary (civil law/ (unless contract to the for married couples andfamily law) contrary) for married those in consensual

couples, those in unionsconsensual unions, or household members ofa farm. Can also bevoluntary.

Compulsory or Can be compulsory when Can be compulsory Can be the presumption voluntary (land land is privatized or when land is privatized as part of a distribution oflaw) individualized (land is or individualized for land

distributed to all household married couples ormembers on a per capita families living in onebasis) household

Inheritance Owner can bequeath a Either the deceased’s Separate inheritanceseparate share of the share automaticallyproperty by will, or share vests in the remainingwill be distributed intestate owners, or the property

must be divided andbecomes commonownership

Transfer Owner can transfer a Permission of other joint Can transfer withoutseparate share without owner(s) is required for permissionpermission of other any transfer of theco-owners property

a per capita share of land, and their names were listedon the land certificate, although only the name of thehead of the household was registered in the land reg-istry. Under the Land Reform Law, this distributedland was held in common ownership.

Although the law called for equal distribution ofland per adult farm member per farm, in fact therewere variations between the size of the land plot re-ceived by male heads of household and the size re-ceived by female heads of household on several of thefarms.

In a 170-person survey of the six farms that werereorganized under the World Bank project, we foundthat female-headed households received on averagefrom 0.4 to 0.1 hectare per capita less than did male-headed households (see figure 3). Exceptions werethe Mamusta and Gilinchl farms. On Mamusta farm,female-headed households on average received 0.5hectare more than male-headed households. OnGilinchl, the one household headed by a female re-ceived 1.0 hectare per capita more than householdsheaded by males.

In Bolivia and Lao PDR, legislation provides thatland allocated to a household by the state is held injoint ownership. In Bolivia, the Family Code specifiesthat property acquired through grant or adjudicationfrom the state forms part of the community property

of the conjugal couple (article 111). This stipulationhas been interpreted by the Land Administration Pro-gram to include land distributed through the agrarianreform and resettlement programs. Based on this in-terpretation, titling procedures require that land beingtitled for the first time be titled to the couple, not onlyto the head of household. Moreover, Bolivia’s INRALand Law (no. 1715, 1996) explicitly recognizes wom-en’s and men’s equal rights to land. Article 3, paragraphV, states that equity criteria will be applied in the distri-bution, administration, tenure, and use of land in favorof women, independent of their civil status.

For land that is acquired other than through statedistribution, a country’s law may provide for compul-sory joint ownership for married couples, and poten-tially for those who live in consensual unions. Com-pulsory joint ownership rights for marital propertyare usually established in civil law, family law, or landlaw, which frequently conflict.

In Azerbaijan, although the distribution of stateland created common ownership within the house-hold, marital property under civil law is held jointlyunless the matrimony contract establishes anotheragreement. Under the civil law scheme, therefore, acourt could decide that, by law, the shares of a mar-ried couple are held in joint ownership and not incommon ownership, thus giving women within a


FIGURE 3 Land Distribution, by Gender of Household Head, in Azerbaijan

0

0.5 0.3

Yerguch(Xachmas)

Shafag(Salyan)

Pusyan(Sharur)

Mamusta(Lenkoran)

Gilinchl(Barda)

Gulaband-Hatai(Ujar)

0.3

0.9 0.7

0.4 0.30.1 0.1

1.9

2.9

0.9 0.81.0

1.5

2.0

2.5

3.0

3.5

Per

Cap

ita A

rea

Mea

ns (H

ecta

res)

Farm (Region)

Male Female

marriage greater control over the total household landbut less control over her share of the land.

Formalizing the right to joint ownership throughtitle registration is not always mandatory, and israrely fully enforced. In practice, the Bolivian legis-lation requiring joint ownership of state-distributedland initially had little effect (1996–2001). Beginningin 2001, INRA, the land administration agency, real-ized that the May 2000 regulations of the law did notinclude sufficient procedural guidelines to ensuregender equity in the titling process. INRA, therefore,modified its activities and procedures with the objec-tive of including more women in the process andgranting land rights to more women.

Whereas the number of titles to women increasedas these issues were handled, the amount of land be-ing titled to women was even smaller than the num-ber of titles would suggest. Figure 4 confirms this byshowing that the amount of land being titled to men

far exceeded the amount titled to women as individu-als and to women in joint titles.

In Lao PDR, even though the state is the ultimateowner of all categories of land, individuals and groupshave use rights to land. Under formal law, land distrib-uted to couples is to be jointly titled (Law on Land, ar-ticle 43; Family Law; and Property Law). There are nocultural restrictions on women owning land. However,even with formal law and customary law in place thatsupported women’s right to a land title, when genderwas not initially a focus of the titling project, the re-sult was a low number of titles with women’s names.

If the law establishes rights of community proper-ty without requiring mandatory joint registration,land could be registered in the name of the householdhead only, and a court or other dispute resolutionbody would have to adjudicate whether the land isheld in joint ownership. Under a community propertysystem, even when title to land is registered in one


Separate property within the marital communityprovides women with the most control over theirportion of the land. The women in Ghana who hadland titled in their names stated that they preferredto own their own land, rather than having jointownership of land with their husbands. On the

other hand, when women have far fewer resourcesthan do men, separate property regimes candisadvantage women if they do not traditionallyinherit or acquire land by themselves. In a separateproperty system, class or wealth may be a greaterdeterminant of ability to own land than is gender.

Women Men Joint Legal Entity

FIGURE 4 Amount of Land Titled, by Gender and Farm Type, in Bolivia

0

50

100

150

200

250

300

Solar Small Medium Empresa

Hec

tare

s (T

hous

ands

)

Farm Size

name only, if the land was acquired during the mar-riage and with marital funds, the land is owned equal-ly by both spouses. Sometimes proof of marriage orcommingling of household sources is required to trig-ger the right. In most jurisdictions, each spouse mayalso own property in his or her individual right(called “separate” property). Therefore, joint owner-ship provisions, without mandatory joint registration,are subject to customary and traditional interpreta-tions of interhousehold ownership.

Countries that have a separate property regimehave the presumption that both members of a couple(married or not) have a separate right to land or prop-erty acquired during a marriage. Thus, even if some-one is formally married and uses the marital propertyto purchase land, that land can be in the separate own-ership of one person only. In this case, if the land istitled it would also be titled and registered solely inthe name of one of the parties.

In Ghana, land is held as separate property. Undercustomary law, property is owned not by the maritalcommunity but by the ancestral family. Thus, the for-mal law to date does not address community proper-ty. However, the 1992 constitution requires that theparliament enact legislation regulating the propertyrights of spouses (article 22), and that assets jointlyacquired during marriage must be distributed equi-tably in case of divorce. There are major variations,primarily based on tribal affiliation, in the number ofwomen who own land in Ghana. One source esti-mates that 50 percent of land owners are women inthe Ashanti region, and only 2 percent to 4 percentown land in the northern and upper west regions, re-spectively (Fenrich and Higgins 2001, note 1). Under

Law 152, co-owners can register as joint owners orowners in common; where they are owners in com-mon, the registration must state what portion of landeach common owner holds (section 88). Either partycan request that the land be partitioned.

The Ghana titling project focused on urban land,and for the most part, the owners were from upper- ormiddle-income families. A study of 1,440 registeredtitleholders found that the majority of those who reg-istered land were from first- and second-class neigh-borhoods (table 2). Neighborhoods are classified asfirst through fourth class, with first class being thewealthiest neighborhoods. For women who registeredas sole rights holders, 64 percent were from second-class neighborhoods, 20 percent from first-classneighborhoods, and 13 percent from third-class neigh-borhoods. Overall, of the 1,440 titles examined, only10 percent were registered jointly.

Many neighborhoods are mixed in Accra. That is,not all residential houses in first-class neighborhoodsare expensive, and some expensive houses can befound in third-class neighborhoods. However, our in-terviews with 82 people who had registered their landindicated that the great majority of titleholders livedin houses that could be described as well above aver-age. The houses all had water, sewerage, electricity,phones, and toilets. Most owners also owned one ortwo vehicles and a satellite dish for television recep-tion. The vast majority of owners were educated tothe college or university level.

Joint tenure can be very valuable for women in thecase of divorce or abandonment. Customary law doesnot encourage divorce. Extended families, villageelders, and the village government may make an ef-


TABLE 2 Location of Land, by Gender of Registrants, in Ghana

Gender of Registrants

Location of Land Male Female Joint Total

First-class residential area 217 72 32 321Second-class residential area 531 234 72 837Third-class residential area 160 48 31 239Fourth-class residential area 16 6 0 22Commercial center 12 7 2 21Total 936 367 137 1,440

Source: Land Title Registry, Accra, Ghana, 2002.

fort to keep the family together. Often, a “cooling-off ” period is required by local leaders before a di-vorce will be allowed. If a divorce occurs, in somecases property division is based on “fault.” Few inter-viewees wanted to discuss divorce.

Women who are abandoned or divorced are vul-nerable in most societies because they are stigma-tized and less “marriageable.” Moreover, they gener-ally do not have rights to their husband’s ancestralland, and they may not have rights to their own ances-tral land. In many cases, when a daughter is married,her portion of the family wealth has already been giv-en to her in the form of dowry or bride price. In Kar-nataka State, India, each religion has its own mar-riage and divorce laws. Laws governing Hindus,Muslims, and Christians all allow for monetary main-tenance in some form, but none permit a woman theright to any of her husband’s ancestral or separateproperty. One focus-group study indicated that theonly land divorced Hindu women retained was thehousehold plot of land received from governmentschemes and titled in their own names. In Ghana,many of the women interviewed who had titled landwere divorced or separated.

Two legal issues related to community propertymust be examined in the context of land administra-tion and titling: consensual unions and polygamy. Le-gal marriage can be expensive and time consuming,and it may require residence or personal identificationdocumentation that women do not have.22 In manycountries, protection for women’s property rights un-der mandatory joint titling provisions is only enforced(if at all) when legal marriage can be proven. A specif-ic legal provision that a consensual union will triggerlegal protection of property rights acquired during thatunion would enable many unmarried rural women toenforce their property rights when they would not oth-erwise be able to do so. Bolivia and Lao PDR havesuch a provision.

Polygamy affects a variety of legal land issues, in-cluding division of property, management of proper-ty, and joint ownership. In Ghana, polygamy is al-lowed in both customary marriages and in Islamicmarriages, but not in “ordinance” marriages. Unfor-tunately, the land legislation basically ignores polyg-amy. Therefore, subsequent marriages can mean thatproperty designated for a first wife will be dividedamong the additional wives and children. Where agri-cultural land is involved, first wives can be dispos-sessed of land needed for survival. A 1993 study on

land disputes in Uganda found that in Kabale andMbale districts, land shortages, rising populations,and polygamy (with allocation of land to multiplechildren and multiple wives) led to a predominanceof intrafamilial land disputes (Kigula 1993). Thismay also be the case in rural Ghana, and should beconsidered in any rural titling project.

InheritanceWomen primarily inherit land as daughters or wives.In many countries, women are more likely to acquireownership rights through inheritance than by any oth-er way (Deere and León 2001). Generally, formal lawrecognizes succession by will and by operation oflaw. Succession by will occurs when the deceasedperson has written a will that orders the distributionof his or her property. Intestate succession is by oper-ation of law and occurs in the absence of a will orwhen a will does not cover the whole estate. Legal in-testacy rules are important because most rural and/orpoor people do not make a will.

In Azerbaijan and Bolivia, intestate property is tobe divided equally among all the children and thespouse. In Azerbaijan, when one spouse dies, the de-ceased person’s share of common joint property, in-cluding land plots, is defined and subtracted from thetotal amount or value of the property. A survivingspouse has the right to inherit by will or at law a de-ceased spouse’s share of common property, but theproperty does not automatically belong to her or him.

In Ghana, where most land is controlled by tribalchiefs, land is considered to be ancestral land, and thesurviving spouse and children are only entitled to onehouse and the household belongings under law. Be-yond that, the spouse is entitled to a share of the resid-ual estate along with other family members under cus-tomary law (Dowuona-Hammond. 2003). However, asto the residual estate, the inheritance law only appliesto property acquired by the marital community anddoes not apply to ancestral property, thus severely lim-iting its scope. In addition, the law does not addresspolygamy.

In Lao PDR, customary norms with regard to landrights and gender are principally applied through in-heritance practices. Although Lao PDR is a multi-ethnic country with both matrilineal and patrilinealtraditions, the great majority of its society is matrilin-eal.23 In practical terms with regard to land rights, thismeans that both daughters and sons can inherit land


and that there are no cultural restrictions on womenowning land. Inheritance practices are not rigid andparents usually decide which children will inheritwhat family property. Often this decision is made onthe bases of need and the relationship between parentand child. The traditional practice is for the youngestdaughter to remain in her parents’ home after mar-riage to take care of them in their old age; she there-fore inherits the family homestead.

In all four countries, customary law plays a signif-icant role in the succession of property. In Azerbai-jan, the formal inheritance law is ignored because,under customary law, the inheritance scheme is en-tirely different than under formal law. Under custom-ary law, rights to land are viewed in the context of thedistribution of wealth within the extended family. Allof the focus-group interviewees indicated that cus-tomary inheritance rules and not formal inheritancerules were followed. Customary law provides that allchildren get a share of the household’s wealth, and thedaughter’s share is given in the form of a dowry.

A dowry is given directly to the bride by her fami-ly and is considered to be her premortem inheritance.A dowry can include livestock, jewelry, clothing, andmay even include land. Women have the customaryright to retain the dowry and to take it with them totheir parents’ home in case of divorce.

The youngest son generally inherits the property ofthe household, and the older sons have a house builtfor them by their family. In anticipation of this inher-itance, the youngest son remains in the household andis responsible for care of his elder parents who con-tinue to live with him.

In Bolivia, customary norms show a strong biasagainst women owning land. At the time of inheritance,the land usually passes from father to sons, althoughwidows are permitted to remain on the property.Daughters may inherit a small share of the land (Salazar2004).

Role of Law Reform

Although legislative reform can be a necessary stepand a prerequisite to a woman’s right to own or useland in her own right, legislative reform by itself of-ten makes little difference to the majority of women.The first women who take advantage of positive legalchanges—especially those changes that go againstcustomary law or traditionally held beliefs—are ur-ban, educated, and usually wealthy women. As wenoted above, customary law has a major impact onwomen’s ability to exercise their rights to land.

As was indicated by the Bolivia and Lao PDR casestudies, mandatory titling and/or mandatory registra-tion do not necessarily mean that women gain equalrights to land. The unequal outcome is related to cul-tural practices and biases, lack of information, ornonenforcement of legal rules. Legislative interven-tion alone cannot provide women with the effectiveright to own and control their own land if women’sownership of land is not accepted and enforced cul-turally and socially. Customary or religious biasescan mean that women will not be able to exercisetheir right to jointly own and control land until thereis a shift in the thinking and understanding of men,women, officials, and household members. Legisla-tive change must be accompanied by legal educationand legal aid for both women and men.

Law can have an impact, however, and it can createan opening for women’s land rights. In Azerbaijan, theLand Reform Law did not have many specifics fordistribution of land, but it did call for distribution toall adult members of the village. The World Bankproject developed a procedure that required that bothmen and women receive land, and they did receive it.Although Azerbaijan comes out of the Soviet systemof collective farming, its very old traditions, which arestill practiced, do not encourage this type of distribu-tion. Women do not receive land under the country’scustomary marital property and inheritance laws. Yet,the law was followed, and women have rights to farm-land. The laws in Bolivia and Lao PDR also supportedwomen in receiving rights to land, and although theselaws were not followed in many cases, women’s land-holdings increased overall.

Policies related to intrahousehold transfers of land,such as inheritance and marital property, need to bestudied and understood before advising on land-relatedlegislation. Inheritance and marital property rules andpractices have a major impact on women’s rights to


Patrilineal inheritance patterns of ancestral landoften correspond to patrilocal residence patternsand one cannot be changed without changingthe other. Legislation alone will not alter thesecustomary and traditional patterns. Landprojects must strive for gender equity withinthese established patterns.

ownership of land and their poverty status. As withmany issues related to the family, inheritance andmarriage customs are deeply embedded in society. Ifa policy goal of a project is, for example, to assistwomen-headed households and deal with women’spoverty, establishing widows’ rights to land as a pri-ority could be very beneficial. A national discussionof inheritance and marital property policies would el-evate the status of the discussion of women’s rights toland in developing countries.

Donor projects can contribute to gender inequalityby supporting those who are already advantaged bywealth, power, or customs to the disadvantage ofthose who are poor and vulnerable. When women’srights are explicitly taken into account and womenparticipate in the design and implementation of a pol-icy, equity is increased. In many cases, increased gen-der equality can also lead to increased economicequality (Meinzen-Dick et al. 1997; Moock 1976).Land administration projects that do not at least un-derstand laws and customs related to intrahouseholdland rights can negatively affect women and families.

Legal and Land Policy IssuesFor the most part, when donors are involved in thedrafting of land policy legislation, the language of thelegislation is at least gender neutral, referring to ahead of household, for example, and not making theassumption that the head of household is male. Onthe other hand, in many countries the cultural or tra-ditional interpretation of gender-neutral terms (like“head of household”) assumes the male rather thanthe female. Therefore, for land legislation to be inclu-sive of both men and women, at a minimum it mustexplicitly recognize women’s and men’s equal rightsto land. This is true in Bolivia’s legislation, whichstates that “equity criteria will be applied in the dis-tribution, administration, tenure, and use of land infavor of women, independent of their civil status”(Ley INRA, article 3, paragraph V).

Beyond such a declaration of equality, the legisla-tive rules that will have the biggest impact on womenare more often found in the regulations and not thebroader policy statements of the law. Considerationshould be given to the following issues:

• Are men and women guaranteed equal participa-tion in the adjudication process? (In Bolivia, forexample, article 231[c] of the Land Law Regula-

tions specifies that titles are to be issued withoutregard to gender.)

• Is the director of the land agency held responsiblefor nondiscriminatory practices with regard togender? (In Bolivia, the most useful provision todate is article 28[g], which gives the INRA direc-tor [and provincial INRA directors] the responsi-bility to ensure that legal gender rights are ob-served in the implementation of the INRA Law.)

• What documents are required by the regulationsfor proof of ownership? Are these documents read-ily available to both men and women, and are theyexpensive to acquire?

• Do the regulations require that the field for the own-er’s name on the legal cadastral form include allowners if the land is held in common ownership?Do the regulations require proof of marriage or con-sensual union? What type of proof is required?

• Do the regulations require written consent fortransfer of property held in common ownership(including sale, mortgage, and lease)? Are thereguidelines for how to determine whether land isheld in common ownership by operation of law,even if it is registered in only one name?

• Do the regulations deal with polygamy if necessary?• Do the regulations deal with illiteracy?• Is there any requirement for public notice of sale

or transfer of land?• For individualization or privatization of rights, is it

a requirement that all adult members of the house-hold be listed on the title? Is it a requirement thatthey be listed in the registry as well?

• Where are disputes adjudicated?• What is required for a dispute to be heard?• How do the issues of money, time, and literacy in-

fluence the dispute resolution process?

Identification of Property HoldersTraditionally, land administration projects have iden-tified the head of household, usually assumed to bemale, as the beneficiary of land formalization and ti-tling projects. In recent years, more efforts have beenmade to protect women’s rights through co-titling(that is, both names appear on the title documents andin the register). Also, with the growing number ofhouseholds headed by female in many countries, thereare increasing numbers of titles in women’s names.


In Ghana, for example, in a survey that looked at1,440 registration entries, 65 percent of registeredowners were male, 25 percent were female, and 10percent of the entries were to joint owners (Dowuona-Hammond 2003). In Azerbaijan, all adults in a house-hold were recognized, and in Bolivia and Lao PDR,specific efforts were made to include women in the ti-tling process. In both the Ghana and Lao PDR cases,which involve urban titling projects, the identifica-tion of women property holders will likely becomemore difficult as the projects extend to rural areaswhere there are more complex and varied traditionallandholding patterns. In none of these projects werethe results of subsequent transactions (for example,inheritance or sale) investigated to see whether thegender balance of landholder(s) recognized in the ini-tial process was retained.

There are many issues that land administrative pro-grams face when attempting to identify property hold-ers on the ground. This subsection will explore some ofthe principal issues involved in identifying propertyholders and their implications for the fieldwork re-quired in issuing titles. These issues include differenttypes of land rights and titles, ethnic and regional varia-tions within a land titling program, and conjugal unions(polygamy, legal marriage, and consensual unions).

One-Proprietor-per-Parcel ModelAs land administration projects have increasingly ap-preciated the importance of recognizing women’srights to land, there has been the recognition that thepractice of issuing titles to just one person in thehousehold (the household head) may be denying oth-er people their land rights. More than one person mayhold rights to a particular parcel of land. Or, if thereis more than one parcel, different people may haverights to different parcels. Wives, for example, oftenhave clearly recognized and legitimate use rights tohousehold land that are lost if the land is given inownership to the male head of household only. A re-

view of the “one-titleholder-per-household” practicehas shown that

• titling guidelines do not call for the identification ofmore than one property rights holder in the house-hold;

• titling procedures do not allow for inquiry into thenumber of property rights holders in the household;

• titling forms do not permit the listing of more thanone property rights holder;

• titling brigades are not trained to look for and iden-tify more than one property rights holder;

• titling activities with communities and households(informational meetings, workshops, and so forth)focus on the male heads of household and do notencourage or facilitate the participation of otherpeople, including women.

Therefore, one of the first determinations thatneeds to be made in the identification of propertyholders for each parcel of land is whether there ismore than one rights holder, and if so, who those peo-ple are. The types of titles to be issued to individualhouseholds, depending on the number of propertyholders and legal options, include individual titles,joint title, and co-ownership titles.

Some Major Ethnic and CulturalProperty Norms and PracticesLand administration programs should consider ethnicand cultural variations that influence norms and prac-tices regarding land rights. These include accessrights across different ethnic groups, inheritancepractices in patrilineal and matrilineal societies, andmarriage practices. These different norms and prac-tices will influence who are considered legitimatelanded property holders, and these may conflict withformal legal norms.


Traditionally, land administration projects haveidentified the head of household, usuallyassumed to be male, as the beneficiary of landformalization and titling projects.

In both Ghana and Lao PDR, the identification ofwomen property holders will probably becomemore difficult as the projects extend to ruralareas where there are more complex and variedtraditional landholding patterns.

Communal and Individual Land Rights

Ethnic groups within a titling area may have differentcustomary tenure systems. One basic issue is the rel-ative importance of communal rights and individual(or household) rights. In transition regions where in-dividual ownership rights are replacing communalrights, conflicts within the community may emerge.In Bolivia, for example, the land regularization pro-gram has the option of giving out community titles24

if the community requests that type of title. In com-munities that have requested such titles, some indi-viduals and families—particularly those who havepurchased land—may want the land they control tobe titled individually, whereas the majority of thecommunity prefers that the community’s land be con-trolled by and titled to the community. Thus, twoquestions need to be considered with regard to thisparticular issue: What type of land rights system ispreferred by community members, and what are thepotential conflicts those preferences may cause?

Inheritance Practices

Other issues related to ethnic groups are largely relat-ed to marriage and inheritance practices; it is thesepractices that particularly determine customary normswith regard to women’s rights to land. Customary in-heritance rights may not be in accord with legislationregarding intestate inheritance. In addition, sons anddaughters may be occupying land that legally still be-longs to their parents—land is often distributed pre-mortem or inter vivos, and the legal recording of thetransfer is done after the death of the parents or not atall. Land administration programs need to determinethe norms and procedures for dealing with these con-flicting and informal inheritance practices. For exam-ple, with regard to premortem inheritance, should thetitle be issued to the parent(s) who are still alive, orshould the heir who is living on the land receive title?

A more difficult question is how to deal with in-heritance practices that directly conflict with formallegislation. What role does land administration havein enforcing inheritance laws, particularly in societieswhere the drawing up of wills is not common andtherefore intestate inheritance laws should apply.Could premortem distribution (without re-registra-tion), for example, be taken as an indication of the de-ceased person’s desire and therefore be considered aninformal will? In most cases, this will deny daughterstheir legal inheritance rights. Evidence of this was

found during a focus-group discussion in Boliviawhere a father had the household land titled to thesons in the family, excluding the daughters and hiswife. Daughters were told that their brothers wouldtake care of them.

Land administration programs should considerdrawing up guidelines and procedures for dealingwith land distribution to heirs when that distributionconflicts with the law. Where premortem distributionhas not taken place, it would seem that land adminis-tration programs should adhere to inheritance law indeciding who inherits landed property; the heirs cansubsequently decide what they want to do with theirinherited land rights.

Marriage Practices

The other issue related to lineage and inheritance ismarriage practices. The principal practice that affectsa person’s rights to landed property is the place of res-idence after marriage. There is a general correlationbetween matrilineal inheritance and matrilocal resi-dence, and between patrilineal inheritance and patrilo-cal residence. This correlation is not strict, however,because there are numerous variations in custom, andchanges are occurring as societies experience socialand economic dislocations. Generally, the customarynorm and practice in both matrilineal and patrilinealsocieties is that land inherited or received from one’sfamily remains the property of that person and his orher lineage; it does not become part of the conjugalcouple’s property.

Two potential problems related to this issue are howland allocated by the state is viewed by the beneficiar-ies, and exactly who are the beneficiaries. Very often,land titling programs are part of or occur subsequent toland allocation programs; this has been the case inAzerbaijan, Bolivia, and Lao PDR. If the land allocat-ed by the state is clearly state land, it would not be con-sidered lineage or family land. In that case, social equi-ty concerns would indicate that the land be allocated


One of the first determinations that needs to bemade in the identification of property holders foreach parcel of land is to determine whetherthere is more than one rights holder, and who those people are.

and titled to both spouses and to single heads of family,whether they be male or female. In Bolivia, for exam-ple, the land administration project adopted the proce-dure that land parcels titled for the first time, whethersmallholder parcels or medium properties, are to be ti-tled to the couple, not only to the head of household.

Although Azerbaijan is a patrilineal and patrilocal so-ciety, state land was distributed to all adult members ofthe former collective or state farm, regardless of gender.However, although women’s names were on the landcertificate, both men and women in focus groups saidthat men primarily make all decisions in the family, in-cluding those related to land.

In some cases, however, the land allocated may beland that the community and its families formerlyowned. Families may therefore believe that the land isactually theirs and that the allocation program is sim-ply returning the land to them. In this case, the issueof lineage will most likely influence who the commu-nity and its members believe is the property holder.This was the case in the title registration of land cer-tificates issued to households in Albania after landprivatization in the 1990s. And this may be a poten-tial problem in Lao PDR as the titling program movesfrom urban to rural areas. Some rural areas are patri-lineal, and women do not generally acquire landedproperty from parents or in marriage. The land ad-ministration program will need guidelines and proce-dures to deal with the issue of whether state alloca-tion regulations or lineage norms determine who isthe appropriate property holder(s) for a land parcel.

Conjugal Unions and Land RightsOne of the problems that land administration programsmay encounter is nonformal conjugal unions. Mostcountries that have reformed their legislation in the re-cent past to make them more gender inclusive and gen-der sensitive tend to explicitly state that both legal mar-riage and consensual union are considered the basis for

marital or community property. The 1996 Land Law inBolivia states that men and women, regardless of theircivil status, have equal rights to land. The proceduresof the land administration project in Bolivia requirethat ·when a legal title or a regularization certificate isissued to a couple, regardless of their civil status (mar-ried or consensual), both names must be included inthe space provided for the titleholder, recording thewoman’s name first and then that of the man.

At this point, one issue is whether to recognize con-sensual unions if the legislation only mentions legalmarriage and does not explicitly recognize consensualunions. This could be dealt with in the titling regula-tions and procedures by suggesting that evidence ofjoint use rights requires the joint titling option. Socialassessments on this issue should inquire about theprevalence of consensual unions in that society andthe land use rights of both spouses. The results fromthis social assessment should guide decisions by landadministration with reference to consensual unions.

After having established whether joint titles are tobe issued to consensual unions as well as legally mar-ried couples, there is the issue of determining whichrelationships are consensual unions. Most legislationthat recognizes consensual unions also has a procedurefor legal recognition of consensual unions. Others maysimply list some basic criteria for consensual unions.In Bolivia, titling procedures indicate that the field ap-praisals by the titling brigades verify effective posses-sion regardless of civil status (married, divorced, sepa-rated, single, widowed) or gender. In Colombia, forexample, co-ownership does not have to be proved, butonly stated as true. In these cases, land administrationprogram procedures should include acceptance of con-sensual unions if couples meet these criteria or possessa certificate of legal recognition.

Many low-income families, however, are not awareof these procedures, or do not have the resources toundertake them. In some countries where personalidentification papers are an issue, particularly for


In Bolivia, the Land Registry refused to register jointownership titles (as community property) toconsensual couples, insisting that only legallymarried couples were recognized as legitimatespouses. As a result, titles to couples without anaccompanying marriage certificate were being

rejected by the Land Registry, and titling brigadeswere therefore reluctant to issue such titles. Titlingbrigades were also finding some male householdheads and some community authorities resistant tothe inclusion of women in the process and on theland titles.

low-income and illiterate people, undertaking any le-gal procedure is problematic. A land administrationproject in rural Peru found a solution to this problemby issuing co-property titles. The distinction is that inthis case marital status is not considered and theyboth own a separate share of the property, rather thanowning the property together as a whole (Deere andLeón 2001). Therefore, land administration guide-lines and procedures could include the option of issu-ing co-property titles to a couple if they cannot pro-duce a certificate of consensual union.

Another issue related to conjugal unions is polyga-mous households. Many societies do not outlawpolygamy. Even when a country does not legallysanction it, the legislation prohibiting it is generallyineffective if polygamy is customary or traditional.However, polygamy seriously affects women’s rightsto property and is the source of much tension andanxiety over land rights in many countries. Polygamycomplicates legislation requiring written consent ofspouses for disposition of property; it also compli-cates provisions on inheritance and co-ownership ofland. Legislating around polygamy is difficult, but toignore formal or informal polygamy is to inadequate-ly protect women’s property rights. The situation ismade even more difficult by the fact that many menrefuse to acknowledge or discuss polygamy, andwomen are often hesitant to raise it as an issue.

There are no effective and gender-sensitive titlingprocedures for polygamous households. Several coun-tries have attempted to legislate land rights for womenin polygamous marriages. In Ethiopia, for example,the Oromiya regulations (2002) require that the hus-band and wife be jointly certified for their commonlyheld land. In a polygamous marriage, a husband is al-lowed to get a holding right certificate with only oneof his wives, and the other wife or wives will get an in-dependent right certificate. The use right of a familyis not affected if either the husband or the wife or bothleave the area. In Burkina Faso, under the 1990 Fami-ly Code, if a couple is monogamous, the couple’s prop-erty is community property. But, if there is more thanone wife, all property is separate property.

Where polygamy is widely practiced but illegal,however, it is ignored in relation to land rights. Fieldresearch in the Kyrgyz Republic revealed that womenwere concerned about losing their husbands and theirrights to their husbands’ income in the event that theirhusbands took second wives. Women stated that hus-bands generally favor second wives, so while their

husbands are living, the first wives’ income and secu-rity are threatened. In addition, first wives are vulner-able to having to divide their property among theirhusbands’ heirs. On the other hand, women who aresecond wives have no legal rights to any of the men’sincome or property and, therefore, this group ofwomen is also very vulnerable.

Legislation regarding property ownership in polyg-amous situations could be helpful. One possible rulewould be that upon taking a second wife, all propertybelonging to the first marriage or consensual unionwould be partitioned and divided so that the husbandonly had his share to distribute to his new wife andchildren. Of course, the law is a very cumbersome toolfor dealing with complicated family relationships, andif it does not make sense within a particular context, itwill not be followed. Customary polygamy rules needto be studied and understood before titling legislationis drafted, guidelines are drawn up, and procedures aredetermined.

Rural/urban and Regional VariationsAnother regional issue is that of differing practices inrural and urban areas. In many countries, there are dif-ferent laws and regulations for rural and urban land. InLao PDR, for example, permanent land use titles arebeing awarded to urban landholders under the LaoLand Titling Program, whereas rural landholders havebeen awarded land use certificates that are valid forthree years. Aside from legislation, however, there areother urban and rural differences. It appears that cus-tomary norms and practices tend to change as popula-tions move from rural to urban areas.25 For example,a study of customary land tenure systems in Lao PDRmentioned that although titling land to women inHmong villages “simply would not work, despite thelaws of the country,” there was recent evidence in ur-ban areas that this custom is not strictly adhered to andthat both sons and daughters inherit land (Ministry ofFinance, Lao PDR 2002, 59–60). On the other hand,as the Lao PDR titling program extends from urbanareas to rural areas, it will have to deal with this con-flict between formal and customary legal norms. Inmany societies, land titling programs will need to es-tablish norms and procedures to deal with customaryproperty and ownership norms that do not correspondto gender-equal statutory laws.

Related to rural/urban differences is the issue ofthe market economy and its impact on property


rights, particularly notions of individual ownership.In urban areas, as the market economy exerts its influ-ence by making production practices more labor inten-sive and oriented toward the market, there is a tenden-cy for land rights to become more individualized (lesscommunal), for families to become more nuclear(less extended), for land rights to be acquired throughpurchase (rather than inheritance), and for customarypractices to become less prevalent. This is also thetendency is rural areas where commercial agricultureis practiced, particularly among small and medium-size farm holdings. In these situations, lineage con-siderations may become less important and inheri-tance practices more flexible. More opportunitiesmay exist for both wife and husband to own land theyhave acquired together, for women to purchase land,and for both daughters and sons to inherit land rights.

Illiteracy and lack of access to services may affectthe implementation of land administration projects inrural areas. In Bolivia, as in many Latin Americancountries, low-income rural women often do not haveidentification cards as required by titling procedures.This can either slow or prevent a claim, and more flex-ible procedures (for example, verification by commu-nity leaders) or the inclusion of a component to facili-tate obtaining identification documents might beconsidered.

All of the above suggest that land administrationguidelines should take these regional differences intoconsideration and require procedures that accommo-date these different situations and customary normsand practices. Wherever possible, these proceduresshould not ignore or take away any land rights thatwomen may already hold; and wherever possible,they should strive for gender equity in the allocationof land and in the granting of legal land rights.

Methodology for Gender-Disaggregated FieldAssessment of Land RightsThe collection of appropriate gender-specific data is aconcern for all land administration projects andshould be a World Bank priority, given its investmentsin the land sector. The knowledge regarding genderand land rights issues consists of (1) how land rightsare distributed among different groups of women andmen, and (2) what effects differentiated land rightshave on gender equity and on women’s capabilities.

Collection of this information should be done duringland administration project preparation to guide de-sign of the project, during project implementation,and after the project is completed. The methods forcollecting these data include social assessments, base-line studies, and impact-evaluation studies. The im-portance of collecting gender-disaggregated data isessential for assessing the extent and depth ofwomen’s land rights and for assessing the impact ofland administration projects on gender equity.

In Lao PDR, the social assessment study did notoccur until well after the project began and the indi-cators were incomplete, thus hindering evaluation ofthe real impact in household and community power,decision making, and socioeconomic conditions. InBolivia, where the titling project financed throughthe World Bank is ending, an evaluation study isabout to begin; however, there is no baseline studywith which to compare the results of the evaluation tomeasure what the impacts have been.

Project Preparation: The Social AssessmentThe social assessment for any land-related projectshould include community-level male and female keyinformant interviews as well as focus groups of po-tential male and female beneficiaries regarding landtenure norms and practices. Detailed information re-garding variations in multiple land use rights, inheri-tance, and marital property, for example, can then bea valuable input to meeting the objective of strength-ening women’s land rights within the target area’s so-ciocultural context. It is also at this project prepara-tion stage that gender-specific indicators should bedeveloped to measure the program’s differential im-pact on men’s and women’s land rights. Appendix 3provides a template for key informant interview andfocus-group protocols that could serve as a guidelinefor future land project social assessments.

Project Implementation: The Baseline SurveyWhen a land administration program is under imple-mentation, it is appropriate to collect gender-disag-gregated household-level information, which canserve the dual purposes of consultation for eventualadjudication and of establishment of baseline data forproject monitoring and evaluation. As resources al-


low, the baseline survey should be administered bothin areas targeted for intervention and in similar areasnot targeted. Appendix 5 exemplifies the type of sur-vey instrument that could be used to collect such in-formation.

Monitoring and EvaluationTo monitor the extent to which gender-specific proj-ect objectives are being met, to carry out midstreamimplementation adjustments, and more generally toevaluate the gender-specific impacts of a given landprogram, it is essential that projects maintain gender-disaggregated databases and carry out periodic com-munity- and household-level data collection. At theproject level, information on project participation andbenefits should be disaggregated by gender, includ-ing such things as personnel statistics, attendance atpublic information and training sessions, as well asissuance of legal title. At the community level, key in-formant interviews and focus groups of beneficiariesdesigned along the lines recommended for the socialassessment can provide qualitative feedback to proj-ect managers regarding the perception of project im-pact and male and female beneficiary satisfaction.

Finally, land projects should administer at least onemidterm and one project-completion household sam-ple survey to track gender-specific changes againstthe baseline data. If designed properly, such surveyscan allow for the quantitative assessment of the im-pact of land policy reform and land tenure regulariza-tion on women’s economic opportunities and intra-household bargaining power. Appendix 4 provides alist of sample indicators that could be used to monitorand evaluate gender-specific project impacts.

Adjudication and Registration ProcessesCritical to protecting the rights of men and women inland administration is the adjudication process. Thisconsists of a number of steps, although each projectmay adjust the order and methodology to suit localneeds or the aims of the project. These steps includeinformation campaigns (which are discussed in thefinal section of this chapter); collection of informa-tion on the rights, rights holders, and location of therights; provision of public notice (particularly in sys-tematic registration) and registration of the interests;and dispute resolution.

Collection of Information andEvidence of RightsIn land administration projects, the type and nature ofthe information collected are usually determined bylaws, regulations, and project procedures. However,they can be classified as information about the poten-tial rights holders, information about the nature of therights (including duration, if based on possession,and sometimes land use, occupancy, or value), and in-formation about the location and boundaries of therights. In Azerbaijan, the Farm Privatization Projectrequired initial information about the relative value ofthe land for distribution (for example, soil quality, ac-cess to roads and water) as well as the number ofhousehold members and other workers who were eli-gible for shares in the distributed land. In Bolivia andmost Latin American projects, crucial pieces of evi-dence are personal identification documents thatmany women do not have or cannot easily obtain. InCambodia, where systematic titling took place (forexample, for an entire village at the same time), eachhouse was visited and neighbors, as well as family, at-tested to the identity of rights holders. This processmay have both disadvantages and advantages: Cus-tom may prevent communities from identifying allstakeholders (for example, a daughter who now livesin the city but may have some legal interest), but theprocess may allow identification to proceed withoutbureaucratic delays.

The second type of information—the nature of therights—is more problematic and varied because ofthe many issues discussed above concerning the types


FIGURE 5 Registration Documents in Ghana

of interests that may exist. This is especially impor-tant in terms of customary tenure where women oftenhold secondary rights in land (for example, rights togather firewood), but others have rights to farm thesame land. These secondary rights are difficult toidentify, locate, and document, and they can be lost ina land titling project where, for example, certificatesof title are issued. Such certificates may become theprimary evidence of land rights, and under some sys-tems of land registration (such as Torrens land titlesystem or English land title system) the holders ofsecondary interests may lose the ability to contest theregistered title. Having women who understand thelocal traditions and tenure systems on the adjudica-tion teams can help ensure that these rights are pro-tected (see Food and Agriculture Organization 2003).

In Ghana, these types of issues will be increasing-ly important as the land administration projects ex-tend to periurban and rural areas. In the urban areascovered by the project of the 1990s, registration wasvoluntary and sporadic. Documents, if they existed,had to be obtained from the Lands Department andother sources (such as planning commissions). Al-though this did not have a gender bias, the bureau-cratic processes were very long and discouraged par-ticipation by poor people, illiterate people, and thosefrom remote areas.

The third type of evidence required is the locationof the rights. This may come in the form of surveys onthe ground or identification of parcels on large-scaletopographic, parcel, or photo maps. The important is-sues here are the timing of the site visit (are all of the

interested parties—including neighbors—available?).If some parties are not available (as an example, inMuslim countries women may not be able to partici-pate in a field demarcation with nonfamily men26),then mechanisms should be in place to ensure their in-terests are protected. This is especially important whensecondary plots are involved that may be wholly usedby females in the community or when overlying inter-ests (such as rights to water) may exist in other parcels.

Public Notice and RegistrationThe most important aspect of the provision of publicnotice (that is, through newspapers as in Ghana orthrough public displays as in the Kyrgyz Republicand Moldova) is that all potential stakeholders havethe ability to know about and understand their rightsand any threat to those rights. Thus, issues such asmedia, illiteracy (including map illiteracy), location,and timing are crucial. Public displays need to be ac-cessible by everyone, including the elderly and thosewho cannot leave home because of cost, lack of trans-portation, or household responsibilities. Whereas thisaffects both women and men, women in rural areasare often less mobile than men.

In some cases, the primary verification of people,interests, and boundaries is conducted on the site, andafter public notice, registration can proceed quite ef-ficiently. This is one of the advantages of systematictitling, as conducted in Lao PDR, or of large-scaleprivatization, as in Azerbaijan. Sporadic registration,as in Ghana, is often more cost efficient for govern-


All stakeholders need to be involved in the adjud-ication process. In a land titling pilot project inMozambique, for example, certificates of title werebeing issued to women in a customary tenure area.The men were long-term migrant workers away in

South Africa, and only visited home occasionally.Actually, however, under customary law only themen could hold the rights to land.

Source: Nichols, Fourie, and Mejais 1996.

Initially, in most households in Lao PDR, only themen participated in the information meetings andother certificate or titling activities. Therefore,women were not aware of the legal and economicsignificance of having their names on land use

documents, nor were they present when decisionswere made as to whose name would appear onthe certificate or title.Source: Gender Resource Information and DevelopmentCenter 2000.

ments initially, but it can lead to bureaucracy and de-lays. In the Ghana project, the requirement for sur-veys and survey plans conducted by the Lands De-partment created two- to three-year backlogs ofregistration applications.27 People interviewed duringthe Ghana case study indicated that repeated visitshad to be made to the Lands Department to keep theapplications moving, and that women were oftenmost persistent. However, the women interviewed(those who had received title) were often well educat-ed and able to take time to pursue the application.

Dispute Resolution Although many potential disputes can be preventedby transparent and consistent procedures, there is aneed to develop mechanisms to resolve disputes thatarise either during or after the adjudication process.The trend in land administration is to avoid havingdisputes reach the courts because (1) courts do not al-

ways have the expertise in land law to apply acceptedprinciples consistently; (2) the court process is usual-ly excessively long and costly and thus discouragesall but the most economically valuable claims; and(3) disputants, particularly women, often have un-equal powers to acquire legal advice and to sustaintheir claims. These factors may especially inhibitclaims by rural women who do not have the supportof family or community—for example, in cases of di-vorce or inheritance. Rights in legislation or grantedby the courts may not translate into actual enjoymentof those rights in a hostile environment.

The solutions include special tribunals that can beestablished not only during initial adjudication butalso to settle land matters over time. Typically, tri-bunals include land specialists and involve proce-dures that are less costly and time consuming than thecourts. In areas where there are strong traditionallaws (such as customary tenure or religious law), in-volvement of the recognized community elders or au-thorities can facilitate dispute resolution, but thoseauthorities may not be inclined to recognize women’sland rights.

Issues to Be Considered in theAdjudication Process The following are questions that should be consid-ered in adjudication to protect the interests of menand women:

1. Have all of the stakeholders had access to infor-mation concerning their rights and the adjudica-tion process?

2. Is the adjudication team familiar with the localcustoms, laws, and practices affecting the rightsof both men and women?

3. Do the processes have to be modified from re-gion to region (for example, urban/rural or oth-er types of land tenure)?

4. Are secondary interests, including rights to re-sources, considered and protected in some waythrough the adjudication?

5. Do all stakeholders have equal access to thedocumentation required for adjudication, and, ifnot, what measures can be taken to level theplaying field?

6. Are the timing and location of adjudication pro-cedures and registration offices appropriate forall potential interest holders?


FIGURE 6 Field Adjudication andBoundary Survey, WorldBank Land Managementand Administration Project in Cambodia

7. Are women’s rights adequately represented andprotected in dispute resolution, and how canlengthy and costly litigation be avoided?

Education, Training, andCommunicationMajor objectives or components of most land admin-istration projects are institutional strengthening, ca-pacity building, and improvement of organizationalcoordination and performance. In Lao PDR, this in-volved developing educational and training programsthat included women and men and that eventually ledto involving more women in the project implementa-tion. Liaison with the Lao Women’s Union strength-ened the project’s capacity to address gender issues atthe local level.

In Ghana, although initial attempts to coordinateland agencies through an intergovernmental commit-tee failed, a new project will address these issues andwill include a stronger socioeconomic component inconjunction with the Ministry for Women’s Affairs.Bolivia also strengthened its capacity to address so-cial issues in the field through gender training offield teams and the use of local mediators in some sit-uations.

There is significant opportunity to affect long-term gender mainstreaming through organizationalreform, particularly through selection processes fornew staff and for education and training. Providingrole models and mentorship programs, both withinorganizations and within foreign assistance, is also animportant aspect of building gender capacity in or-ganizations, although none of the projects reviewedactively used these methods. It is important that theseactivities and the roles represented are integral partsof the project and not simply add-ons designed tomeet gender targets if sustainable results are to beachieved (Nichols, Crowley, and Komjathy 1999).

Education, training, and communication are valu-able tools in promoting gender equity in land admin-istration projects on a number of levels, including

1. raising general awareness about the rights ofmen and women with respect to land and prop-erty within the country, and thus encouragingthe longer-term sustainability of the project in-terventions and socioeconomic goals;

2. making project implementers more aware of thesocial and cultural implications of land admin-istration and the need for gender sensitivity, inaddition to giving them tools (such as guide-lines, examples, benchmarks) to use within theproject;

3. increasing the participation of women in landadministration, a profession that is generallymale dominated worldwide (an exception beingsome European countries);

4. increasing the participation of women and menin the land titling process, subsequent registra-tion, and other related activities (for example,access to credit or community services).

The following sections discuss how these goals canbe met more effectively.

Training of ImplementersThe first phase of any project should be the identifi-cation of gender issues in the country, noting regionalvariations. This information, together with best prac-tices from other jurisdictions, ideally would be usedin all training programs. The second phase should bethe identification of whom within the project or asso-ciated with the project should receive the informa-tion. Decisions on the delivery, including trainers,timing, and media, should follow.

Women and men both need to learn more aboutgender issues related to land and land administration.Oftentimes, it is assumed that women in land admin-istration know more about or are more sensitive to thegender issues. One of the dangers of this assumptionis that gender issues are marginalized and left to betaken care of by the few women employees involved.In Lao PDR, the role of gender awareness was dele-gated to the Lao Women’s Union, and despite theirexpertise, it did not really become mainstreamed inland administration.

An important opportunity exists for World Bankintervention by including women in any technical or


In Bolivia, the saneamiento interno processinvolves resolution of disputes duringadjudication by community members, thusgiving the community an investment in the project.

other training, education programs, or study tours.This has been shown to be an enabling strategy thatcan promote more gender inclusion, despite the tradi-tions within land administration. It enables women toplay more than a secondary role, and it encouragesproject managers to be more aware of gender balance.Some bilateral agencies, such as the Swedish Interna-tional Development Agency, have used 50 percentquotas in both short- and long-term training abroad toencourage more female participation in countriessuch as Russia and Ukraine (WaterMark Industries1999). Similarly, AUSAID encouraged female partic-ipation in diploma and master’s programs, the resultbeing greater participation of women in field teamsand program development (for example, land policy).In Ghana, where no special considerations weremade, there were and continue to be few women infield aspects of land administration.

The training of implementers also needs to be mul-tileveled. It should begin with decision makers (thatis, those designing and approving the project), suchas task managers within the World Bank, top ministe-rial representatives, and bilateral donors. This train-ing should include

1. the general policy of the World Bank regardinggender and the reasons why gender matters (in-cluding any international agreements regardingwomen’s rights applicable to the country);

2. how land administration projects affect men andwomen culturally, socially, and economically;

3. how the country can benefit from gender inclu-sion in land administration;

4. best practices and examples of how these bene-fits can be achieved.

Various approaches for this training can be used,such as (1) printed brochures and short text materials,(2) an introduction to the topic during project negotia-tions, and (3) short seminars, as appropriate. The mainpoint is to provide the material in a way that is not

threatening (especially where large cultural differ-ences exist). This can often be best achieved by stress-ing the benefits to the organization or country, usingstatistics, if available, and concrete examples. Manycountries do not like to admit that, despite legal pro-tection of equal rights, implementation of equal rightsmay be faulty. Specific examples (such as the problemwith providing personal identification documentationin Bolivia) can help make the issue real.

A more in-depth training is needed at the projectmanagement level. This involves both foreign techni-cal assistance and the main staff in the project imple-mentation unit. It is at this level that information con-cerning gender issues in the recipient country mustbe available at the beginning of the project, includingbaseline studies wherever possible. In addition to un-derstanding the cultural, social, and other aspects ofthe specific population groups from a gender per-spective, the main issues for this audience will be

• why should gender be a focus of the project?• how does it cross-cut the project activities?• what can the project do about it?

A variety of delivery methods for such trainingshould be considered. General seminars for staff maybe effective. If these seminars are voluntary, however,they often preach to the converted, and so are eitherpoorly attended or disregarded by those who mightbenefit most. Another approach is setting benchmarksfor the project to achieve at the outset; this tends toraise interest among those who need to achieve thosebenchmarks.28 In the projects reviewed for this study,only Bolivia appeared to have some specific goals forproject activities with respect to gender (such as atten-dance at informational meetings), and these proce-dures evolved during the project.

At the field and operational level (for example,communications people, adjudication teams, registra-tion staff) there is a need for a wide variety of train-ing, depending on whether the activity involves direct


In the Lao PDR Project, a high diploma programwas established in the country, and of the first 26students, 7 were women. One woman was alsosponsored for a graduate degree in Australia. InVientaine Province, 17 percent of the total staff

were women working in the field in surveying andadjudication. It was noted that the women werewell respected and listened to by the communityand were considered more trustworthy than men.

contact with the landholders and on whether the ac-tivities involve collecting data that should be genderdisaggregated. Various techniques could include

• seminars and workshops for staff;• special modules in training courses (such as the

Lao diploma in surveying and mapping);• case study examples;• best practice guidelines;• gender-related statistical indicators.

It is always important to include both men andwomen in the training to prevent the marginalization ofgender issues to female staff. The training is probablybest handled by in-country experts, such as the LaoWomen’s Union, who understand the specific culturalissues and can better discuss how best the project ob-jectives can be achieved on the ground. All of the casestudies also pointed out the need to understand the va-riety of issues in different regions of the country thatresult from different customary law (Ghana and LaoPDR), religions (Azerbaijan and Lao PDR), and so-cioeconomic considerations (Bolivia and Lao PDR).

In the Bolivian case study, the gender-sensitivitytraining of departmental INRA personnel and titlingbrigades consisted of a half-day session. This trainingoutlined the objectives of the gender program; em-phasized that women should participate in the titlingprocess, reviewed the legal rights of women (not onlyin titling, but also in other property issues such as in-heritance); and discussed the problems that womenencounter, such as monolingualism and lack of iden-tity cards.

A main issue with training project implementationunit staff and implementation teams is the need for

constant updating as more information becomesavailable and the need to take into account staffturnover. The Bolivian project, for example, readjust-ed its field procedures during the project as the prob-lems were identified. If new information, forms, orprocesses are needed, then these will have to be intro-duced to operational staff on a continuous basis.Workshops during the project are also important ingaining insight from operational staff on actual issuesand results experienced on the ground.

Training of and Communication with BeneficiariesThis part of the process is the key to ensuring genderequity in any land administration project. Although itis often assumed, even in industrial countries, thatpeople know their rights, both women and men maynot know them. Training for and communication withbeneficiaries of the project help ensure that the ulti-mate client can make informed decisions and canhelp enforce accountability and transparency of theproject. Perhaps even more important, well-informedbeneficiaries can make the project sustainable andmore effective (for example, by making more gender-informed decisions in subsequent transactions, or byaccessing credit or government services). The mainissues in this training component include

1. identifying and involving the target audiences;2. having the right messages, delivery vehicles,

and timing;3. creating a receptive learning and interaction at-

mosphere.

The Lao Women’s Union used a two-pronged ap-proach for training that appears to have worked wellin communities. Two information sessions were held,one with both men and women so that both groupscould understand and discuss the gender issues, andone with only women. The latter created an environ-ment in which women were less inhibited and couldask questions that were directly relevant to them. Thecommunity training focused on the rights under lawand the benefits of involvement in the land titling. InLao PDR, the Women’s Union had representatives atthe local level who also understood and could mobi-lize the beneficiaries.

Village information meetings were by far the mostimportant means by which beneficiaries becameaware of the titling program (see figure 8). More than


FIGURE 7 Training of RegistrationStaff in Kazakhstan

75 percent of all respondents in our 300-household,random-sampling survey (70 percent of men and 92percent of women) reported learning of the projectthrough such meetings. For men, another relevant av-enue of information was the village head; approxi-mately 15 percent of male respondents reported learn-ing of the land titling program in that way. Regardingactual participation in the information meetings, 82percent of male respondents and 72 percent of femalerespondents reported having attended. Of those whodid not participate in these preproject informationmeetings, the most important reason cited by men wasthat they had not known about them, whereas womenmost frequently reported not attending because themale head of household had attended instead.

The Bolivian case study pointed out the need forcommunity-level training, and a variety of trainingand communication media were used to raise aware-ness of rights to land. The main issues for such cam-paigns include literacy and language issues; creatingneutral environments for open discussion; and theneed to address specific barriers to participating in theprojects, such as scheduling of activities and access togovernment offices. The Bolivia study also pointedout the fact that when the community is involved, dis-putes arising from adjudication are more easily re-solved. However, under the saneamiento interno (in-ternal community adjudication) process, advocatedfor by smallholders to overcome delays with the more

formal titling processes, the ad hoc nature of theprocess led to undertrained field support teams and noeffective rules for safeguarding women’s rights.

In Azerbaijan, educational sessions at the commu-nity level were largely attended by men. Women whoattended were usually heads of households, and mostwomen learned of the impacts and procedures throughtheir spouses. There was no specific training regardinggender issues or women’s rights. Similarly, in Ghana,where the project did not have any gender component,no specific attention was given to communicating in-formation on issues related to gender or to a gender-specific audience. The fact that in both of these proj-ects women’s names were included on titles wasindicative of the legal foundation. In Ghana, the proj-ect included mostly higher-income urban landholders,which was also indicative of its voluntary nature.

An example of successful information campaignsthat include gender issues at the local level is the caseof Cambodia’s land titling project. This education ac-tivity includes both men and women and is careful toensure that illiterate women are provided with appro-priate information. All related materials are posted ina public place in the villages, literature on land rightsand titling procedures is provided in pictorial form,meetings are held in local schools or community cen-ters, and titles are issued locally. Involvement of bothfemale and male field staff helps emphasize genderinclusiveness.


FIGURE 8 Participation in Information Meetings, by Gender, Lao PDR Land Titling Project

Male Survey Respondents

18%

82%

No

Yes

Female Survey Respondents

28%

72%

Other ConsiderationsOne of the main considerations in education andtraining arising from this study is the need to addressdifferent groups in different manners. For example, inBolivia, the gender media campaigns that accompanythe titling efforts consist of printed materials, videosfor women, posters, and calendars. All of these mate-rials are customized for the geographic zone, the lo-cal language, and cultural norms. In Lao PDR, thesedifferences have been addressed by the use of com-munity-level leaders (that is, members of the LaoWomen’s Union and district land administrationstaff). In Ghana, the geographic differences are rec-ognized (that is, differences in customary law and so-cioeconomic status) and will probably be addressedin future extensions of the project into periurban andrural areas.

The content of the community training and com-munications will vary, but at a minimum they shouldinclude

1. the legal rights of women specifically, includinginheritance and divorce;

2. special problems encountered by women (forexample, documentation, location of registra-tion offices, access to credit);

3. the involvement of women and men in the adju-dication process and in registration of rights;

4. potential benefits of participation.

Media for delivery of the messages should be tai-lored to regional and socioeconomic variations. Thiswill include considerations of language, literacy, andaccess to such mass media as radio, television, and

newspapers. In many rural areas, pictorial materials,radio, or even video (for example, in Bolivia) are ap-propriate options to overcome educational barriers.An example from Lao PDR is given in figure 10.

Informing both men and women of their rights isessential for mutual understanding of any differences.Sessions with both men and women also allow eachgroup to understand potential barriers to full partici-pation (for example, scheduling of adjudication, trav-eling to registry offices, obtaining documentation),and may encourage households to overcome thesebarriers together. However, it is also often importantto hold separate sessions for women to provide a non-threatening environment for discussion and to pro-vide feedback to the land administration processes.Having public meetings in which younger people canparticipate is also a way to ensure that the next gener-ation of landholders better understands its rights.

Another issue in adjudication is the scheduling offield visits that may be inconvenient for either men orwomen who work away from home, or for women


FIGURE 10 Participation in LandAdjudication in Lao PDR

Source: Lao Women’s Union training materials, August 2004.

FIGURE 9 Information Campaign in Peru In Lao PDR, the meetings with communities

included two sessions—one with both womenand men, and one with women alone. Themixed sessions were generally male dominated,but they gave everyone a better understandingof the land rights of both women and men.

who have both productive and reproductive work re-sponsibilities. Scheduling also affects the provisionof public notice (often 30–90 days from the time ofpublication of the adjudicated titles and parcels). Incountries where some landholders may be absent forlong periods of time (for example, when they are

working outside the country), there is a necessity tohave family or friends monitor titling claims. In spo-radic titling, as in Ghana, this involves checking thenational newspapers at least weekly to determine ifany claims have been made against a property.


Probably the most important lesson and recommen-dation that can be made regarding the integration ofgender in land administration projects is to make gen-der an integral part of the project from the beginningand in all of its phases and components. This chapteris organized around the implementation of a land ad-ministration program, including (1) the legal founda-tion, (2) the identification of property holders, (3) theresearch and data collection activities, and (4) the ad-judication processes; and the training and communi-cation components. As each section will emphasize,gender issues will not be adequately and appropriate-ly addressed if they are not an integral part, beginningwith the initial design and continuing through long-term impact assessment.

Legal FoundationOne underlying lesson from all four land projects con-sidered and from the literature review relative to legis-lation is that formal law that requires gender equity inproperty rights is mostly ineffective in the face of cus-tomary or religious law that does not recognize equi-table property rights for men and women. That is tosay, although it is necessary that formal law requiresequity in property relations, it is not sufficient and isoften only a first step that enables a small group ofwell-educated and often wealthy women to take ad-vantage of their rights. Moreover, some legislative andsocial changes may be more readily accepted than oth-ers, by both men and women, and part of the process

needs to involve listening to women to understandwhat legal rights are most valuable to them.

In many instances, land projects that include womenand strive for gender equity are dealing with culturalchange. Changing culture and customary norms ishard, and it is possible that, if norms related to women’sland rights do not change in the broader society, someof the ground gained during a gender-inclusive registra-tion project may be lost subsequently. This highlightsthe need for public education of both men and womenrelative to the importance of women having registeredland rights.

Another key finding is that land legislation mayconflict with family or personal law, and both types oflegislation must be reviewed for their impact onwomen. Family law is rarely considered as part of landadministration projects, and yet family law has a ma-jor impact on women’s right to use or own property.

When land is passed through ancestral lines thatexclude women, women may be more likely to gainrights to land within a marriage, and provisions man-dating joint titling of marital property will providethe best protection for women. This is especially truein patrilocal societies. However, in many instances,

41

5

Lessons Learned and Recommendations

The most important lesson learned is to makegender an integral part of the project from thebeginning and in all of its phases.

rural women are not legally married, although theyare married under customary or religious law. Legalrules that require joint titling for conjugal couples,whether legally married or not, can be an effective so-lution to this issue.

Gender-neutral language in land legislation mayreally not be gender neutral because of the culturalunderstanding of the words used. For example, “headof household,” although gender neutral, most oftenmeans “man” in a cultural context. Women have thebest chance of gaining rights to land in a land reformprogram where state land distributed to households isunderstood to include both spouses, not just onehousehold head (for example, in Azerbaijan and Bo-livia). In this instance, legal rules that require thatwomen and men receive an equal share of land and/orhave both of their names listed on the title can be ex-tremely effective, even in the face of customs to thecontrary.

The four main recommendations that can be ap-plied in all land administration projects in relation tolegislation and gender equity are process-related andare as follows:

1. In the planning stage of the project, do qualita-tive and legal research related to family lawsthat affect women’s property rights and their re-lationship to customary land law to understandhow a titling or privatization project will affectwomen.

2. Solicit women’s input into necessary changes inlegislation, especially related to family or per-sonal laws.

3. Include women who are knowledgeable aboutwomen and property rights in legislative work-ing groups.

4. Have respect for local culture, custom, and re-ligion.

Identification of Property Rights HoldersThe importance of identifying property holders onthe ground before starting a land administration pro-gram cannot be overstated. That is, who has whatrights in the bundle of rights associated with land?More than one person may hold rights to a particularparcel of land. Or, if there is more than one parcel,different people may have rights to different parcels.Wives, for example, often have clearly recognized

and legitimate use rights to household land but not toland in a distant field. A primary lesson learned fromthe four case studies is that titling guidelines mustcall for the identification of more than one property-rights holder in the household.

Land administration programs should considerethnic and cultural variations that influence normsand practices regarding land rights. These include ac-cess rights across different ethnic groups, inheritancepractices in patrilineal and matrilineal societies, andmarriage practices. In addition, customary norms andpractices tend to change as populations move fromrural to urban areas. These different norms and prac-tices will influence who are considered legitimatelanded property holders, and these norms and prac-tices may conflict with formal legal norms.

Here are the two primary recommendations thatflow out of these lessons learned relative to identify-ing property rights holders:

1. Conduct field research to identify all propertyrights holders within a household, in both ruraland urban areas and among various ethnicgroups. Include this information in the designof the land administration program.

2. If there is a basis in law for doing so (direct,vague, or permissive language), ensure that rulesregarding titling and registration allow for indi-cating more than one property rights holder onthe registration forms, and that the forms them-selves facilitate inclusion of women.

ResearchLack of information can lead to policies and projectsthat either limit or reduce women’s economic and socialopportunities. Few, if any, projects gather gender-disag-gregated information at the beginning of a project andthen throughout the project’s life. Understanding thesituation on the ground for women—urban and rural,wealthy and poor, literate and illiterate, wives, daugh-


Land administration projects need to be madeinclusive by recognizing that there may be morethan one property holder per parcel and morethan one rights holder in a household.

ters, widows, and single women—takes time, effort,and research. But a land project that does not sort outwomen’s rights as separate from the household’s rightsrisks disempowering the most vulnerable, but oftenmost economically active, members of society. Rec-ommendations for gendered research include baselinestudies and data collection.

The case studies show that a lack of baseline databefore the project interventions makes rigorously as-sessing the impact of those interventions impossible.Without an initial survey, it is difficult

• to know what are the gender-related issues thatneed to be addressed;

• to measure the gendered effects of the project at alater date;

• to raise awareness of the need for gender-disaggre-gated data.

In addition to the baseline studies, the collection ofgender-specific data over the course of the projectand over the longer term must be explicitly addressedin land administration projects. this data collectionshould not be simply a count of how many titles havewomen’s names or of the number of women involved.There is a need, for example, for more extensive dataon registration, on subsequent transactions (formaland informal), inheritance, and credit. This informa-tion is essential not just during the project for mid-stream adjustments to correct flaws in design, butalso for longer-term monitoring of the effects ofWorld Bank projects.

There are two main recommendations that flowfrom these lessons learned in relation to research.They are

1. Conduct a true baseline study with carefullyconsidered metrics and methodologies to cap-ture the gender issues and potential impacts be-fore project interventions take place, and prefer-ably before critical project methodologies and

targets are determined. This should be seen asthe first step in monitoring for problem areas inthe project implementation and in measuringthe impacts over the longer term.

2. Collect and analyze gender-disaggregated datathroughout and after the project to be able to ad-equately adjust methodologies and targets andto measure what the project has achieved.

Adjudication and Registration ProcessesThe most important lessons to be learned regardingthe adjudication and registration processes are that allproject staff have to be well informed about and wellequipped to address gender issues throughout theproject. Also all stakeholders (households, neighbors,community leaders, financial institutions, and soforth) need to be informed of their rights and any gen-der concerns.It is important that gender be considered,for example, in site visits, field methodologies, loca-tion of public meetings and registration offices, and inefficient access to registration processes.

There is a need for project officers and all staff tohave familiarity with local customs and practices af-fecting gender, as well as with legislation, which mayaffect the design and implementation. Gender issues re-lated to secondary interests (for example, rights to re-sources but not land) and not merely martial status needto be addressed in future projects, especially where cus-tomary rights are being formalized. Issues related todocumentation, illiteracy, and lack of transportationneed to be considered at the project design stage.

There is also a need to ensure that land administra-tion projects and organizations open opportunities forboth women and men through employment, careerpaths, education, and training. Often large projectsprovide an opportunity to ensure that there are rolemodels and mentors (for example, foreign technicalassistance and project staff) and incentives to in-

Lessons Learned and Recommendations 43

Gender-disaggregated data is more than thenumber of titles bearing women’s names; thedata need to capture the actual situations withinthe household and within the community.

Few projects gather gender-disaggregated dataat the beginning and throughout the projectcycle, and that lack of information can lead topolicies, projects, and procedures that eitherlimit or reduce women’s economic and socialopportunities.

crease not only the number of women but also theirroles in the organization. A lesson learned is that inthe adjudication, dispute resolution, and registrationprocesses, the participation by female staff is an assetto the project, not only in dealing with gender issuesbut also in their interaction with stakeholders.

The following recommendations can be made forfuture projects:

1. Ensure that gender issues are mainstreamed andnot seen as an extra project or the responsibilityof only female staff or women’s organizations;make gender programs cross-cutting; make themeveryone’s responsibility.

2. Carefully consider special issues, such as sched-uling of adjudication activities, requirements fordocumentation, and location of services (such asregistration offices) that may act as barriers towomen’s full participation.

3. Consider the local and regional variations incustom, religion, and law when designing andimplementing projects.

4. Where appropriate, try to resolve disputes anduncertainties at the local level to provide equi-table access to the processes.

5. Coordinate titling with support services, such ascredit and training, to ensure the maximum ben-efits of the process.

6. Increase gender equity in land administrationorganizations at all levels and in all aspects ofthe project, including education and training, soas to produce sustainable project results.

7. Ensure that foreign technical assistance and seniorstaff also have gender-equity awareness and poli-cies so they can act as role models and mentors.

Education, Training, andCommunicationThe design and implementation of the land adminis-tration project itself must include gender awareness atevery stage, including training, education, and com-

munication. Moreover, throughout the life of the proj-ect, it is critical to evaluate whether these activitiesare having the desired effect. The projects in both Bo-livia and Lao PDR were greatly improved in their im-pact on women after midproject corrections includedtraining, education, and communication activitiesthat focused on reaching women.

Recommendations for ProjectDesigners and ImplementersThe following are recommendations and strategiesfor gender-sensitive training, education, and commu-nication for project designers and implementers:

1. Have a plan for communicating the importance ofgender issues from the early project design phase.

2. Design that plan to address different levels of tar-get audiences (for example, senior administra-tors, technical assistants, project implementers)with appropriate messages and formats.

3. Include both men and women in any training,education, or study visit opportunities.

4. Provide project managers and implementerswith guidelines and best practices that may beadapted to suit specific country experience.

5. Involve men and women as role models andmentors throughout the project.

Recommendations for ProjectBeneficiariesThe following are recommendations and strategiesfor gender-sensitive training, education, and commu-nication for project beneficiaries:

1. Use local expertise in project communication andcommunity training. Local NGOs, other min-istries, and universities often have local-level re-sources and an understanding of local culturesand traditions.


Gender equity is not a secondary issue to berelegated to the care of a few female staffmembers. It should be integrated throughout theproject and should be everyone’s responsibility.

The greatest means of ensuring sustainablegender equity and gender-related impacts aretraining, education, information, and awareness.

2. Target groups that include men and women, butalso allow for separate women-oriented sessionsto create a neutral environment.

3. Use a variety of media and messages to ensurethat all potential beneficiaries are included, es-pecially considering constraints of literacy, lan-guage, and access to mass media.

4. Ensure that local and regional variations in cul-tures, socioeconomic conditions, and traditions

are included and respected within any informa-tion campaign.

5. Include gender as part of the program from theinitial stages forward.

6. Assist women in establishing community organ-izations focused on their needs and interests.These might include access to microcredit, edu-cation and training, or development of indus-tries suitable for and desired by women.

Lessons Learned and Recommendations 45

Appendix 1 includes summaries of the four countrystudies: Azerbaijan, Bolivia, Ghana, and Lao PDR.Appendix 2 describes the methodology used for thesecountry case studies. Appendix 3 consists of a set ofguidelines for the social assessment mentioned inchapter 4. Appendix 4 offers a sample questionnairethat could be used for collecting gender-disaggregat-ed data in a baseline and impact evaluation householdsurvey. Appendix 5 provides a list of sample indica-tors that might be used to monitor and evaluate gen-der-specific project effects.

Appendix 1: Summaries ofCountry Case StudiesAzerbaijan: Farm Privatization Project (1997–2003)Background

Azerbaijan is a former republic of the Soviet Unionthat declared its independence in 1991. Azerbaijani isthe official language, although Russian is still used tosome degree, especially in the capital city of Baku.The majority religion is Muslim (90–95 percent).Azerbaijan is located in the southern Caucasus regionon the Caspian Sea. It is bordered by Russia, Georgia,Armenia, and Turkey, and is alternately described asEurope and as Asia.

Land Tenure Systems: Prior to independence from theFSU, most of the agricultural land was held by stateand collective farms. Until 1991, there were 983 col-lective farms and 820 state farms, cultivating a totalof 1.46 million hectares (Venkataraman and Askerov

1999). In 1996 the Land Reform Law was passed toenable privatization and distribution of state and col-lective farmland. The rules set out in the 1996 law areextremely general, with no detailed procedures forimplementation.

Project Background: The objective of the Farm Priva-tization Project was to assist the Government of Azer-baijan in accelerating land privatization and in re-structuring state and collective farms by developing amodel for the process in pilot areas that could serveas a basis for replication of privatization. The goalwas to devolve full ownership of land rights and for-mal title to individuals. By mid-1998, one year intoproject implementation, formal land titling was com-plete in the six pilot farms. Titles were distributed tohousehold heads of families, although all names ofadult family members were included on the land cer-tificates and titles (6,645 families).

Legal Framework

Land Legislation and Policies: The 1996 Land Re-form Law allowed land to be transferred to citizensand legal entities of Azerbaijan only (there can be noforeign ownership of land). The law defined general-ly who is eligible to receive land in private ownershipand how the land should be divided. The size of theland share was to be based on the area of the farm, thequality of the farmland, and the number of peoplewho have a right to obtain a share. The law did notspecifically state that the land must be divided equal-ly; rather it stated only that the “average size” of aland share would be determined by dividing thewhole of the land by the number of people to receiveland. Land was transferred to citizens free of charge.

47

Appendixes

The newly created farms (household farms) wereguaranteed the right to decide what managementform they would take, whether they would combinewith other farms, and so forth. The law also gavelandowners the right to transact with their land.

Gender and Land Rights: Marital property is to be heldjointly unless the matrimony contract establishes anoth-er agreement. The law recognizes succession by willand by operation of law. The intestate law provides thatsurviving children, spouses, and parents take first inequal shares. When one spouse dies, the deceased per-son’s share of common joint property, including landplots, is defined and subtracted from the total amountor value of the property. A surviving spouse is able tokeep her or his share of the common joint property.

Under customary law, the inheritance scheme isentirely different than it is under formal law. Custom-ary law provides that all children get a share of thehousehold’s wealth, and a daughter’s share is given inthe form of a dowry. Even though daughters have alegal right to the land they received during the initialprivatization and distribution, when they marry theyvery infrequently ask to continue using a portion ofthe family’s land.

Assessment of Issues and Interventions

In regard to women’s rights to land, there is little vari-ation among the rayons (districts). According to fo-cus-group interviews and data collected from thehousehold survey, both men and women in all house-holds received rights to land in the Farm PrivatizationProject. Women who were interviewed knew they hadboth access rights and ownership rights to land. Com-munity leaders report that women are able to pur-chase and inherit land in all districts. Women mayalso sell and bequeath land in all rayons, with the ex-ception of the Xetai municipality in Salyan Rayon. InXetai, women are restricted from selling and be-queathing land.

Of the 180 households across six farms that weresurveyed in Azerbaijan, 150 households (72 percent)reported a male head of household and 30 households(27 percent) reported a female head. By farm, the dis-tribution of male and female household heads is fair-ly consistent.

Project Participation: Participation in the farm reor-ganization process by male and female farm headsvaried by farm, but fewer female heads of householdparticipated than did male heads of household on all

farms and in all activities. The focus-group inter-views indicated that general meetings related to farmprivatization, commission meetings about division ofland, and educational seminars concerning privateownership of land were all attended almost exclusive-ly by men; the only women who attended were headsof households, not women whose husbands were theheads of the household. Attendance at the generalmeeting prior to farm reorganization averaged 85 per-cent among male household heads and 50 percentamong female household heads. In focus groups,women said they knew nothing about their rights toland—only that they had a right.

According to focus groups with both women andmen, if there were men within a family, only the menparticipated in the lottery, in choosing land, in regis-tration of the land, and in signing the State Akt (titledocument). Some female heads of household alsoparticipated. Only the names of heads of householdwere registered, although all family names were list-ed on the State Akt.

Both male and female household heads receivedadvisory services on Gulaband-Hatai farm (UjarRayon). Female household head participation onShafag farm (Salyan Rayon) and on Pusyan farm(Sharur Rayon) was significantly lower than wasmale household head participation.

Distribution of Landholdings: Two focus groups ofwomen stated that land was not distributed evenlyduring privatization. The quantitative survey indicat-ed that the per capita landholdings vary from farm tofarm, with female-headed households receiving onaverage from 0.4 to 0.1 hectare per capita less thanhouseholds headed by males. On all farms, exceptGilinchl (Barda), the per capita distribution was lessthan 1 hectare (0.12–0.95). On the Gilinchl farm,males received 2.99 hectares and females received1.91 hectares. The community-level survey indicatedthat women were dissatisfied with the land distribu-tion primarily because the quality of land was worsefor them, or because of the distance between theirlands and their homes.

Parcel Inputs: Although there are some variations intypes of inputs used by male-headed and female-head-ed households in all of the farms, the most interestingcase is Mamusta (Lenkoran). Approximately the samenumber of both household types report using irriga-tion and fertilizer, but only male-headed householdsreport using other inputs, except pesticide.


Household Decision Making: In focus groups, a fewmen and women stated that the entire family makesdecisions about what to do with family income. Forthe most part, however, both men and women saidthat men primarily make all decisions in the family.

Credit: Many families took credit, but usually onlymen were involved. Most women stated that theirhusbands signed all the documents, and they did notknow that their husbands had taken credit until thedocuments were signed.

Water User Associations: All families are membersof the water user associations, but only men are listedon the contract.

Positive Aspects of the Land Reform for Women: Wom-en stated that, with land rights, many families are in abetter position after the loss of the head of the familybecause women do not have to be dependent on theirfathers and brothers.

Negative Aspects of the Land Reform for Women: Grow-ing crops is very hard labor, and women without hus-bands suffer a great deal and must work very hard.Most women agreed that the reforms increased theirworkload.

Divorce: Men refused to discuss divorce, saying thatit did not occur and was a question not even worthdiscussing. In many cases, women also refused to dis-cuss divorce. Some women said that divorces arerare, but when they occur, men initiate them. If thereis a divorce, the property is divided by the court andchildren go with the mother back to her family. Incourt, women will get half of the property. Out ofcourt, women receive nothing when a divorce occurs.

Inheritance: All groups stated that everything is di-vided among the children unless they are young, inwhich case the wife receives the inheritance. Equaldivision of property did not mean equal division ofland. No one knew what the formal law was regard-ing inheritance; they strictly followed custom.

Bolivia: National LandAdministration Project (1995–2001)

Legal Framework

Bolivia’s basic legal framework is very positive withregard to women’s land rights; this includes the Con-stitution, Civil Code, Family Code, and the 1996

Land Law (Ley INRA). Customary norms and prac-tices, however, show a strong bias against womenowning land. Husbands control household land and,if that land is formally titled, generally only the hus-band’s name appears on the documents. At the time ofinheritance, the land usually passes from father tosons, although widows are permitted to remain on theproperty. Daughters may inherit a small share of theland.

One of the distinguishing features of the 1996 LeyINRA is the explicit recognition of women’s andmen’s equal rights to land, stating that equity criteriawill be applied in the distribution, administration,tenure, and use of land in favor of women, independ-ent of their civil status.29 The provisional (1997) andfinal (2000) regulations for the Land Law, however,were not specific with regard to gender issues, nordid they provide guidelines for procedures that wouldsafeguard the land rights that women have under Bo-livian law. As a result, the first three to four years ofthe regularization process (saneamiento) were imple-mented by the Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agrariawithout regard for women’s land rights and withoutmonitoring of the titles being issued to women eitheras individuals or as joint owners.

Land Administration Program

The World Bank and other international donors haveprovided financing to Bolivia to modernize and updateits land administration records and institutions. Theoriginal National Land Administration Project was im-plemented from 1995 to 2001; the current project(Supplemental Land Administration) was approved in2001 and ends in 2005. The objective of the regulariza-tion program is to legalize the land rights of the manyrural families who received land through the land re-distribution program in the highlands and valleys andthrough the resettlement program in the lowlands. Inaddition, people engaging in land transactions, partic-ularly among smallholders, have neither completed thelegal transfer of land rights nor recorded the transac-tions in the land registry.

Regularization Procedures

Initially, gender concerns did not guide or influencethe design of regularization procedures. The sanea-miento forms did not include a place for more thanone name as titleholder. Personnel were not instruct-ed to correctly identify all landowners within thehousehold. Women were not encouraged to attend

Appendixes 49

public meetings and workshops regarding saneami-ento, nor were they sought out when the titlingbrigade visited their land for adjudication and parcelmeasurement.

After several years and after critiques by civil soci-ety that the saneamiento process was dispossessingwomen of their land rights, INRA began to designand implement procedural changes to increase theparticipation of women. Changes were made in thefieldwork carried out by titling brigades to ensurethat women, particularly wives, were being includedin the titling documentation. That office also con-tracted with a gender specialist to organize and im-plement gender-training workshops (for INRA per-sonnel, titling brigades, and beneficiaries) and todevelop gender-oriented informational materials.

These changes, however, have been done ad hocand apparently with little monitoring. If these proce-dures had been in place from the beginning and hadformed an integral part of the program, the opportu-nity to train INRA staff and titling brigades wouldhave been greater and possibly more effective.

The Bolivia case seems to indicate that when toofew resources are allocated to gender concerns (inthis case, one person was placed in charge of genderissues for the whole program), these gender initia-tives are at risk and easily dropped.Where gendertraining has taken place, either with INRA staff andtitling brigades or with beneficiaries, there does ap-pear to be a positive impact on women’s knowledgeand assertiveness with regard to their land rights.Gender training, however, has not reached all areas ofthe saneamiento program. It seems that the most ef-fective gender training is one that results in a titlingbrigade becoming proactive in implementing stan-dards that (1) include women (such as a verbal andwritten campaign that greatly emphasizes women’srights and the importance of their participation at alllevels of saneamiento), (2) include a female techni-cian in each saneamiento brigade, and (3) request thatall internal saneamiento community committees in-clude at least one woman.

Land Titled to Women

A review of the statistics prepared by INRA revealsthat men as individuals have received more than 50percent of the titles issued since 1999, whereaswomen as individuals have received only 17 percent.If joint titles are included, the percentage of women

who received legal title to land increases to 37 per-cent; on the other hand, the percentage of men also in-creases to 76 percent. Breaking down this informationby year, the percentages of joint titles particularly andtitles issued to individual women have increased sig-nificantly in the last few years. However, it is also evi-dent that individual men continue to receive more than50 percent of titles. Taking into consideration inheri-tance practices and Bolivia’s marital property regime,these statistics appear to demonstrate that women maybe more successful at acquiring land as spouses thanas daughters through inheritance.

If we disaggregate the information by type offarm, it appears that women are more likely to obtaintitle to smaller parcels of land: 23 percent of smallhomestead parcels were titled to women and 47 per-cent were jointly titled. As parcels increase in sizeand/or commercial nature, the percentage of womenreceiving titles either as individuals or jointly withtheir spouses decreases. Except for the small home-stead parcels, individual men obtain the great majori-ty of land titles, and women obtain a small percentage(between 10 percent and 18 percent) of titles for agri-cultural (small and medium) parcels and legally reg-istered commercial farms. Joint titles for agriculturalparcels also decrease greatly. The amount of land be-ing titled to men also far exceeds the amount titled towomen as individuals and to women in joint titles.Tentative conclusions are that (1) a great number ofindividual and joint titles being issued to women arefor homestead parcels, not for agricultural parcels;and (2) the amount of land being titled to women iseven smaller than the number of titles suggests.

Major Problems Encountered

A review of the procedural modifications over the lastfive years reveals the difficulty that the titling brigadesexperienced in carrying out the instructions to includewomen in the saneamiento process—difficulties causedby both government agencies and community mem-bers. Among the former, the Land Registry, for exam-ple, refused to register co-ownership titles (as commu-nity property) to consensual couples, insisting that onlylegally married couples were recognized as legitimatespouses. As a result, the Land Registry refused titles tocouples without an accompanying marriage certificate,so titling brigades were reluctant to issue such titles. Ti-tling brigades also met resistance from some male house-hold heads and from some community authorities when


they attempted to include women in the saneamientoprocess and on the land titles.

Another potential problem is the lack of trainingfor a recent procedure called saneamiento interno. Inthis titling method, the community does the parcelmeasurements (that is, INRA or the titling brigadesmeasure the perimeter of the community) and deter-mines who are the legal owners of the parcels. Whilesaneamiento interno is potentially important in that itinvolves community members who are then more in-vested in the saneamiento process, it has been adopt-ed without adequate training for titling brigades andfor the community facilitators. Focus-group discus-sions revealed that community members, includingwomen, who believe they are being denied ownershiprights to their land, are anguished because they feelthat they have no other recourse (right to appeal). Itwould appear that communities that decide to dosaneamiento interno are not informed of how the ap-peal process works and that, consequently, communi-ty leaders are able to ultimately determine the out-come of contentious land conflicts.

Ghana: Urban II Project—Titling Component (1994–1997)

Background

Ghana is a densely populated country (about the sizeof Great Britain) with 18.8 million people. Of these,44 percent are Akan, which includes the Ashanti. TheAkan are matrilineal, although most of the othertribes are patrilinial.30 Approximately 70 percent ofthe population is Christian (predominantly in thesouth) and approximately 15 percent is Muslim (pre-dominantly in the north). Traditional religions arepracticed exclusively by some people, and in con-junction with other religion by others.

Ghana has a pluralistic legal system, which consistsof statutory and constitutional law as well as commonlaw principles, including judicial decisions, and cus-tomary laws and practice. Under customary law, thechiefs control and administer stool/skin land. Beforecolonialism, the north did not have a chieftain system,but rather had seven priests who controlled land.

The chieftain system is interrelated with the gov-ernment structure. For dispute resolution, often thechief is approached first, before the case goes to civilcourt, although this is not mandatory. The civil courts

can hear customary law cases, and increasingly, chiefsare ignored and people go directly to civil court.

Land Tenure Systems: Land ownership in Ghana fallsinto two main categories: state or public land, andcustomary or private land. Approximately 80 percentof the land is held in customary tenure. Such land canbe held by individuals, families, stools or skins (com-munities), and tendamba (the first clans in a commu-nity). All public lands in Ghana (20 percent) are vest-ed in the president in trust for the people of Ghana.Public lands are managed by the Lands Commission,in coordination with relevant public agencies andgovernmental bodies.

Under customary law, the titleholder holds the landin absolute, or allodial, ownership, in trust for thewell-being of the whole community for the presentand future generations (Kotey 2004). This title iscalled the “stool” in many parts of the south, and the“skin” in the north (Kotey 2004). Subchiefs or familyheads may also play a role in managing stool land. Insome instances, subchiefs are more powerful than themain chief because they receive funds from landtransactions. The coexistence of customary and for-mal land tenure creates both overlap and gaps in thelegal framework.

Gender and Development: Women in Ghana are dis-advantaged, compared with men, in education, litera-cy, and land ownership. Women farmers, on average,cultivate plots that are about half the size of those cul-tivated by men (Fenrich and Higgins 2001). Women’sability to own and control land is very much a part ofthe intrahousehold distribution of wealth. The mostimportant issue related to family land is that it muststay in the family lineage. For this reason, maritalproperty has not traditionally been community prop-erty, but rather has been separate property.

Project Background: The Ghana Urban II Project(June 14, 1990–June 30, 1999) had two primary ob-jectives: local government sector rehabilitation, andhousing sector reform. The land titling pilot was partof the component to set up a home-financing compa-ny, and it ran from approximately 1994 to 1997. TheWorld Bank titling pilot assisted the already existingsporadic titling system.

Legal Framework

Land Legislation and Policy: The legal regime forland management in Ghana is pluralistic, based on

Appendixes 51

the coexistence of statutory law, customary law, andIslamic law. Under customary law, rights in land de-rive principally from a person’s lineage, not from themarital family.

Under Law 152, co-owners can register as jointowners or owners in common; where they are ownersin common, the registration must state what portionof land each common owner holds31 Either party canrequest that the land be partitioned. However, theremay be a minimum plot size prescribed by law, inwhich case one party would receive the value of hisor her land, not the land itself.

Gender and Land Rights: There are major variations,in the number of women who own land in Ghana—variations primarily based on tribal affiliation. Onesource estimated that 50 percent of land owners arewomen in the Ashanti region, and only 2 percent to 4percent of women own land in the northern and up-per west regions, respectively (Fenrich and Higgins2001).

The 1992 constitution requires the parliament toenact legislation regulating the property rights ofspouses,32 and it provides that spouses must receive areasonable provision from the estate, regardless of theexistence of a will. The constitution also requires thatassets jointly acquired during marriage be distributedequitably in case of divorce.

Law 111 (1985) was intended to provide security toa surviving spouse and children, and it notes the grow-ing importance of the nuclear family (Fenrich and Hig-gins 2001). Under the law, the surviving spouse andchildren are entitled to one house and the householdbelongings. Beyond that, the spouse is entitled to ashare of the residual estate, along with others undercustomary law (Dowuona-Hammond 2003). However,Law 111 only applies to property not disposed of by awill; and does not apply to lineage property, but onlyto “self-acquired” property. Whether land is self-acquired or lineage property is not always clear, and theterm self-acquired is not defined in the law (Dowuona-Hammond 2003). Law 111 does not address polygamy,so multiple wives may be forced to share the spousal al-lotment.

The Customary Marriage and Divorce Law 112(1985) was published the same day as Law 111 (in-heritance). Law 112 required marital registration andlimited application of Law 111 to marriages that wereregistered. Ignorance of the law, illiteracy, and men’sunwillingness to register meant that many marriages

were not registered, and this limited the scope of Law111. Law 112 was amended (1991) to address thisproblem by allowing either party to register the mar-riage, not imposing a timeline for registration, and al-lowing oral or documentary evidence of a customary-law marriage instead of registration for application ofLaw 111.

Assessment of Issues and Interventions

A major drawback of the Urban II Project was thefact that the actual title application process was vol-untary and sporadic. Applicants were primarily thosewith wealth and education, and many applicants actu-ally lived abroad. The Urban II Project had no gendercomponent.

The World Bank interventions did not specificallyaddress women, and fewer women were found to betitleholders. In a 1,440-entry survey, 65 percent ofregistered owners were male, 25 percent were female,and 10 percent of the entries were to joint owners(Dowuona-Hammond 2003). Of the joint owners, 91percent were spouses. The Dowuona-Hammondstudy indicated that the majority of those who regis-tered land were from first- and second-class neigh-borhoods (the wealthiest neighborhoods).

As stated above, marital property is customarilyseparate property in Ghana. Our interviews foundthat most of those properties held in joint ownershipwere businesses, and there were very few. Quite of-ten, both spouses had title to their own land plot.

Land: Women who were interviewed stated that therewas no difference in the way men and women weretreated in terms of title registration or land purchase.All who were interviewed cited tenure security and/orlegal requirement as the reason they had registeredtheir land in the title registry. More than gender,wealth seemed to be a determining factor of who hadland registered in her or his name.

Inheritance: No specific inheritance pattern emerged.Both sons and daughters inherited land, and membersof both matrilineal and patrilineal tribes showed onlya slight preference for following custom.

Process of Titling Land: All people interviewed statedthat the process took a long time, often years, Theyhad heard about the need to register from radio broad-casts and newspaper articles, or by word of mouth.

Divorce: None of those interviewed were divorced, al-though several lived independently from their spouses.


Lao PDR: Land Titling Project 1(1997–2003)Legal Framework

In Lao PDR, even though the state is the ultimateowner of all categories of land, individuals and groupshave use rights to land. The state has the responsibili-ty for managing land and allocating it for use to indi-viduals, families, and organizations (Constitution, ar-ticle 15). The 1991 constitution also affirms the rightsof private parties to use land, and the Law on Land(May 1997) reaffirms the state’s responsibilities (arti-cle 3) and the rights of private parties (article 5) toprotection, use, usufruct, transfer, and inheritance ofland (articles 53–58). The state assigned land manage-ment responsibilities, including land allocation, to rel-evant line ministries, including the Ministry of Agri-culture and Forests for rural land and forest land (Lawon Land, articles 8–9). The Law on Land also providestemporary and permanent rights to land to private par-ties. A land certificate provides provisional or tempo-rary legal use right for agricultural or forest land (arti-cle 48). Land certificates are inheritable (article 18),but they cannot be sold or used as collateral. Perma-nent land use rights are assigned and recorded with aland title (article 49), and they include the right to passon their use rights to heirs, the right to sell their userights, and the right to use them as collateral for cred-it. Land certificates can be converted to land titles af-ter 10 years through an application for land titleprocess (article 36).

Gender and Land Rights

Lao PDR legislation, including the 1991 constitution,acknowledges gender equity with regard to family,inheritance, and property laws. Daughters and sonsare to inherit equally. Land acquired by a couple issupposed to be issued a joint land use certificate or ti-tle (Law on Land, article 43; Family Law; and Prop-erty Law). Property acquired before marriage andland inherited from parents are not generally includ-ed in marital property, and land title would thereforebe issued to the individual owner.

Customary norms with regard to land rights andgender are principally applied through inheritancepractices. Lao PDR is a multiethnic country withboth matrilineal and patrilineal traditions, but thegreat majority of its society is matrilineal. With re-gard to land rights, in practical terms this means that

both daughters and sons can inherit land, and thatthere are no cultural restrictions on women owningland. Inheritance practices are not rigid, and parentsusually decide which children will inherit what fami-ly property. Often this is done on the basis of needand the relationship between parent and child. Thetraditional practice is for the youngest daughter to re-main in her parents’ home after marriage to take careof them in their old age; she therefore inherits thefamily homestead.

In the patrilineal ethnic groups, such as the Khumuand the Hmong found mostly in the midland and up-land areas, men are the owners and administrators ofland, and land is transferred from one generation toanother through sons when they marry and leave thehouse or when the parents become too old to work theland. Marriage practices are patrilocal, so womenmove to the husband’s house and receive gifts ofmoney or animals from their birth families. Womendo not generally inherit land from their parents.

In spite of positive legal, political, and cultural con-ditions for recognition of women’s rights in Lao PDR(with exceptions in some regions), there are problemsin issuing land documents to women. This is the casein the land allocation program in rural areas whereland use certificates are being issued, and it was alsothe case during the first years of the titling program inurban areas. A 1998 study by the research arm of theLao Women’s Union, the Gender Resource Informa-tion and Development Center (GRID), revealed thatthe names on land documents did not always reflectthe actual landholder. Although more women inherit-ed land than did men, many more land use certificatesand titles were issued only in the husbands’ names. Inaddition, both husband and wife acquired over half ofthe land parcels, but only a small percentage of thesecouples received joint certificates and titles.

Among the reasons for the discrepancy between ac-tual landholder(s) and the name placed on land docu-ments are these: (1) the certification or titling processitself; (2) previous land documentation, such as tax re-ceipts that had only the name of the household head;and (3) cultural norms whereby women defer to thetraditional head of the family, particularly in publicsituations. The results of this study heightened aware-ness on the part of the different actors in the land ad-ministration project (such as government agency offi-cials, NGOs, and donor agencies) that women’s rightsto land were not being protected in the process oflegally assigning property rights to land.

Appendixes 53

Land Administration Project

The Land Titling Project (LTP), begun as a small ur-ban pilot project in 1994–95, issues permanent landuse titles to land in urban and periurban areas. Thisprogram was extended to include periurban areas dur-ing the First LTP (LTP1), and is projected to includeirrigated (lowland) paddy land in the Second Land Ti-tling Project (LTP2).

The titling carried out has been characterized assystematic—that is, an entire district was to be target-ed and all land in the area was to be adjudicated. Sys-tematic titling facilitates such processes as informa-tion campaigns, dispute resolution, and use of titlingresources. The Lao Women’s Union was asked to playan important role in communicating to landholdersthe benefits of title and the rights that would ensue tomen and women. The procedures developed included

• training of local field staff (facilitated in lateryears by the Department of Land’s inclusion ofmore women at the district level);

• meetings to which both men and women wereinvited;

• separate meetings for women;• general awareness raising on the rights of women

to land within the project.

Village information meetings were by far the mostimportant means by which beneficiaries becameaware of the titling program. In the 2005 householdstudy implemented for the Lao PDR case study, morethan 75 percent of all respondents (70 percent of menand 92 percent of women) reported learning of theproject through such meetings. Both men and womenreported high incidence of having interacted withproject personnel when they came to survey the prop-erty. Eighty-four percent of men and 75 percent ofwomen indicated that they were interviewed or con-sulted during the survey process, most often in theform of “describing the property information to proj-ect personnel.” In contrast to the survey phase of proj-ect implementation, fewer than half of the respondentsreported active participation in the adjudication of ti-tle phase, with no significant difference between menand women.

The 2003 socioeconomic baseline study indicatesthat the LTP1 process has been more successful inproviding women with legal documentation to landrights than have other land programs. A comparison ofhouseholds that received title and those that receivedanother type of official document, such as land cer-tificates, reveals that LTP1 has a higher percentage ofwomen titled and joint titles. Because LTP1 has fo-cused on urban land, and other official land docu-ments are more likely to be for rural and agriculturalland, some of the explanation for this gender disparitymay be urban/rural and ethnic differences.

The land administration project has been a learningprocess with respect to gender issues and land. TheLao Women’s Union has been an effective participantin the titling process because of its institutional struc-ture: There are union offices at the national, provin-cial, and district levels, and at least representatives atthe village level. However, nearly all of the gender fo-cus was delegated to the Lao Women’s Union. The dis-advantage of this arrangement is the minimal internal-ization of gender issues and responsibility by theproject staff and implementation agencies.

Another problem related to the involvement of theLao Women’s Union is the level of resources for theiractivities allocated from the titling program. Key in-formants from both the union and the donor agencysector mentioned that budget funds set aside for LaoWomen’s Union activities are minimal, and that ad-ministrative obstacles often prevent the union frombeing reimbursed for its expenses. The union is en-thusiastic about its role in the land titling program,but lack of resources may hamper its activities andlimit its effectiveness.

A further issue for land titling in Lao PDR is thefact that LTP1 dealt primarily with urban land tenure,where social issues are less influenced by customarylaw and where land has a market-determined value. Infuture, as the titling moves to periurban and rural ar-eas during LTP2, the gender issues will be much morecomplex and there will be significant regional varia-tions that will have to be included in the program.


Appendix 2: Case StudyMethodologiesAzerbaijanA number of study methods were used to collect dataand information regarding the gender aspects of theFarm Privatization Project.

Collection of Documentation

Project documentation and relevant studies were col-lected prior to the trip to Azerbaijan in October 2004.Legislation was collected during the October trip.This information was supplemented by interviewsand observations of the registration process.

Key Informant Interviews

The team met with (1) World Bank staff in Baku, (2) for-mer staff of the Farm Privatization Project, (3) currentstaff of the follow-on credit project, (4) specialists ongender issues, (5) the State Committee on Statistics, (6)regional registration officials, (7) the Ministry of Agri-culture gender focal point, and (8) the State Committeeon Women’s Issues.

The quantitative component consisted of a cross-sectional household and community survey conduct-ed in six sites (rayons, or districts: Barda, Lenkoran,Salyan, Sharur, Ujar, and Xachmas). Nine communi-ty interviews and 180 household-level interviewswere conducted.

Household Surveys

All interviews were conducted in person. In each ofthe six pilot farm villages, 30 households were inter-viewed. Each third house on the right side of thestreet and each third house on the left side of thestreet were selected for interviews. Within house-holds, 50 percent of the interviewees were womenand 50 percent were men. The surveyors were trainedand the instrument was pretested.

Community-Level Surveys

Community-level interviews were conducted with thechiefs of local villages (baladiya). The distribution ofinterviews was related to the number of villages oneach pilot farm as follows:

• Gilinjili (in Barda)—1• Gulaband-Hatai (in Ujar)—1• Narimanov (in Lenkoran)—1

• Pusyan (in Sharur)—1• Shafag (in Salyan)—2• Yerguch (in Xachmas)—3

Focus-Group Discussions

The general objective of the qualitative study was todetermine some of the impacts, from a gender per-spective, of the farm reorganization and titling/regis-tration program.

Information on short-term impacts regarding thetitling/registration/farm privatization process wereobtained, such as level of gender consciousness withregard to property rights, attitudes of women and menwith regard to women’s land rights, and social statusof women and men. Focus groups were held on theterritory of each of the six farms. The survey groupconducted nine focus groups—three in each of threerayons: one focus group of men only, one focus groupof young women, and one focus group of elderlywomen. The three farms were Gilinjili farm in Barda;Shafag farm in Salyan; and Pusyan farm in Sharur,which is in Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic. Theinternational expert and a local gender expert con-ducted one focus group with women only or mixedgroups on the territory of each of the three otherfarms: Narimanov farm in Lenkoran; Gulaband-Hatai farm in Ujar; and Yerguch farm in Xachmas. Afocus-group protocol was used. The survey grouptaped and transcribed the interviews.

BoliviaThe Bolivia country study used several data collec-tion methods, including secondary data and informa-tion, key informant interviews, and focus groups. Arandom-sample household survey of titled and con-trol group households, using a gender-disaggregatedquestionnaire, is scheduled to be completed by June30, 2005; data were therefore not available for inclu-sion in this report.

Secondary Data and Information

Various sources of information were reviewed to col-lect data on formal and customary land rights andgender. Legislation consulted includes the 1994 Con-stitution, the 1975 Civil Code, the 1973 FamilyCode,33 the 1996 Ley INRA, and the 2000 INRARegulations. Previous studies on women’s rights toland were also consulted. And within INRA, admin-istrative documentation on how gender has been in-

Appendixes 55

corporated into the land administration project, aswell as statistics on the levels of titled women, werecollected.


During visits to Bolivia in July and September 2004,interviews were carried out with INRA directors andofficials at both national and provincial levels, withtitling brigade personnel, and with research centersand scholars.

Focus-Group Study

Five focus-group discussions with women and men(separately) in two different sites were undertaken inSeptember with a Bolivian social scientist, RosarioSalazar. The sites chosen are in areas where INRA hasrecently made increased efforts to carry out its gender-sensitivity training program with titling brigades andwith the titling population. The focus-group discus-sions took place in

1. Ichilo (Santa Cruz): a lowland, resettlement(colono) area where smallholders migratedfrom the Quechua-speaking highlands, but arenow mostly also Spanish speaking;

2. Pocona (Cochabamba): an ex-latifundio area inan inter-Andean valley (midlevel in altitude,2,500–3,000 meters above sea level) wheresmallholders received their land from the 1953agrarian reform, and are mostly Quechua speak-ers, particularly the women.

GhanaCollection of Documentation

Project documentation and relevant studies were col-lected during a visit to Ghana in December 2004. Wewere able to obtain some documentation of the landadministration component of the project, as well aslaws pertaining to land rights, marital property, inher-itance, and registration. In addition, a recent survey,funded by GTZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technis-

che Zusammenarbeit), focused on disaggregating titleregistration data by gender, which was extremelyhelpful in our understanding of the situation in Accra,Ghana’s capital. This information was supplementedby interviews and observations of the registrationprocess.


The team met with (1) World Bank staff in Accra, (2) government employees in the Land Titles Officeand the Lands and Surveys Department, (3) special-ists in socioeconomic issues (a small gender-and-landworkshop sponsored by GTZ was held during thecourse of the visit), and (4) a selected sample of 12 ti-tleholders in Accra to establish a small number ofcase studies on gender-related impacts.

Household Survey

A small household sample survey (60 households)was conducted in Accra.

Lao PDRTo explore the gender impact of the Lao PDR titlingprogram, several data collection techniques were used.Interviews with key informants were done by two of thestudy team members in August and October of 2004.These key informants came from a variety of institu-tions, including government, donor agencies, andNGOs. A focus-group meeting was also held with a vil-lage in the Saithany District (Vientiane Municipality)that had undergone systematic titling. A random-samplesurvey was administered to 300 households during De-cember 2004 in two administrative units: six villages inVientiane Municipality and six villages in SavannakhetProvince. Secondary information on a number of is-sues, including land legislation, tenure systems, landprograms, and gender issues, was collected from previ-ous studies, project documentation, and NGO anddonor agency reports. Secondary information was usedto guide this study and to complement its findings.


Appendix 3: Sample Templatefor Gender-Specific BaselineSocial AssessmentThis sample template is for a baseline social assess-ment of gender-specific land rights, mentioned inchapter 4. The following open-ended questions canbe adapted for use in the planning stage of a landproject. They can be asked both of key informants atthe community level, and of potential beneficiaries inindividual interview or focus-group settings.

Land Acquisition1. What are the different ways in which men ac-

quire land (for example, inheritance, purchase,rental, local allocation, state allocation)?

2. What are the different ways in which women ac-quire land (for example, inheritance, purchase,rental, local allocation, state allocation)?

Inheritance

1. From which parent(s) or other relative(s) do menmost commonly inherit land (for example, moth-er, father, uncle, brother)?

2. From which parent(s) or other relative(s) dowomen most commonly inherit land (for exam-ple, mother, father, aunt, sister)?

3. When do men usually receive their inheritances(for example, at marriage, at death of parents)?

4. When do women usually receive their inheritances(for example, at marriage, at death of parents)?

5. Are inheritance transfers usually legally record-ed or registered? If so, when is this usually done(for example, at the time of the transfer, uponthe death of the original owner)?

6. Do all sons inherit equally or unequally fromtheir parents?

7. Do all daughters inherit equally or unequallyfrom their parents?

8. If daughters inherit land from their parents, dothey normally keep this land themselves? If not,what usually happens to this inherited land?

9. Do sons inherit more, less, or the same as daugh-ters?

Market Purchase

1. How common is it for men to buy land?2. How do men generally pay for the purchase of a

new parcel of land (for example, savings, loan)?

3. What are the difficulties that men might have inbuying land?

4. How common is it for women to buy land?5. How do women generally pay for the purchase

of a new parcel of land (for example, savings,loan)?

6. What are the difficulties that women might havein buying land?

Market Rental

1. How common is it for men to rent land?2. What are the difficulties that men might have in

renting land?3. How common is it for women to rent land?4. What are the difficulties that women might have

in renting land?

Local Allocation

1. How and when is land allocated to men by localauthorities?

2. How and when is land allocated to women bylocal authorities?

3. Approximately what proportion of householdsreceive land allocated by local authorities?

State Distribution

1. Have men in this community received land fromthe government (for example, land reform, farmprivatization, leasehold, resettlement)?

2. Have women in this community received landfrom the government (for example, land reform,farm privatization, leasehold resettlement)?

Other

1. Are there other ways that men in this communi-ty might obtain land (for example, borrowing,gift, exchange)?

2. Are there other ways that women in this com-munity might obtain land (for example, borrow-ing, gift, exchange)?

Marital Property PracticesAll questions should distinguish between formallymarried and cohabiting couples.

1. When couples first marry/cohabit, where do theyestablish residence (for example, with the hus-band’s family, with the wife’s family, independ-ently)?

Appendixes 57

2. Do women generally bring a dowry to marriage/cohabitation?

3. If so, does this dowry often include land?4. Do men generally bring land to a new marriage/

cohabitation?5. Once a couple is married/cohabiting, do they

keep separate control over the land they broughtto the marriage (for example, decisions over useand transfer, control over proceeds)?

6. If new land is purchased while a couple is mar-ried/cohabiting, is it considered to belong to thehusband, the wife, or both?

7. If a couple separates or divorces, what happensto the land?

8. If a husband dies before his wife, what happensto the land?

9. If a wife dies before her husband, what happensto the land?

Gender-Specific Land UseMale Land Use

1. What crops do men most commonly grow ontheir land?

2. Of the crops grown by men, which are mostcommonly used for consumption by the family?

3. Which crops are most commonly sold?4. How common is it for men to rent out their

land?5. Which family members most often help men in

the cultivation of their crops?6. How common is it for men to hire labor to help

out in the cultivation of their crops?7. Do men in this community receive loans to pur-

chase inputs (seed, fertilizer, pesticide, hired la-bor) for agricultural production?

8. What are the most important sources of agricul-tural loans for men?

9. Do any of these sources regularly require thatmen use their land as collateral (guarantee) forthe loan?

10. What are the most important sources of nonag-ricultural loans for men (for example, consump-tion, small business)?

11. Do any of these sources regularly require thatmen use their land as collateral (guarantee) forthe loan?

Female Land Use

1. What crops do women most commonly grow ontheir land?

2. Of the crops grown by women, which are mostcommonly used for consumption by the family?

3. Which crops are most commonly sold?4. How common is it for women to rent out their

land?5. Which family members most often help women

in the cultivation of their crops?6. How common is it for women to hire labor to

help out in the cultivation of their crops?7. Do women in this community receive loans to

purchase inputs (seed, fertilizer, pesticide, hiredlabor) for agricultural production?

8. What are the most important sources of agricul-tural loans for women?

9. Do any of these sources regularly require thatwomen use their land as collateral (guarantee)for the loan?

10. What are the most important sources of nonag-ricultural loans for women (for example, con-sumption, small business)?

11. Do any of these sources regularly require thatwomen use their land as collateral (guarantee)for the loan?


Appendix 4: Sample Gender-Specific Indicators forMonitoring and Evaluation ofWorld Bank LandAdministration Projects

Project-Level Indicators1. Staff composition, by gender (especially field-

level public information, training, and survey/adjudication teams)

2. Information meeting attendance, by gender (dis-tinguish head of household from non-head ofhousehold)

3. Training meeting participation, by gender (dis-tinguish head of household from non-head ofhousehold)

4. Titles issued, by gender (individual, joint)5. Post-titling land transfers (sales, bequests), by

gender

Beneficiary Household-LevelIndicators

1. Land use and investments/improvements, bygender

2. Agricultural (for example, crop sale) income, bygender

3. Nonagricultural income, by gender4. Land collateralization/credit receipt, by gender5. Outmigration, by gender6. Food and nonfood expenditures

7. Child school enrollment, by gender8. Incidence of divorce/separation9. Division of land assets upon divorce/separation

10. Division of land assets upon death of the head ofthe household

Beneficiary Community-LevelIndicator

1. Participation in community organizations anddecision-making bodies, by gende

Appendix 5: SampleQuestionnaire for DataCollection for Baseline andImpact EvaluationThis sample survey instrument consists of nine mod-ules (pages 60–81). It can be adapted and modifiedas needed to establish baseline information and tomonitor project impact over time. The modules are

1. household roster2. parcel information3. wealth4. credit5. community participation6. nonfarm employment7. household enterprise8. expenditures9. community-level data.

Appendixes 59

60

Ho

useh

old

Ro

ster

1.2.

3.4.

5.6.

7.8.

9.10

.11

.12

.ID

HOUS

EHOL

DPR

INCI

PAL

FATH

ER’S

FA

THER

’SM

OTHE

R’S

MOT

HER’

SCO

DEM

EMBE

RSSE

XRE

LATI

ONSH

IP T

O HE

ADAG

EED

UCAT

ION

OCCU

PATI

ONM

ARIT

AL S

TATU

SM

IGRA

TION

EDUC

ATIO

NOC

CUPA

TION

EDUC

ATIO

NOC

CUPA

TION

Who

nor

mal

ly M

ALE–

1HE

AD–1

YEAR

S IF

W

hat w

as th

eW

hat k

ind

ofM

ARRI

EDFo

r how

W

hat w

as

Wha

t kin

d of

W

hat w

asW

hat k

ind

ofliv

es a

nd e

ats

FEM

ALE–

2W

IFE/

HUSB

AND–

21

YEAR

OR

high

est g

rade

wor

k do

es(F

ORM

AL)–

1m

any

the

high

est

wor

k di

d th

e th

e hi

ghes

tw

ork

did

the

toge

ther

inCH

ILD/

ADOP

TED

CHIL

D–3

OLDE

Rco

mpl

eted

by

[NAM

E] d

oCO

HABI

TING

–2m

onth

sgr

ade

fath

er o

f

grad

em

othe

r of

this

dw

ellin

g?GR

ANDC

HILD

–4[N

AME]

?m

ost o

f the

DIVO

RCED

–3du

ring

the

com

plet

ed

[NAM

E] d

oco

mpl

eted

[N

AME]

do

NIEC

E/NE

PHEW

–5M

ONTH

S IF

time?

SEPA

RATE

D–4

past

12

by [N

AME]

’sfo

r mos

t of

by [N

AME]

’sfo

r mos

t of

FATH

ER/M

OTHE

R–6

<1

YEAR

WID

OW O

Rm

onth

sfa

ther

?hi

s lif

e?m

othe

r?he

r life

?SI

STER

/BRO

THER

–7W

IDOW

ER–5

has

he/s

he

SON/

DAUG

HTER

-IN-L

AW–8

NEVE

Rbe

en a

way

BROT

HER/

SIST

ER-IN

-LAW

–9M

ARRI

ED–6

from

this

GRAN

DFAT

HER/

MOT

HER–

10ho

useh

old?

FATH

ER/M

OTHE

R-IN

-LAW

–11

OTHE

R RE

LATI

VE–1

2OT

HER

NONR

ELAT

IVE–

13

OCCU

PATI

ONAL

CUM

ULAT

IVE

NAM

EYR

S

MOS

CODE

SM

ONTH

S

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

61

Par

cel I

nfo

rmat

ion

1. D

oes

any

mem

ber o

f you

r hou

seho

ld c

urre

ntly

own

any

agric

ultu

ral l

and,

fore

st la

nd,o

r pas

ture

land

?If

answ

er to

1.i

s YE

S,co

ntin

ue w

ith m

odul

e.If

answ

er to

1.i

s NO

,ski

p to

nex

t mod

ule.

2. P

leas

e te

ll m

e ab

out e

ach

plot

/par

cel o

f lan

d be

long

ing

to y

our h

ouse

hold

? Pl

ease

des

crib

e or

give

me

the

nam

e of

eac

h pl

ot.

3.4.

5a.

5b.

5c.

Wha

t is

the

How

is th

isDi

d yo

u us

e th

isIf

this

plo

t was

If th

is p

lot w

asar

ea o

f thi

spa

rcel

cur

rent

lyla

nd c

ontin

ually

rent

ed o

ut fo

r any

rent

ed o

ut fo

r pl

ot/p

arce

l ?be

ing

used

?fo

r the

pas

t 12

part

of th

e la

stan

y pa

rt of

the

COM

PLET

E TH

IS Q

UEST

ION

FOR

ALL

PLOT

S. T

HEN

ASK

REM

AINI

NG Q

UEST

IONS

FOR

EAC

H PL

OTm

onth

s,or

did

year

,how

muc

hla

st y

ear,

whi

chBE

FORE

GOI

NG T

O TH

E NE

XT P

LOT.

you

rent

it o

ut to

did

you

char

ge?

hous

ehol

d ot

hers

for a

ll or

mem

bers

pa

rt of

the

last

rece

ived

the

12 m

onth

s?re

ntal

inco

me?

ANNU

AL C

ROP

USED

ALL

12

LAND

–1M

ONTH

S—1

TREE

CRO

PRE

NTED

ALL

12

LAND

–2M

ONTH

S–2

FORE

ST–3

BOTH

USE

D PA

STUR

E–4

AND

RENT

ED–3

OT

HER

(spe

cify

)__

____

___

–5

AREA

AMOU

NT

HOUS

EHOL

DUN

ITIN

LOC

ALM

EMBE

RNA

ME

OF P

LOT

AREA

C

ODE

LAND

USE

COD

ERE

NTAL

COD

ECU

RREN

CYID

COD

E

62

Par

cel I

nfo

rmat

ion

6.7.

8.9.

10.

11.

12a–

g.W

hat c

rops

did

you

gro

w

Who

in th

eHo

w m

uch

of [M

AIN

How

muc

h of

W

hat p

rice

Is

this

plo

tDi

d yo

u us

e an

y of

the

follo

win

g in

puts

/equ

ipm

ent o

n th

is p

arce

l dur

ing

the

last

gro

win

g se

ason

?on

this

plo

t dur

ing

the

last

hous

ehol

dCR

OP] d

id y

ou

that

[MAI

N di

d yo

u ge

t irr

igat

ed?

grow

ing

seas

on?

deci

des

how

harv

est d

urin

g th

eCR

OP] w

asfo

r the

[MAI

Nto

use

/wha

t la

st g

row

ing

seas

onso

ld?

CROP

] tha

t to

gro

w o

non

this

par

cel?

you

sold

?th

is p

arce

l?

YES–

1YE

S–1

NO–2

NO–2

HOUS

EHOL

DPR

ICE

AGRI

CULU

RAL

MEM

BER

UNIT

IN L

OCAL

EXTE

NSIO

NM

AIN

CROP

2ND

CROP

ID C

ODE

AMOU

NT

CO

DEAM

OUNT

CURR

ENCY

FERT

ILIL

ZER

PEST

ICID

ESHE

RBIC

IDES

TRAC

TOR

PLOW

THRE

SHER

SERV

ICES

63

Par

cel I

nfo

rmat

ion

13.

14a.

14b.

14c.

15.

16.

17.

18.

Whi

chHo

w d

id th

e cu

rrent

Who

spe

cific

ally

In a

ppro

ximat

ely

Wha

t leg

al ti

tle o

rIf

title

d,w

hose

nam

e(s)

is(a

re) o

n th

eW

ho is

mos

t lik

ely

Whe

n is

this

par

cel m

ost l

ikel

yho

useh

old

owne

r(s) a

cqui

re th

is la

nd?

inhe

rited

/pur

chas

ed/

wha

t yea

r was

owne

rshi

p rig

hts

dodo

cum

ent(s

)?to

inhe

rit th

is p

arce

l?to

pas

s do

wn

as in

herit

ance

?m

embe

r(s)

acqu

ired

it?th

is p

arce

l acq

uire

dth

e cu

rrent

ow

ner(s

)do

es th

is

by th

e cu

rrent

ow

ner(s

)?ha

ve fo

r thi

s pl

otpa

rcel

of

land

?cu

rrent

lybe

long

to?

INHE

RITE

D–1

ENTE

R HO

USEH

OLD

ID C

ODE(

S)EN

TER

HOUS

EHOL

DUP

ON D

EATH

OF

CURR

ENT

PURC

HASE

D–2

CODE

IF R

ESID

ENT

OWNE

R–1

AGRA

RIAN

REF

ORM

/NO

NRES

IDEN

T SO

N–91

UPON

MAR

RIAG

E OF

DECO

LLEC

TIVI

ZATI

ON–3

NONR

ESID

ENT

BENE

FICI

ARY–

2OT

HER

(spe

cify

) DA

UGHT

ER–9

2OT

HER

(spe

cify

)__

____

____

____

__ –

4OT

HER

NONR

ESID

ENT

____

____

____

_ –3

RELA

TIVE

–93

HOUS

EHOL

DHO

USEH

OLD

MEM

BER

MEM

BER

FIRS

T NA

ME

SEC

OND

NAM

EIN

HERI

TANC

E C

ODE

INHE

RITA

NCE

CODE

ID C

ODE

ACQU

ISIT

ION

CODE

ID C

ODE

YEAR

ON D

OCUM

ENT

ON

DOC

UMEN

TW

HO?

WHE

N?

64

Wea

lth1.

2.3.

4.5.

6.7.

How

Wha

t are

the

Wha

t is

the

Wha

t is

the

prin

cipa

l sou

rce

Wha

t is

the

mai

n W

hat t

ype

of to

ilet

Does

you

r hou

seho

ld o

wn

any

of th

e fo

llow

ing

item

s?m

any

maj

or c

onst

ruct

ion

mai

n so

urce

of

wat

er fo

r drin

king

and

ty

pe o

f fue

l use

d do

es th

e dw

ellin

gro

oms

mat

eria

ls o

f thi

sof

ligh

ting?

cook

ing?

for c

ooki

ng?

have

?do

es th

isdw

elin

g?dw

ellin

gha

ve?

BRIC

K–1

ELEC

TRIC

ITY–

1PR

IVAT

E CO

NNEC

TION

TO

GAS–

1FL

USH

TOIL

ET–1

YES–

1CO

NCRE

TE–2

KERO

SENE

,OIL

,PI

PELI

NE–1

ELEC

TRIC

ITY–

2LA

TRIN

E–2

NO–2

ADOB

E–3

OR G

ASPR

IVAT

E W

ELL–

2W

OOD–

3OT

HER

(spe

cify

)W

OOD–

4LA

MPS

–2PU

BLIC

TAP

S/ST

ANDP

IPE/

COAL

–4__

____

____

–3TI

N/ZI

NC–5

CAND

LES

ORW

ELL–

3KE

ROSE

NE–5

MUD

–6FL

ASHL

IGHT

S–3

WAT

ER V

ENDO

R–4

OTHE

R (s

peci

fy)

BAM

BOO–

7NO

LIG

HTIN

G–4

RIVE

R,ST

REAM

,LAK

E,PO

ND,

____

____

__–6

TILE

–8SP

RING

,OR

RAIN

WAT

ER–5

THAT

CH–9

OTHE

R (s

peci

fy)

LINO

LEUM

–10

____

____

____

___–

6

MOT

ORCY

CLE/

WAL

LSFL

OOR

ROOF

STOV

ERE

FRIG

ERAT

ORTE

LEVI

SION

BICY

CYLE

SCOO

TER

CAR/

TRUC

K

65

Cre

dit

1.2.

3.4.

5.6.

7.8.

Plea

se re

cord

the

nam

e an

d ho

useh

old

ID c

ode

In th

e la

st 1

2 W

hat w

as th

e W

hat k

ind

of

Wha

t was

the

mai

n re

ason

for

In th

e la

st 1

2 W

hat w

as th

e W

hat k

ind

ofof

any

hou

seho

ld m

embe

r who

has

bor

row

ed

mon

ths,

how

tota

l am

ount

gu

aran

tee

did

borro

win

g/ob

tain

ing

this

/thes

em

onth

s,ho

w

tota

l am

ount

guar

ante

e di

d m

oney

from

any

sou

rce

(indi

vidua

l or

man

y tim

es d

idbo

rrow

ed fr

omth

e bo

rrow

erlo

an(s

)?m

any

times

did

borro

wed

from

the

borro

wer

inst

itutio

n) in

the

last

12

mon

ths

this

hou

seho

ldfri

ends

or f

amily

prov

ide

the

this

hou

seho

ldm

oney

lend

ers,

prov

ide

the

mem

ber b

orro

w

mem

bers

in th

ele

nder

(s) f

orm

embe

r bor

row

empl

oyer

s,or

lend

er(s

) for

any

mon

ey,t

hat

last

12

mon

ths?

this

/thes

e an

y m

oney

,tha

tla

ndlo

rds

in th

eth

is/th

ese

loan

s?he

/she

had

/has

loan

(s)?

he/s

he h

ad/h

asla

st 1

2 m

onth

s?to

repa

y,fro

mto

repa

y,fro

m a

nyan

y fri

ends

or

mon

eyle

nder

s,fa

mily

em

ploy

ers,

or

mem

bers

?la

ndlo

rds?

AGRI

CULT

URAL

INPU

TS–1

FARM

EQU

IPM

ENT–

2AN

IMAL

S–3

LAND

–4NO

NFAR

M B

USIN

ESS–

5CO

NSUM

PTIO

N–6

HOM

E RE

PAIR

/IMPR

OVEM

ENT–

7CO

NSUM

ER D

URAB

LES–

8CE

REM

ONY–

9M

EDIC

AL O

R OT

HER

EMER

GENC

Y–10

OTHE

R (s

peci

fy) _

____

____

___–

11

HOUS

EHOL

DID

COD

ENA

ME

FROM

ROS

TER

1 2 3 4 5

66

Cre

dit

9.10

.11

.12

.13

.W

hat w

as th

e m

ain

reas

on fo

r bor

row

ing/

In th

e la

st 1

2 m

onth

s,ho

w m

any

Wha

t was

the

tota

l am

ount

bor

row

edW

hat k

ind

of g

uara

ntee

did

the

Wha

t was

the

mai

n re

ason

for b

orro

win

g/ob

tain

ing

this

/thes

e lo

an(s

)?tim

es d

id th

is h

ouse

hold

mem

ber

from

ban

ks,c

redi

t uni

ons,

coop

erat

ives,

borro

wer

pro

vide

the

lend

er(s

)ob

tain

ing

this

/thes

e lo

an(s

)?bo

rrow

any

mon

ey,t

hat h

e/sh

eor

NGO

s in

the

last

12

mon

ths?

for t

his/

thes

e lo

an(s

)?ha

d/ha

s to

repa

y,fro

m b

anks

,cr

edit

unio

ns, c

oope

rativ

es,

or N

GOs?

AGRI

CULT

URAL

INPU

TS–1

AGRI

CULT

URAL

INPU

TS–1

FARM

EQU

IPM

ENT–

2FA

RM E

QUIP

MEN

T–2

ANIM

ALS–

3AN

IMAL

S–3

LAND

–4LA

ND–4

NONF

ARM

BUS

INES

S–5

NONF

ARM

BUS

INES

S–5

CONS

UMPT

ION–

6CO

NSUM

PTIO

N–6

HOM

E RE

PAIR

/IMPR

OVEM

ENT–

7HO

ME

REPA

IR/IM

PROV

EMEN

T–7

CONS

UMER

DUR

ABLE

S–8

CONS

UMER

DUR

ABLE

S–8

CERE

MON

Y–9

CERE

MON

Y–9

MED

ICAL

OR

OTHE

R EM

ERGE

NCY–

10M

EDIC

AL O

R OT

HER

EMER

GENC

Y–10

OTHE

R (s

peci

fy) _

____

____

___–

11OT

HER

(spe

cify

) ___

____

____

_–11

1 2 3 4 5

67

Co

mm

unity

Par

ticip

atio

n M

od

ule

`1.

2.3.

4.Am

ong

the

adul

t mem

bers

of y

our

How

act

ively

does

the

Amon

g th

e ad

ult m

embe

rs o

f you

rHo

w a

ctive

ly do

es th

eho

useh

old,

who

par

ticip

ates

in a

ny o

fpe

rson

par

ticip

ate

inho

useh

old,

who

par

ticip

ates

in a

ny o

fpe

rson

par

ticip

ate

inth

e fo

llow

ing

com

mun

ity g

roup

s/th

is g

roup

?th

e fo

llow

ing

com

mun

ity g

roup

s/th

is g

roup

?ac

tiviti

es?

(Lis

t up

to 4

hou

seho

ld

activ

ities

? (L

ist u

p to

4 h

ouse

hold

m

embe

rs p

er c

omm

unity

gro

up)

mem

bers

per

com

mun

ity g

roup

)

LEAD

ER–1

LEAD

ER–1

ACTI

VE M

EMBE

R–2

ACTI

VE M

EMBE

R–2

DOES

NOT

PAR

TICI

PATE

INDO

ES N

OT P

ARTI

CIPA

TE IN

DECI

SION

MAK

ING–

3DE

CISI

ON M

AKIN

G–3

NAM

E OF

ORG

ANIZ

ATIO

N(M

AY C

ONSU

LT W

ITH

COM

MUN

ITY

QUES

TION

NAIR

ENA

ME

#1HO

USEH

OLD

NAM

E #1

HOUS

EHOL

DTY

PE O

F OR

GANI

ZATI

ONTO

CON

FIRM

/PRO

BE)

NAM

E #1

I

D CO

DENA

ME

#2

ID C

ODE

Farm

ers'

gro

up/c

oope

rativ

e

Othe

r pro

duct

ion

grou

p

Trad

ers

or b

usin

ess

asso

ciat

ion

Labo

r uni

on

Neig

hbor

hood

/villa

ge c

omm

ittee

Relig

ious

gro

up

Polit

ical

gro

up

Cred

it or

sav

ings

gro

up

Educ

atio

n gr

oup

Heal

th g

roup

Wat

er o

r was

te m

anag

emen

t gro

up

Ethn

ic-b

ased

com

mun

ity g

roup

Othe

r

68

Co

mm

unity

Par

ticip

atio

n M

od

ule

`5.

6.7.

8.Am

ong

the

adul

t mem

bers

of y

our

How

act

ively

does

the

Amon

g th

e ad

ult m

embe

rs o

f you

rHo

w a

ctive

ly do

es th

eho

useh

old,

who

par

ticip

ates

in a

ny o

fpe

rson

par

ticip

ate

inho

useh

old,

who

par

ticip

ates

in a

ny o

fpe

rson

par

ticip

ate

inth

e fo

llow

ing

com

mun

ity g

roup

s/th

is g

roup

?th

e fo

llow

ing

com

mun

ity g

roup

s/th

is g

roup

?ac

tiviti

es?

(Lis

t up

to 4

hou

seho

ld

activ

ities

? (L

ist u

p to

4 h

ouse

hold

m

embe

rs p

er c

omm

unity

gro

up)

mem

bers

per

com

mun

ity g

roup

)

LEAD

ER–1

LEAD

ER–1

ACTI

VE M

EMBE

R–2

ACTI

VE M

EMBE

R–2

DOES

NOT

PAR

TICI

PATE

INDO

ES N

OT P

ARTI

CIPA

TE IN

DECI

SION

MAK

ING–

3DE

CISI

ON M

AKIN

G–3

NAM

E OF

ORG

ANIZ

ATIO

N(M

AY C

ONSU

LT W

ITH

COM

MUN

ITY

QUES

TION

NAIR

ENA

ME

#1HO

USEH

OLD

NAM

E #1

HOUS

EHOL

DTY

PE O

F OR

GANI

ZATI

ONTO

CON

FIRM

/PRO

BE)

NAM

E #3

I

D CO

DENA

ME

#4

ID C

ODE

Farm

ers'

gro

up/c

oope

rativ

e

Othe

r pro

duct

ion

grou

p

Trad

ers

or b

usin

ess

asso

ciat

ion

Labo

r uni

on

Neig

hbor

hood

/villa

ge c

omm

ittee

Relig

ious

gro

up

Polit

ical

gro

up

Cred

it or

sav

ings

gro

up

Educ

atio

n gr

oup

Heal

th g

roup

Wat

er o

r was

te m

anag

emen

t gro

up

Ethn

ic-b

ased

com

mun

ity g

roup

Othe

r

69

No

nfar

m E

mp

loym

ent

Mo

dul

eIN

TERV

IEW

ER:C

ompl

ete

the

rem

aini

ng q

uest

ions

by

row

for e

ach

hous

ehol

d m

embe

r lis

ted

in c

olum

n 2.

1.2.

3.4.

5.6.

7.At

any

tim

e du

ring

the

last

yea

r Pl

ease

list

the

nam

es o

f tho

seW

hat k

ind

of w

ork

did

this

per

son

Wha

t kin

d of

trad

e or

bus

ines

s is

For h

ow m

any

Durin

g th

ese

How

muc

h di

d he

/she

ear

n(1

2 m

onth

s) h

ave

any

of th

eho

useh

old

mem

bers

who

hav

edo

? (p

rimar

y oc

cupa

tion)

it co

nnec

ted

with

?w

eeks

in th

e w

eeks

,how

for t

his

wor

k?m

embe

rs o

f thi

s ho

useh

old

w

orke

d fo

r a w

age

or s

alar

y la

st 1

2 m

onth

sm

any

hour

sw

orke

d fo

r a w

age

or s

alar

y?du

ring

the

last

yea

r.di

d he

/she

do

per w

eek

did

(Do

not i

nclu

de w

ork

this

wor

k?he

/she

do

in h

ouse

hold

ent

erpr

ises

)th

is w

ork?

YES–

1 (c

ontin

ue)

PER

HOUR

–1NO

–2 (g

o to

nex

t mod

ule)

PER

WEE

K–2

PER

MON

TH–3

PER

YEAR

–4OT

HER

(spe

cify

)__

____

___–

5

DESC

RIPT

I ON

HO

USEH

OLD

DESC

RIPT

ION

DESC

RIPT

ION

WEE

KSHO

URS

NAM

E

ID

COD

EDE

SCRI

PTIO

N

CO

DEDE

SCRI

PTIO

N

CO

DEPE

R YE

ARPE

R W

EEK

AMOU

NTTI

ME

UNIT

70

No

nfar

m E

mp

loym

ent

Mo

dul

e

8.9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

In a

dditi

on to

the

wor

k yo

u W

hat k

ind

of w

ork

did

this

per

son

do?

Wha

t kin

d of

trad

e or

bus

ines

s is

this

For h

ow m

any

wee

ksDu

ring

thes

e w

eeks

,Ho

w m

uch

did

he/s

he e

aern

have

alre

ady

desc

ribed

,did

(s

econ

dary

occ

upat

ion)

conn

ecte

d w

ith?

in th

e la

st 1

2 m

onth

sho

w m

any

hour

s pe

rfo

r thi

s w

ork?

this

per

son

do a

ny o

ther

di

d he

/she

do

this

w

eek

did

he/s

he d

ow

ork

for a

wag

e or

sal

ary

wor

k?th

is w

ork?

durin

g th

e pa

st 1

2 m

onth

s?

YES–

1 (c

ontin

ue)

PER

HOUR

–1NO

–2 (g

o to

nex

t mod

ule)

PER

WEE

K–2

PER

MON

TH–3

PER

YEAR

–4OT

HER

(spe

cify

)__

____

___–

5

DESC

RIPT

ION

DESC

RIPT

ION

WEE

KSHO

URS

DESC

RIPT

ION

COD

EDE

SCRI

PTIO

N

C

ODE

PER

YEAR

PER

WEE

KAM

OUNT

TIM

E UN

IT

71

Ho

useh

old

Ent

erp

rise

Mo

dul

e1.

2.3.

Over

the

past

12

mon

ths,

has

anyo

ne in

W

hat k

ind

of e

nter

pris

e(s)

doe

s yo

ur h

ouse

hold

ope

rate

?W

ho is

mos

t inf

orm

ed a

bout

or i

n ch

arge

of d

ay-t

o-da

yyo

ur h

ouse

hold

ope

rate

d an

y op

erat

ions

of t

he e

nter

pris

e?no

nagr

icul

tura

l ent

erpr

ise?

(G

ive re

leva

nt lo

cal e

xam

ples

)

YES–

1 (c

ontin

ue w

ith th

is m

odul

e)NO

–2 (s

kip

to n

ext m

odul

e)

ENTE

RPRI

SE ID

DESC

RIPT

ION

CODE

NAM

EID

COD

E

1 2 3 4

72

Ho

useh

old

Ent

erp

rise

Mo

dul

ePl

ease

list

for m

e th

e na

mes

of a

ll ho

useh

old

Durin

g th

e pa

st 1

2 m

onth

s,Du

ring

the

mon

ths

that

the

In a

n “a

vera

ge s

ales

”mon

th,

In a

mon

th w

ith “a

vera

gem

embe

rs w

ho h

ave

wor

ked

in th

is e

nter

pris

e fo

r how

man

y m

onth

s w

asbu

sine

ss w

as in

ope

ratio

n,w

hat i

s yo

ur le

vel o

f sal

essa

les,

”how

muc

h ha

ve y

ou

durin

g th

e pa

st 1

2 m

onth

s.th

e bu

sine

ss in

ope

ratio

n?

how

man

y da

ys p

er m

onth

per m

onth

?sp

ent i

n to

tal o

n th

e pu

rcha

sedi

d th

is b

usin

ess

usua

llyof

inpu

ts (l

abor

,raw

mat

eria

ls,

oper

ate?

item

s fo

r res

ale,

trans

port,

elec

trici

ty,w

ater

,fue

l,re

ntal

,an

d so

forth

)?

HOUS

EHOL

DEN

TERP

RISE

IDNA

ME

ID C

ODE

MON

THS

DAYS

AMOU

NTAM

OUNT

1 2 3 4

73

Exp

end

iture

Mo

dul

e—F

oo

dW

EEKL

Y FO

OD E

XPEN

DITU

RES

1. W

hich

hou

seho

ld m

embe

r has

prim

ary

resp

onsi

bilit

y fo

r doi

ng th

e fo

od s

hopp

ing?

(Ent

er h

ouse

hold

mem

ber’s

cod

e fro

m th

e ro

ster

)

2. D

urin

g th

e pa

st 7

day

s (o

ne w

eek)

,did

you

r hou

seho

ld p

urch

ase

any

of th

e fo

llow

ing

food

s?

TEM

YES–

1

NO–2

IF Y

ES, H

OW M

UCH

DID

YOU

SPEN

D ON

THI

S IT

EM?

Mai

ze

Bean

s

Suga

r

Bana

nas

Coffe

e

Past

a

Frui

t

Vege

tabl

es

Pota

toes

Eggs

Chic

ken

Fish

Mea

t

Milk

74

Exp

end

iture

Mo

dul

e—N

on-

Fo

od

NON-

FOOD

EXP

ENDI

TURE

S

1. D

urin

g th

e pa

st 1

2 m

onth

s (o

ne y

ear),

has

anyo

ne in

you

r hou

seho

ld p

urch

ased

any

of t

he fo

llow

ing

item

s?

IF Y

ES, H

OW M

UCH

DID

YOU

IF Y

ES, W

HICH

HOU

SEHO

LD M

EMBE

R PU

RCHA

SED

THE

ITEM

YES–

1

NO–2

SPEN

D ON

THI

S IT

EM?

ITEM

? (E

NTER

COD

E FR

OM H

OUSE

HOLD

ROS

TER)

Wom

en’s

clo

thin

g

Men

’s c

loth

ing

Child

ren’

s cl

othi

ng

Wom

en’s

foot

wea

r

Men

’s fo

otw

ear

Child

ren’

s fo

otw

ear

Med

icin

es a

nd h

ealth

ser

vices

(e.g

.,do

ctor

fees

,hos

pita

l cha

rges

)

Smal

l kitc

hen

appl

ianc

es (e

.g.,

blen

der,

mixe

r)

Kitc

hen

uten

sils

(e.g

.,po

ts,p

ans,

buck

ets,

tool

s)

Smal

l ele

ctric

al it

ems

(e.g

.,ra

dio,

Wal

kman

,wat

ch,c

lock

)

Larg

e ap

plia

nces

(e.g

.,st

ove,

refri

gera

tor,

was

hing

mac

hine

,sew

ing

mac

hine

)

Hom

e en

terta

inm

ent (

e.g.

,tel

evis

ion,

radi

o,vid

eo o

r mus

ic p

laye

r)

Vehi

cle

(e.g

.,bi

cycl

e,m

otor

cycl

e,ca

r,tru

ck)

Appendixes 75

Community-Level Data—Community and Informant Information

COMMUNITY INFORMATION

Community name

Community code

Municipality name

Municipality code

Department name

Department code

INFORMANT INFORMATIONMALE–1 ELECTED/APPOINTED LEADER–1FEMALE–2 TEACHER/SCHOOL PRINCIPAL–2

HEALTH CARE PROVIDER–3OTHER (specify) _____________–4

NAME AGE SEX POSITION IN COMMUNITY

1

2

3

4

5


Community-Level Data—Demography and Land Use

1. How large is the land area of this community?

2. How would you describe the topography of this community?

COASTAL PLAINS–1 MOUNTAINS–4INLAND PLAINS–2 DESERT–5HILLS–3 OTHER (specify) _________–6

3. Does this community contain land that is owned by the community itself, rather than by individual owners?

4. How many people live in this community?

5. How many households are found in this community?

6. What are the principal ethnic groups found in this community?

DEFINE COUNTRY-SPECIFIC ETHNIC GROUP CODES HERE

7. What are the major religions practiced by residents of this community?

DEFINE COUNTRY-SPECIFIC RELIGION CODES HERE

8. What are the major languages spoken by residents of this community?

DEFINE COUNTRY-SPECIFIC LANGUAGE CODES HERE

9. Do individuals in this community trace their descent through their fathers, their mothers, or both?

CODES FOR QUESTIONS 9–11:FATHER–1MOTHER–2BOTH–3OTHER (specify) _______________–4

10. Do individuals in this community receive inheritance from their fathers, their mothers, or both?

11. When a man from this community gets married, does he go to live with his wife, or does she come to live with him?

12. In thie community, can women . . .

. . . purchase land?

. . . inherit land?

. . . sell land?

. . . leave land as a bequest when they die?

HECTARES

TOPOGRAPHY CODE

YES–1 NO–2

INDIVIDUALS

HOUSEHOLDS

1ST

2ND

3RD

1ST

2ND

3RD

1ST

2ND

3RD

CODE

CODE

CODE

YES–1 NO–2

YES–1 NO–2

YES–1 NO–2

YES–1 NO–2

Appendixes 77

Commuity-Level Data—Services and Infrastructure1. 2. 3. 4.Does this community have the following services and facilities? How far is the nearest [ . . . ] What is the most common How long does it take to

from the community, in mode of transportation from travel from the communitykilometers? the community to the [ . . . ]? to the [ . . . ], using that

mode of transportation?

YES–1NO–2 (continue with questions 2–4)

COUNTRY-SPECIFIC TRANSPORTATION CODE HOURS MINUTES

Electricity

Telephone lines

Piped drinking water

A paved road

A primary school

A secondary school

A health clinic

A hospital

A marketplace

A store

A post office

A public telephone


Community-Level Data—Employment and Migration

MALE FEMALE

1. Which activities are the most important sources of employment for individuals in this community?

ENTER COUNTRY-SPECIFIC EMPLOYMENT CODES HERE

2. Are there any small businesses in this community, with few employees and perhaps run out of people's homes?

3. What types of products/services do these small businesses produce/sell?

ENTER COUNTRY-SPECIFIC PRODUCT/SERVICE CODES HERE

4. On average, how many employees do these businesses have?

MALE FEMALE

5. Do some people in this community leave temporarily during certain times of the year to look for work elsewhere?

6. Where do most of them go?

ENTER COUNTRY-SPECIFIC MIGRATION DESTINATION CODES HERE

7. What type of work do they most commonly look for?

ENTER COUNTRY-SPECIFIC EMPLOYMENT CODES HERE

1ST

2ND

3RD

1ST

2ND

3RD

AVERAGE NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES

YES–1NO–2

DESTINATION CODE

EMPLOYMENT CODE

Appendixes 79

Community-Level Data—Agriculture

1. Is agriculture an important source of income for some households in this community?

2A. What are the three most important crops cultivated by residents of this community? (List in order of importance) 2B. Do some farmers hire laborers to work in this crop?2C. For which tasks are they most likely to hire laborers?2D. Are the laborers hired more likely to be men, women, or both?

2A: 2B: 2C: 2D:

COUNTRY-SPECIFIC CROP CODE YES–1 NO–2 TASK CODE MEN–1 WOMEN–2 BOTH–3

1ST

2ND

3RD

3. In this community, is there any system of irrigation?

4. In this community, how common is it for families to . . .

. . . farm land that they own?

. . . farm land that they rent from someone at a fixed price?

. . . farm land that others own in return for a portion of the crop (sharecropping)?

YES–1NO–2

YES–1NO–2

VERY COMMON–1SOMETIMES HAPPENS–2RARE–3EXTREMELY RARE–4


Community-Level Data—Community Organizations

Please tell us if any of the following types of organizations exist in this community.

APPROXIMATENUMBER OFACTIVE

TYPE OF ORGANIZATION NAME OF ORGANIZATION ACTIVITIES OF ORGANIZATION (POST-CODE) MEMBERS

Farmers’ group/cooperative

Other production group

Traders or business association

Labor union

Neighborhood/village committee

Religious group

Political group

Credit or savings group

Education group

Health group

Water or waste management group

Ethnic-based community group

Other (specify):

Appendixes 81

Commuity-Level Data—Credit1. 2. 3. 4.If someone in the community needed to borrow money, either for For what kinds of activities does What interest rate might a What type of guaranteepersonal use or for their farm or business, from what sources might this source most often lend borrower expect to pay for does this source usuallyhe or she get a loan? money? a loan from this source? ask for? (For example:

land, crops, wages)

FARM INPUTS OR EQUIPMENT–1NONFARM BUSINES–2CONSUMPTION–3MEDICAL OR OTHER EMERGENCY–4OTHER (specify)_________________–5

MONTHLY COUNTRY-SPECIFICLENDER CATEGORY NAMES OF LOCAL INSTITUTIONS PERCENTAGE RATE CODE

Family/friend

Moneylender

Community group/cooperative/NGO

Private bank

Government bank

1Although in fiscal years 1990 to 1994 only 3 stand-aloneland projects were approved, this number increased to 19($0.7 billion commitment) and to 25 ($1.0 billion commit-ment) in the 1995–99 and 2000–4 periods, respectively. FY2004 commitments on land-related projects (that is, stand-alones and those with a land component, but excluding ad-justment operations) alone amount to $1 billion (http://lnweb18.worldbank.org/ESSD/ardext.nsf/11ByDocName/TopicsLandPolicy andAdministration).2The World Bank Land Policy and Administration Themat-ic Group maintains a project database at http://lnweb18.worldbank.org/ESSD/ardext.nsf/11ByDocName/TopicsLandPolicyandAdministrationProjects.3United Nations 1999, p. 90.4Lastarria-Cornhiel 1997, p. 1321.5Izumi 1999, p. 14.6Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions 2004, p. 56.7Available at http://www.db.idbproject.org/Sites/IdpProjectDb/idpSurvey.nsf/wViewCountries.8This law has not yet been fully implemented, and in somecases readjustments are still occurring. Field research indi-cated that women in areas where land was scarce did not fa-vor this new law.9The Law on the Administration of Agricultural Land(2001, Kyrgyz Republic).10Dirven (2001) argued that insofar as inheritance remainsthe principal form of land access in the region, significantamounts of land remain inaccessible to younger, potential-ly more innovative farmers until the deaths of their parents.In this context, inheritance to widows, which serves as akind of “bridge” in a largely patrilineal inheritance system,further delays the passage of productive resources into thehands of rural youth.11One example of a legal impediment to women’s landrights comes from Honduras, where joint titles can only be

issued to legally married couples or to couples in consen-sual unions who formally register their domestic partner-ships. However, the costs involved in formalizing consen-sual unions are often prohibitive—or, at least, they act as asignificant disincentive—for couples who might otherwisebe willing to register their property in both spouses’ names.12Article 6 of the constitution protects citizens’ rights andfreedoms without distinction of sex, origin, economic orsocial condition, or any other condition.13CEDAW, adopted in 1979 by the UN General Assembly,is often described as an international bill of rights forwomen, defining what constitutes discrimination againstwomen and setting up an agenda for national action to endsuch discrimination.14India is another country where land reform implementa-tion is done at the state/province level within the parame-ters of the national land reform program.15For example, until 2000, the agrarian reform registrationform (cadastro) did not have space for writing in thenames of two people. INCRA also insisted on naming menas beneficiaries—if a woman applied, INCRA officialswould ask the whereabouts of the spouse, and in the ab-sence of a spouse they would try to grant beneficiary sta-tus to a son.16These constraints include higher levels of illiteracy, low-er Spanish-language skills, and lack of personal identifica-tion documents.17The Red Nacional de la Mujer Rural (National Networkof Rural Women) is a program of the feminist NGO, Cen-tro de la Mujer Peruana Flora Tristán.18Deere and León (2001) reported that between September1995 and May 1997 (21 months) only 26 titles for 689 hec-tares were jointly titled.19The Guayape Valley Agricultural Development Projectcovers 220,000 hectares, of which 93,000 hectares makeup the broad valley of the Guayape River.

83

Endnotes

20Information on titles issued at the national scale showsthat between 1996 and 2000, 25 percent of total titles wereissued to women (Secretaría de Agricultura y Ganadería,Honduras 2000).21We are using the term ownership to broadly include own-ership-like rights. These would include long-term-userights, as in Lao PDR, or the long-term right to ancestralland that is held by a tribe, as in Ghana.22For example, in rural Peru, 40 percent of women reportliving in consensual unions. In rural El Salvador, 63 per-cent of couples report living in consensual unions (Deereand León 2001).23The three major ethnic groups are Lao Lum (68 percentof the population), Lao Theung (22 percent), and Lao Sung(10 percent). The major patrilineal ethnic groups are theKhumu and the Hmong.24These communities and their titles are called Tierras Co-munitarias de Origen.25In Bolivia and Lao PDR, anecdotal evidence was heardfrom key informant interviews and focus groups regardingdifferences in norms and practices in rural and urban areas.26An example was a land titling project in Yemen in thelate 1980s, in which children ened up assisting demarca-

tion teams during the day because women could not partic-ipate and men were away working.27Efforts to increase the productivity within the survey of-fice by using computerized parcel mapping did not extendto the land titles office, where the drafting of the parcel in-dex maps was reproduced again by hand28It is important that benchmarks are given at the start.There are many instances of projects (for example, Mo-zambique land titling, land administration reform in theBaltic States) in which the gender-related expectationswere imposed toward the end of the project.29Ley INRA (1996), article 3, paragraph V.30Other tribes include the Dagoma, Ewe, Ga, Gonja, Kase-na, Konkomba, Lobi, Marmprusi, Nzema, and Sisala. 31Law 152, section 88.32Article 22.33The Family Code was initially promulgated in 1973, butmajor amendments were enacted in 1977, 1988, and 1999,as well as more minor amendments in between those years.


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