1. Strengthening Women’s Property
Women s
Rights:
The Key to Food Security
United Nations’ Forty-Ninth Session of the
Nations Forty Ninth
Commission on the Status of Women
March 10, 2005
Presented by
Lauren Pandolfelli, IFPRI
Thursday, July 30, 2009

2. Overview
• Complexity of rights to
p y g
land and water
• IFPRI research
findings on the
importance of women’s
property rights and
t i ht d
assets
• Points of intervention
• Recommendations
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3. Complexity of rights to land and water
• Separate bundles of rights for different users and
different resources
• Robustness of rights to withstand challenges
• M lti l sources of claims f property rights,
Multiple f l i for t i ht
including statutory, customary and religious laws
• Importance of “interstitial spaces” for women’s
interstitial spaces women s
production
• Dynamism of rights due to population pressure,
pressure
legal pluralism, and cultural change
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4. In most societies, women’s property rights
are weaker than men’s
men s
• Although usufruct rights
may be guaranteed in some
societies, women usually
obtain access through men
(fathers, brothers,
husbands)
• Indirect access to land plus
land,
pro-male bias in titling and
land reform programs, leads
to disadvantaged p
g position in
acquiring secure rights in a
privatized system
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5. Importance of women’s rights to property
and other assets
Demonstrated
Increases in:
• Agricultural
Productivity
• Household
Welfare
• Women’s
Decision-Making
• Project
Sustainability
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6. Agricultural Productivity
Equalizing agricultural inputs between men and
women increases agricultural productivity
productivity.
• In Kenya, equalizing levels of education, experience,
y q g p
and farm inputs between men and women increases
women’s yields for maize, beans, and cowpeas by
22 %.
• In Bangladesh, new vegetable technologies
disseminated by NGOs and targeted to women are
more profitable than traditional agriculture
(controlled by men)
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7. Household Welfare
Distribution of assets within the household matters
• In Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Sumatra
and South Africa, assets in the
hands of women leads to greater
expenditures on child schooling
• I Bangladesh, a hi h proportion
In B l d h higher ti
of pre-wedding assets held by the
mother decreases the morbidity of
girls
il
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8. Women’s Decision-Making Power
Gender equity in access is a valuable outcome in its
own right
• In Bangladesh, assets targeted to
women leads to greater mobility
for women, increased political
awareness, and fewer incidents
of domestic violence
fd ti i l
• In Mexico, wife’s education and
work experience is associated
with her making decisions by
herself
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9. Project Sustainability
Attention to gender improves project sustainability
• A review of 271
World Bank projects
by IFPRI shows that
when projects
address gender, their
g ,
sustainability
increases by 16 %
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10. Yet, there have been relatively few interventions
designed to improve gender equity in land
• Assumption that the household functions as one unit
and men and women pool their resources
• Few empirical studies documenting consequences of
unequal access t l d on rural li lih d on an
l to land l livelihoods
individual basis
• Cultural and political resistance to giving women land
rights on their own
• Limited information about the distribution of property
rights between men and women, on cross-national basis
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11. Ways of Strengthening Women’s Property
Rights
• Legal Reform of inheritance laws or provision for joint titling
of land
• Community Programs have the potential to change
g
gendered p
power relations
• Collective Action Programs enable women to acquire
management, and often exclusion, rights over resources
g , , g
• Technology Interventions directed to meet women’s needs,
increase the value of women’s labour
• Credit, Information, and Inputs enable more productive
use of land
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12. Recommendations
Reform and monitor legal institutions to attain
gender equity in property rights
• Legal reforms are necessary to strengthen women’s
entitlements and to make their claims over natural and
physical assets more enforceable.
• Legal reforms must be accompanied by legal-literacy
legal literacy
campaigns so that both men and women are aware of
such changes
• Women need access to administrative and judicial
channels
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13. Recommendations (cont.)
Develop technologies to increase the returns
to women’s labor in the agricultural sector
women s sector.
• Technologies that increase
returns to women’s labor may
women s
increase bargaining power
and rights to land
• In Ghana, cocoa farms
increased demand for
women’s labor so much that
husbands gave “gifts” of land
in return for labor
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14. Final Note:
From Research to Action
Women’s property rights are complex, dynamic
and vary according t i t
d di to intersecting id titi
ti identities
•Identify key gender/tenure interactions for each site
y yg
•Use cost-effective diagnostic tools to ensure stakeholder
participation
•Assess the multiple entry points through which women’s
rights over resources can be strengthened
o er reso rces
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