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Customary tenure, gender and access to forests and trees in Ghana and Burkina Faso
1. 5th Annual FLARE Meeting
August 23-25, 2019
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
Customary tenure, gender and access to
forests and trees in Ghana and Burkina Faso
2. Customary tenure is a key
component of the forest-
farm interface
• How do customary tenure systems
affect access to forest and trees for
men and women in the Sahel?
• How do these systems vary?
• What are the implications for
livelihoods and resource management?
Analyzing customary tenure systems is
a challenge:
• Complex
• Informal
• Opaque
• Evolving
3. The WAFFI Project
Analyzed multi-village
landscapes in Burkina Faso
and Ghana
Twelve village sites
• The Nobéré commune in
the Zoundwéogo Province in
Burkina Faso
• The Kassena-Nankana
West District in the Upper
East region of Ghana
4. Data collection with
mixed methods
Focus group interviews
• 58 Focus groups
• 793 villagers (44% female)
Participatory Action Research
Systematic stratified household
survey
• Ghana
• 128 men
• 140 women
• Burkina Faso
• 106 Men
• 98 women
5. Tenure systems at sites
Ghana: Legal pluralism
Property types:
• Customary system allocates
individual access on community
lands
• Parkland ‘commons’
• State owned reserve areas, titling
in per-urban areas
Customary landownership in Kasena
areas
• Land priest (Tigatu)
• Landlords – patriarchs of families
with de facto ownership of land in
customary system
Burkina Faso: Decentralized
system
Property types:
• Rural private individual lands
• Land of local authorities
• State lands with sectoral categories
(i.e. forest and wildlife areas,
pastoral areas)
Customary landownership in Mossi
areas
• Land chief (Chef de terre)
• Landlord - holder of lineage or
inherited land
6. Tree tenure
• Officially forests are national
patrimony
• ‘Off reserve’ trees treated as
national patrimony but
authorized use allowed (in
theory)
• In customary system trees
on farms controlled by
landowner
Women’s tenure rights
• Legally granted equitable
access to land
• Customary system does not
grant ownership, women
access through male relative
Tree Tenure
• Trees property of land owner
• Planting trees can bestow
customary ownership
• Several official mechanisms for
local forest management
• Specific ownership rules for
valued trees such as néré
(Parkia biglobosa)
Women’s tenure rights
• Legally granted equitable access
to land
• Customary system does not
grant ownership, women access
through male relative
Tenure systems at sites
11. • Shea often described
as a “women’s tree
crop”
• Shea is a crucial
income source for
women at landscapes
• Men do harvest shea
for commercial
purposes
Shea
(Vitellaria paradoxa)
Tree product income
13. Shifting access
to shea income
• In Ghana, historic
stigma to men selling
shea in markets
• Key changes: Price
increased and buyers
purchasing shea in
villages
• Men claim greater
share of shea on farm
• Women pushed to
degraded distant shea
14. Conclusions
• Smallholders often occupy forest-farm interface –
difficult to separate agricultural and forest landuse
• Formal and customary tenure overlap to create
complex gender differentiated systems shaping
access to and benefits from forest resources
• It is a challenge for outsiders to understand these
systems
• However, it is crucial that policy makers and
development practicioners have a better
understanding of how these systems function and
vary locally