Securing Property Rights for Women and Men in Rural Benin
Women in Sub-Saharan Africa are less likely than men to own land. They also use less land and have lower tenure security over the land that they use. This gap is costly in terms of lost productive output. The early results showed that improved tenu...
| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Format: | Brief |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2016
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/803771467991943736/Securing-property-rights-for-women-and-men-in-rural-Benin http://hdl.handle.net/10986/25453 |
| Summary: | Women in Sub-Saharan Africa are less
likely than men to own land. They also use less land and
have lower tenure security over the land that they use. This
gap is costly in terms of lost productive output. The early
results showed that improved tenure security through land
demarcation increased long-term investments in cash crops
and trees and erased the gender gap in land fallowing - a
key soil fertility investment. It is important that
interventions cover as much of a household’s landholdings as
possible: the authors found that some women shifted their
agricultural production to plots of land that did not
benefit from demarcation so that they can guard these less
secure and less productive plots. The rural land use plans
(plans fonciers ruraux (PFR)) in Benin represent a more
decentralized, low-cost approach to land rights
formalization. The PFR program is innovative in its focus on
the formalization of existing customary rights of individual
landholders. The objectives of the program are to improve
tenure security and stimulate agricultural investment in
rural areas. The World Bank’s Africa gender innovation lab,
in collaboration with researchers from the development
research group and the Paris school of economics, set out to
evaluate the PFR program’s impact through a randomized
controlled trial. This study provides the first set of
experimental evidence on the causal impact of a large-scale
land formalization program. |
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