Conference Agenda

Feminist scholars and activists have drawn attention to the importance of women’s land rights; yet little of this work has focused on the relationship of land and water rights. Within rural communities, men and women have different rights to both land and water. We explore these interconnected relationships using community profiles and in-depth interviews from two communities as well as survey data on both land and water rights collected from multiple adults in 650 rural households in Kilifi County, Kenya. Land may be under private, communal, or state tenure. Similarly, the rights over water may be held by individuals, the community, or the state. Thus, there is a range of possible regimes, such as communal water points on private land. All of these property rights are embedded in social relations and are negotiated. While most people report that they have a right to access water at most of the water points, what this means in practice differs. For water that is not on their own land, often they have to pay, either in cash or in kind, to be able to access it. Because women are the ones who typically collect the water, they are practiced at negotiating for water and may be able to obtain water even when the men in their household cannot. But there are also times when women are the ones to access the water, but once they bring it into the household, someone else makes the decision about how it should be allocated.

Households make a complex set of decisions on water source choice, quantity demanded, and allocation across people and activities. In many parts of the world, people choose from among multiple sources of water that are of different quality and reliability; many households may rely on unimproved sources of water, such as rivers, ponds, and open springs. The water sources chosen by the household and amount taken from each source may vary based the household’s preferences and specific water needs and costs and constraints in obtaining the water from each source. Demand for water in these contexts is often modelled to consider choice among water sources, the quantity demanded of water, or as a system of equations that takes into account simultaneity between households’ source choice and the quantity of water taken from that source. In these models, the household is portrayed as a single decision-making unit with a single set of household preferences (i.e. a unitary household model). Power dynamics and the decision-making process within the household are not made explicit, and the fact that household members may have differing preferences is not taken into account. Yet, extensive work on unpacking household decision making has demonstrated that portraying households as a single decision-making unit is not appropriate. Using unique data from Kilifi County, Kenya, this study explores how intrahousehold decisions making dynamics impacts household’s water choices and water insecurity.

Land ownership has long been argued to enhance farm productivity by improving tenure security. But would this hold for female and male owners alike? The relationship between land ownership and productivity has been investigated relatively little from a gender perspective in most regions, with work on Asia being especially sparse. Even less explored are gender differences in the likelihood of landowners self-cultivating as vs. leasing out their land.

This paper uses a unique household-level dataset for nine states of India to first assess gender differences in the likelihood of landowners self-cultivating or renting out their land. It then analyses differences in farm productivity between female and male owners who self-cultivate. The effect of caste disadvantage is also explored.

We find that women owners are significantly less likely than male owners to self-cultivate their land. This is linked especially to family labour constraints and regional opportunities. However, among those who do self-cultivate, the annual farm productivity per hectare does not differ significantly by the gender of the owner-cultivator. This holds true with or without controlling for other factors. Caste matters, however: Scheduled Caste owner-cultivators of both genders have significantly lower productivity than upper-caste ones.

https:/doi.org/10.1080/00220388.2022.2162883

The goal of this study is to provide an in-depth analysis of the channels through which women acquire land in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), the inherent obstacles and the relevance of land ownership to gender equality and women’s economic and social outcomes; and provide suggestions to inform effective gender-sensitive land policies. Emphasis of this study is on the inheritance channel through birthright with a conviction that it is socially and economically empowering. The descriptive analysis show that the proportion of women who own land in SSA is 40 percentage points lower than that of men regardless of how the land was acquired, whereby about 30 percent of women own land in SSA, compared to 70 percent of men. Nonetheless, women are more likely to acquire land either through purchase from the market system or marriage, and even then, their rights of ownership are usually very limited and precarious compared to the rights of men.