"Giving women rights to land also gives them power ... "
--Rural Poverty Report, p.86

THEME: It is far from easy to increase women farmers' control over land.

The IFAD Rural Poverty Report 2001 argues for reducing the barriers to women's control over land. But its review of the situation is not encouraging. Neither traditional nor reformed landholding systems have notably increased rural women's share of farmland.

Why is women's direct access to land important? As the report points out, there has been considerable 'feminization of agriculture', and female-headed rural households are increasing in most parts of the world. Even in male-headed households, the physical well-being of a woman and her children can depend considerably on her direct access to land and resulting control over crops and income. Women's income almost everywhere has a better chance of being spent on the basic family needs - especially food, health and education. Moreover, many IFAD projects have shown that women's lack of land title bars them from access to credit and needed inputs or technology.

The report notes a number of ways that women can potentially obtain access to land. These include: inheritance, purchase, distributive land reform, use rights through their husbands and out-migration of males when women farmers are left in control. Attempts to improve women's access have invariably been less successful than hoped.

• Inheritance laws almost everywhere favour males. Several countries have undertaken ambitious legal reforms to improve women's inheritance rights, but produced little change in practice. Religious and customary law has frequently proven stronger. For instance, in the Indian States, most daughters do not inherit land, though they are legally eligible to do so. Similar situations exist in North Africa and elsewhere.
• Land reforms have sometimes tried to give women equal rights, though large shifts of farmland towards women are rare. In four of 13 Latin American countries that disaggregated gender data on land reforms of the sixties and seventies, women formed only 4-25% of beneficiaries. Experience under smaller distributive reforms has been similar.
• Irrigation schemes that allocate newly irrigated land to farmers somehow end up not giving women farmers equal opportunity, even when women are heads of farming households. The study refers to an irrigation case in Kenya where women suffered as a result. In other instances, women have gained initial access, but subsequently lost it, as in an IFAD experience in Mali.

Why is it so difficult to improve women's access to and control over land? It is easier to shift education, health and non-farm assets to women than to give them land rights. As the report implies, the basic reason is power. Education or health may be seen as important assets by outsiders, but in the rural community land counts more. People who have experienced decades of inherited disadvantage and discrimination are aware that benefits from health or education may or may not emerge. In any case, they are distant. But with land, the impact on social and economic power can be almost immediate. Therefore, giving women land means giving them power. It is not surprising that women have such a hard time obtaining control of this valuable asset.

Adapted from:

IFAD. 2001. Rural Poverty Report 2001: The Challenge of Ending Rural Poverty. Oxford University Press. February.

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