Publication: Environmental and Gender Impacts of Land Tenure Regularization in Africa: Pilot Evidence from Rwanda

Although increased global demand for land has led to renewed interest in African land tenure, few models to address these issues quickly and at the required scale have been identified or evaluated. The case of Rwanda’s nation-wide and relatively low-cost land tenure regularization program is thus of great interest.

A new working paper paper by the World Bank (Authors: Daniel Ayalew Ali, Klaus Deininger, and Markus Goldstein, August 2011) evaluates the short-term impact (some 2.5 years after completion) of the pilots undertaken to fine-tune the approach using a geographic discontinuity design with spatial fixed effects. Three key findings emerge from the analysis.

• First, the program improved land access for legally married women (about 76 percent of married couples) and prompted better recordation of inheritance rights without gender bias.
• Second, the analysis finds a very large impact on investment and maintenance of soil conservation measures. This effect was particularly pronounced for female headed households, suggesting that this group had suffered from high levels of tenure insecurity, which the program managed to reduce.
• Third, land market activity declined, allowing rejection of the hypothesis that the program caused a wave of distress sales or widespread landlessness by vulnerable people. Implications for program design and policy are also discussed.

Access the working paper here.

Publication: Do men and women accumulate assets in different ways? Evidence from rural Bangladesh

This paper examines asset dynamics for husband-owned, wife-owned, and jointly owned assets, using unique longitudinal survey data from rural Bangladesh. Nonparametric and parametric methods are used to examine the shape of the dynamic asset frontier, the number of equilibria, and whether land and nonland asset stocks converge to such equilibria. The paper also investigates the differential impact of negative shocks and positive events on husbands’, wives’, and jointly owned assets. Husbands’ and wives’ asset stocks are drawn down for different kinds of shocks, with husbands’ assets being liquidated in response to death of a household member and dowry and wedding expenses, and both husbands’ and wives’ assets being negatively affected by illness shocks. The paper concludes by drawing out implications for the design of gender-sensitive social protection mechanisms.

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Event (DC): Do Men and Women Accumulate Assets in Different Ways? Evidence from Rural Bangladesh

Agnes R. Quisumbing (International Food Policy Research Institute)

Thursday, May 12^th 2011
12:30 pm – 2:00 pm

Conference Room 4B – 4^th Floor
2033 K Street, NW
Washington, D.C. 20006

** Brown Bag Format **

RSVP to B.Pereira@cgiar.org

Abstract:  This paper examines asset dynamics for husband-owned, wife-owned, and jointly owned assets, using unique longitudinal survey data from rural Bangladesh. Non-parametric and parametric methods are used to examine the shape of the dynamic asset frontier, the number of equilibria, and whether land and non-land assets stock converge to such equilibria.  The paper also investigates the differential impact of negative shocks and positive events on husbands’, wives’, and jointly-owned assets. Husbands’  and wives’ asset stocks are drawn down for different kinds of shocks, with husbands’ assets being liquidated in response to dowry and wedding expenses, and wives’ assets being negatively affected by illness shocks.    Factors that affect husbands’ and wives’ ability to form social and familial networks also affect asset accumulation:  wives with more brothers, and who live closer to their natal village, are better able to acquire assets.  Put differently, factors that encourage the formation or maintenance of women’s social networks also reduce gender asset inequality.  The paper concludes by drawing out implications for the design of gender-sensitive social protection mechanisms. 

Publication: Women, marriage and asset inheritance in Uganda

Using a unique dataset from Uganda, which collected individual-level asset ownership data and women’s life histories regarding assets, this paper examines the relationships between inheritance, marriage and asset ownership. Land is the most important asset in rural Uganda. The majority of couples (both married and those in consensual unions) report owning land jointly. Men who report owning a parcel of land are much more likely than women to say they inherited the land. Inheritance is not an important means of acquisition of other assets, including livestock, business assets, financial assets and consumer durables. These items are acquired through purchase, for both men and women.

Cheryl Doss, Mai Truong, Gorrettie Nabanoga, Justine Namaalwa

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Publication: Planting Hybrids, Keeping Landraces: Agricultural Modernization and Tradition Among Small-Scale Maize Farmers in Chiapas, Mexico

Publication year: 2011 Source: World Development, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 22 February 2011 Mauricio R., Bellon , Jon, Hellin This paper examines how agricultural modernization and tradition interact among small-scale commercially-oriented maize farmers by studying shifts in area and number of farmers planting hybrids and landraces. Results show substantial yield increases but reductions in production and area planted, associated with widespread hybrid adoption and landrace abandonment. Agricultural government programs have played an important role fostering commercialization and hybrid adoption. Cultural preferences, and possibly an anti-poverty program coupled with women’s empowerment, have fostered landrace retention. Hybrids and landraces have overlapping functions in farmers’ livelihoods influenced by interdependent production and consumption decisions, cultural preferences, and imperfect markets even under agricultural modernization

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Publication: Journal of Development Studies Special Section on Assets and Gender

Women’s Property Rights and Gendered Policies: Implications for Women’s Long-term Welfare in Rural Tanzania
Amber Peterman

Tenure Insecurity, Gender, Low-cost Land Certification and Land Rental Market Participation in Ethiopia
Stein T. Holden; Klaus Deininger; Hosaena Ghebru

How Access to Credit Affects Self-employment: Differences by Gender during India’s Rural Banking Reform
Nidhiya Menon; Yana van der Meulen Rodgers

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Publication: Asset Dynamics in Northern Nigeria

This paper examines household asset dynamics and gender-differentiated asset inequality over a 20-year period (1988–2008) in northern Nigeria. We show that the initial endowments of both household capital and livestock holdings are inconsistent with the poverty trap hypothesis but that tracking rules for households in panel surveys may lead to differences in empirical results on poverty traps. We also investigate whether initial household endowments contributed to gender-differentiated future asset levels and asset inequality. Initial livestock holdings have an effect on women’s future livestock holdings but not on their livestock shares within the household, as the effect of initial livestock holdings on men’s future livestock levels was much greater than its effect on women’s levels. The mechanism through which asset levels differed was related to the relative prices of the assets in gender-differentiated asset portfolios. Men, who primarily held larger livestock with larger unit values, benefited from large price increases in high-value livestock, while women held lower-value livestock. These price fluctuations reinforced gender asset inequality within households for both types of assets considered.

Andrew Dillon and Esteban J. Quiñones

http://www.ifpri.org/publication/asset-dynamics-northern-nigeria

Publication: Input Choices in Agriculture: Is There A Gender Bias?

Publication year: 2010 Source: World Development, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 28 October 2010 Susan E., Chen , Priya, Bhagowalia , Gerald, Shively This paper examines evidence of gender biases in the decisions of agricultural households, utilizing data from International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics’s village level studies in India (1975–85). The main empirical finding is that households with a high proportion of boys tend to use some agricultural inputs, including fertilizers and irrigation services more intensively than households with girls. This pattern is more pronounced among wealthier households but does not appear to be driven solely by bequest motives or male child labor productivity.

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Publication: Does Social Capital Build Women’s Assets?

Neha Kumar and Agnes Quisumbing

This paper investigates the long–term impact of agricultural technologies, disseminated using different implementation modalities, on men’s and women’s asset accumulation in rural Bangladesh. Data were collected in 1996–97 to examine the effects of the adoption of new vegetable varieties and polyculture fishpond management technologies on household resource allocation, incomes, and nutrition, and a followup survey was conducted ten years later. We make three types of comparisons using nearest neighbor matching, comparing (1) early and late adopters of the technology; (2) NGO members with access to the technology and those without access to the technology; and (3) NGO members vs. non–NGO members. Our results suggest that implementation modalities are important in determining the impact of new technologies on men’s and women’s asset accumulation. Women’s assets increase more relative to men’s when technologies are disseminated through women’s groups. These findings are robust to controls for unobserved household–level characteristics. These results suggest that social capital, as embodied through women’s groups, not only serves as a substitute for physical assets in the short run, but helps to build up women’s asset portfolios in the long run.

http://www.ifpri.org/publication/does-social-capital-build-women-s-assets