Submissions Accepted for Presentation at the World Bank Land Conference 2024

This paper presents long-term results from a randomized control trial (RCT) with married couples in rural Uganda testing the impacts of two interventions – alone and together – aimed at empowering women. The first intervention offered couples assistance with obtaining a freehold land title at no cost, with incentives in place for the inclusion of the wife’s name on the title (as (co-)owner of the land). The goal of this intervention was to strengthen women’s property rights. The second intervention offered women an unconditional cash grant. The goal was to relax women's credit constraints. Results show that both interventions significantly increased long-term agricultural investment, the value of harvest produced and traded in the market by the households, and increased women's decision-making power vis-a-vis their husbands.

This paper evaluates different policy instruments to increase demand for co-titling in the context of a land titling intervention offering freehold land titles to married couples in rural Uganda. We cross-randomized whether (a) the household is exposed to an information treatment making salient the benefits of adding the wife’s name to the title; (b) the land title offer is made conditional on the wife’s name being added to the title; and (c) the intervention is targeted to husbands alone versus husbands and wives together. We find that only half of the husbands choose to add their wives’ name on the title, but the information treatment persuades most of them to do so. In contrast, most couples add the wives’ names on the titles irrespective of the information treatment. Making the offer conditional on the wife’s name being on the title does not reduce overall demand for titling.

In this paper, we document patterns of land tenure insecurity in a matrilineal region of Mozambique. We explore the gendered sources and covariates of tenure insecurity that stems either from private land disputes or collective expropriation (by government or large-scale land investors). We find that overall, nearly half of respondents report experiencing collective insecurity, as compared with only 12.5% reporting individual insecurity. We distinguish patterns between principal males, female spouses, and principal females, finding principal males feel the least secure about their collective and individual rights. Secondly, we use the fact that in several of the villages surveyed, the government carried out a variety of land rights documentation interventions, including a community delimitation, individual parcel demarcation, and full certification of rights. This continuum of documentation efforts allows us to see how different interventions match existing forms of tenure insecurity, and what is needed to address fears about losing land.

This study seeks to investigate if adoption of digital land market services has led to successful digital inclusion and helped narrow gender gap in rural household welfare using cross-sectional gender disaggregated data from 612 rural households in Nigeria. The study used different matching techniques and endogenous switching regression (ESR) model which controls for selection bias and unobserved heterogeneity. Findings show that, there is significant difference between the male and female rural households in terms of their welfare status despite the adoption, with male households are better off compared to their female counterparts. Using ESR model, findings show that the impact of adoption of digital land marketing services are effective at enhancing male and female households’ welfare outcome. Policies that are aimed at scaling up digital land marketing services adoption among households would help bridge gender gap in welfare status, which may impact their food consumption expenditure positively.