A review of long-term impacts of land registration on Women’s Land Rights

The nexus between land registration interventions, tenure security, and women’s land rights have diverse contributions in literature. Although land registration is the most dominant land intervention tool, it has received criticisms in many studies as not being the golden solution to increased tenure security, particularly for women. Over the years, efforts to safeguard women’s land rights in different country contexts through land registration interventions have yielded mixed results, especially in the longer term. This scoping study reviewed existing land registration interventions and the resulting long-term transformative impacts on women’s land rights. Focusing on Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Asia, the study relied on academic and grey literature as well as interviews with experts and practitioners. It was found that there are few studies on long-term impact assessment of land registration interventions because many projects are evaluated in the short term. Among the evidence of transformative impacts in the short term, the results observed that: women have increased perceived tenure security; increased investment in agriculture; improved socio-economic status and empowerments. Some identified threats to the sustainability of transformative impacts include socio-cultural norms and practices, supply-driven interventions, and costly land registration processes. The study uncovers that different categories of women have diverse land tenure needs and each land registration intervention tool used, whether individual, joint, or collective, has its benefits and disadvantages on women’s tenure security. Thus, it is important not to follow a ‘one size fits all’ approach, but rather conduct efficient baseline evaluation studies to align the contextual women’s land needs to the selected interventions tools or strategies, in order to realize the expected transformative impacts.