The UN’s new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which guide development efforts, recognize the importance of property rights for women, especially in rural areas. The SDG has set goals so “all men and women have equal rights to ownership and control over land by 2030” and a target of doubling “the agricultural productivity and incomes of small-scale food producers, especially women.”
“Reaching this goal requires pro-active policies to ensure equal land rights for women,” said Jorge Munoz, who manages the land group at the World Bank.
Property rights can be a complex web of national and state laws, customs, traditions, and histories that vary from country to country, even town to town.
“Even when the laws offer equal protection, sometimes traditions and customs take over, especially in rural areas,” noted Victoria Stanley, a senior land rights specialist at the World Bank.
In Kosovo, for example, World Bank development experts are working in a village that is populated largely by war widows, yet less than 8% have title to property. Most of the landowners should be women, but culture and traditions discourage women from ownership.
Even when there are no male relatives to claim title, the time, cost, and complexity of surveying and registering land presents huge obstacles for women, leaving them without information or legal protection for their property.
To break the impasse, the World Bank turned to technology; surveying property with small, unmanned aerial drones that involve the whole community in the mapping process and help the government produce a national land registration system. The drones offer mapping services in a matter of days or weeks, at a fraction of the cost and time of conventional surveying using manned aircraft.
From Kosovo to Ethiopia to Honduras to Vietnam, the World Bank and its partners are helping women gain equal treatment in obtaining land rights in every region of the world.
One of the Bank’s largest portfolios in land administration and management is in the Europe and Central Asia region, which, since the fall of communism, has witnessed one of the largest land reforms in history. An example of the Bank’s work in the region can be found in an agricultural land registration project in Tajikistan, where nearly a quarter of the issued land certificates went to women, giving nearly 23,000 female farmers title to land.
Some other examples of World Bank-supported work include:
- In Ethiopia, the government’s large-scale land certification effort—covering 6.3 million households—improved women’s economic and social status. Previously, women didn’t have property rights, and divorced women could expect little more than a sack of grain as compensation from their former husbands. Now, they are entitled to 50% of the property.
- In Indonesia, post-tsunami recovery efforts in Aceh included community mapping and issuing of over 222,000 land title certificates, about one-third going to women. In Vietnam, 60% of the five million land-use certificates were issued in the name of both the husband and the wife.
- In the aftermath of Cyclone Phailin in 2013, the government of Odisha State in India provided land and financial support to construct concrete houses for the poor in 12 cyclone-vulnerable villages. Land allocation was carried out either jointly in the name of husband and wife, or, in the case of single women, individually.
