parts of Uganda (Doss et al 2014a), where 69 (58) percent of men (women) report themselves as landowners, but only 52 (20) percent have some form of documentation. This shows that even when women report to own land, they often have lower tenure security than men.<sup>14</sup> On the other hand, the Uganda study also illustrates that male and female landowners, even without documentation, often feel reasonably secure about their land rights. Similarly, Slavchevska et al (2017) show that tenure security is reasonably high in Uganda, Tanzania and Malawi – but much less so in Nigeria. Moreover, many studies have shown reported ownership to be correlated with indicators of agency and decision-making power (e.g. Beegle et al 2001; Oduro et al 2012; Swaminathan et al 2012; Doss et al 2014b), which suggests that despite the above caveats reported ownership is a meaningful concept to explore.

This paper reports on two different concepts of reported ownership, depending on whether a respondent owns property alone or jointly with someone else, typically (but not always) his/her spouse. The DHS questions on individual property ownership provide four response categories – (1) “alone only”, (2) “jointly only”, (3) “both alone and jointly”, and (4) “does not own”. In the analysis, the category ‘sole ownership’ combines options (1) and (3), while the category ‘sole and joint’ combines options (1), (2) and (3). As discussed earlier, joint ownership of property is common across many African countries, and gender gaps are generally smaller than in sole ownership. There are reasons to expect that joint ownership rights may be weaker than individual ownership rights. Joint property ownership does not necessarily mean that men and women have equal rights, and women may be disadvantaged in decision-making when their interests do not align with those of their husbands (Agarwal 2003; Doss et al 2014b; Jacobs and Kes 2015). For example, analysis of LSMS-ISA data for Tanzania cited in Slavchevska et al (2017) reveals that of all plots that are owned jointly, 68 percent can be sold by both owners, 23 percent by the male owner alone and just 1 percent by the female owner alone. On the other hand, joint ownership may be preferable in contexts where women face high social cost in obtaining sole ownership rights (Jackson 2003). There is also no clear policy path for advancing sole property ownership for married men and women, given that housing property is typically non-partible, while land property is partible only to a certain degree.<sup>15</sup> Given these considerations, the main indicator used in this paper is sole and joint ownership combined. However, sole ownership is often reported separately, where this is thought to provide further insights. In the interest of parsimony, land and housing ownership is often combined into a single indicator of property ownership, which equals unity if a woman or man owns land and/or housing, and zero otherwise. Separate statistics on land and housing ownership at the country-level are reported in Table A2 (appendix).

The descriptive analysis in the remainder of section 3 focus on the absolute gender gap, that is the percentage point difference between the share of men and women aged 20 to 49 years who report owning property.<sup>16</sup> Women’s property ownership ought to be compared to men’s property ownership to understand the degree of gender inequality and to separate gender gaps in ownership from low levels of property ownership per se. However, an exclusive focus on these gender gaps has the drawback that it does not provide information on the incidence of male and female property ownership. For example, two countries with the same absolute gender gap in property ownership (say, 10 percentage points) may have very different shares of men and women owning property (say, 20 and 10 percent in country A vs. 70 and 80

> 14 There are, however, exceptions to this norm. Slavchevska et al (2017) report that in Ethiopia, 58 percent of plots owned solely by women have a certificate under the owner’s name, compared with 46 percent of male owned plots.

> 15 Agricultural land is typically partible, but land fragmentation is a concern. Even though small farms, on average, are farmed more intensively in environments with little mechanization and achieve higher levels of productivity, very small land holdings do not generate enough revenue to cover subsistence needs (Ali and Deininger 2015).

> 16 We focus on the age bracket 20 to 49 years to abstract from adolescence and exclude young adults living with their parents.

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