reduce productivity and female well-being more broadly.<sup>3</sup> In fact, reforms to equalize women’s inheritance rights in Kenya -albeit not applied equally everywhere (Linkow, 2019)- had multiple positive impacts on women’s livelihoods (Harari 2019).

While the above implies that forestalling gradual erosion of women’s land rights could be an important policy issue in customary tenure systems, gathering data to measure women’s rights and tenure security is likely to require considerable effort. Contrary to formal systems where the type of right associated with each document is defined in law and holders’ names are written down, household surveys conducted in countries dominated by customary tenure systems ought to elicit information on whether the rights to bequeath, sell, rent out, use as collateral, make improvements are held individually or jointly by different individuals for each parcel (Doss et al., 2019). While there is little doubt that asking all adult individuals in private about their personal ownership of and rights to assets is the most desirable and recommended approach, the cost of doing so led most large-scale surveys to obtain this information through proxy reporting and specifically through the use of _most knowledgeable_ household members. Little is known about the magnitude of errors potentially associated with this practice.

# **2.2 Nature and relevance of land rights in Malawi**

Malawi is one of Africa’s poorest and most densely populated countries with an economy that is heavily dependent on agriculture. Historically, land allocation in Malawi has been dualistic. Land for cultivation of commercial crops was provided to estates under freehold or leasehold (Deininger and Xia 2017) while smallholders were left to produce food crops, mainly maize, under customary tenure. Although restrictions on small farmers’ participation in cash crop cultivation were eliminated in the 1990s, smallholders’ limited resources (Ricker-Gilbert _et al._ 2014) and vulnerability to risk, particularly in the face of climate-related shocks (Sesmero _et al._ 2018), constrained their ability to diversify into other crops or adopt measures to manage soil fertility (Krah _et al._ 2019).

Agricultural production patterns are thus characterized by dominance of maize, a staple with limited scope for value addition and employment generation. Despite unequal coverage, fertilizer subsidies may further have crowded out more sustainable practices (Khataza _et al._ 2017) such as investment in organic manure (Holden and Lunduka 2012). Growing land scarcity has also triggered land disputes (van Donge 1999), often centered around inheritance, and land disputes are often associated with higher levels of tenure insecurity and quantitatively large productivity losses (Deininger _et al._ 2019), especially for women.<sup>4</sup>

> 3 While access to inherited land increased women’s level of self-employment and earnings in Ethiopia (Kumar and Quisumbing 2012), data from Demographic and Health Surveys for 15 African countries show that there are only two countries (Rwanda and Senegal) where widows and their children inherit most of a deceased’s assets whereas in more than half of the countries (Benin, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea, Mali, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe), widows report no inheritance of assets whatsoever (Peterman 2012).

> 4 With 22% of farmers fearing potential land loss, annual losses due to tenure insecurity are estimated at US$14 million (Deininger _et al._ 2019).

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