inequality. Moreover, this paper – to the best of our knowledge – is the first to explore in detail descriptive patterns and correlates of gender gaps in property ownership within and across countries in Africa.

While empirical studies show that land and housing property are the most important components of wealth for most African families (de Magalhaes and Santaeulalia-Llopis 2015), they are also the forms of wealth most closely tied to geography. Own land has a central role in rural areas, as the main place to live and produce, but is less relevant in towns and cities were most jobs are outside of agriculture and housing can be rented. In urban areas, housing and residential land play a larger role than agricultural land, but even though city dwellers tend to earn more than their rural compatriots, they are often less likely to own a home.<sup>4</sup> This reflects partly that land is relatively scarce in urban areas, leading to high-priced real estate, but also better access to financial services, as an alternative means to store wealth. Because of this, some caution must be exercised in comparing ownership of land and housing property across rural and urban areas. We revert to this issue in section 3.4, where we show that the wealth gradient of gender gaps in property ownership echoes rural-urban differences, and in section 4, where we distinguish between urban and rural areas in the multivariate analysis.

The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2 reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on how property is acquired in Africa and the constraints that women often face relative to men. This includes a discussion of how, in some countries, legal provisions discriminate between men and women, and constrain women’s property ownership. Section 3 describes the data sources and presents descriptive statistics on gender gaps in land and housing ownership, first showing Africa-wide estimates and then exploring patterns across and within countries. Section 4 pools the individual-level unit record data for different countries to assess country-region, household- and individual-level factors that are associated with women’s and men’s property ownership in a multivariate framework. Section 5 concludes.

# **2. Literature review**

# **2.1 Women’s pathways to property ownership**

This section discusses several pathways through which women obtain ownership of land and housing property, and the constraints they encounter relative to men. We focus on life events, particularly marriage and inheritance, which are the most common channels for both women and men to acquire property throughout Africa. In Ghana, 59 percent of agricultural parcels and 45 percent of housing lots are reported to be inherited or received as a gift; where the latter includes early inheritances received at marriage (Deere et al 2013). This highlights the salience of life events for land acquisition even in a country where land markets are fairly developed by regional standards. Besides life events, the section also discusses, although in less detail, other channels through which individuals obtain property. This includes market purchases, allocations from village authorities, government programs, etc. Within each of these channels gender gaps can emerge from an interaction between households, markets and institutions (World Bank 2011).

> 4 Rates of home ownership tend to be lower in urban than rural areas. See Pendall et al (2016) for the United States, Eurostat (2015) for European Union countries, and Sato et al (2011) for China.

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