# **5.2 Women’s land rights and inheritance**

A more direct test of the extent to which Rwanda‟s policy of actively increasing women‟s rights to land had the desired impact is to assess the extent to which LTR helped to increase female land ownership. However, a key provision of the legislation is that legally married women are entitled to equal ownership rights over household parcels. 76 percent of couples in our sample have a marriage certificate, in line with legal provisions requiring registration of marriages at the local commune. Table 7, which presents regressions for an indicator of land ownership and the share of land owned by females, illustrates that LTR has dramatically changed women‟s rights over land by helping to create documentary evidence of such rights. While the first four columns, based on the full sample, show little change in female land ownership rights, columns 5 and 6 which restrict the sample to cohabitating/married couples, reveal a large program impact. The first row shows that, for women in this group who are not legally married, LTR results in a small but statistically significant reduction (by 8 percentage points) of the probability of having documented land ownership.<sup>10</sup> However, for women who are part of a union formalized through a marriage certificate, the effect of the program is overwhelmingly positive—they are 17 percentage points more likely to be regarded as joint land owners after LTR than before. The final column displays results with the share of the land owned by women as the dependent variable which point to a positive but not statistically significant effect, regardless of the presence of a certificate.

As many past land adjudication efforts failed to tackle inheritance issues, it is of interest to explore LTRinduced effects in this regard. Table 8 highlights that, most likely because it requires an explicit record of who will inherit the parcel, the process significantly reduces succession-related uncertainty. We find a 9 percentage point increase in the respondent‟s response that she/he now knows who will inherit the parcel. Column 2 shows that greater certainty along these lines strongly benefits respondents‟ the children and that gender bias has virtually been eliminated, at least for couples. In LTR areas, children are 13 points more likely to inherit the land and, as columns 4 and 5 document, girls both benefit almost equally. Column 4 suggests that girls in female headed households are significantly less likely to be designated as an heir compared to their counterparts in male headed households. This result deserves further research, but it is not inconsistent with data from Mexico which shows that women exhibit strong and persistent preferences for male versus female heirs (Deere and Leon 2003).

# **5.3 Land market activity**

It is often claimed that, by reducing in the transaction costs of transferring land, interventions to improve land tenure may set off a wave of distress sales whereby households who lack access to credit and

> 10 While our questionnaire did not elicit information on disputed claims, it would in principle be straightforward to use the dispute register to explore how many of these were able to register disputed claims and how many of these had actually been resolved.

14