grandmothers). The conclusion from this body of research points to a strong potential for improving household outcomes through the strengthening of women’s command over resources.

The remainder of this White Paper review is presented as follows. **Section II** offers some stylized facts on the degree to which women’s and men’s property rights over land, livestock, and savings differ in Sub-Saharan Africa. In **Section III** , we examine the potential drivers – related to contextual factors and endowments – of the gender gap in property rights. **Section IV** presents the conceptual framework and outcomes of interest. **Section V** takes stock of the gender-differentiated evidence from rigorous impact evaluations of programs, interventions, and legal changes related to property. We conclude the White Paper in **Section VI** by outlining the pressing knowledge gaps and GIL’s frontier research agenda around gender and property rights in Sub-Saharan Africa **.**

- II. Gender gaps in the ownership, use, and control of productive assets

This section documents the existence – and magnitude – of gender gaps in the ownership, use, and control of land, livestock, and formal savings across Sub-Saharan Africa. The information is presented by productive asset category.

# **_Land_**

The existence of a stark gender gap in women’s ownership, use, and control over land is well established. Women in Sub-Saharan Africa are less likely than men to report owning land or having documented ownership over land, they own and manage less land overall, and they farm smaller agricultural plots (C. Doss et al. 2015). For example, in all six of the African countries for which LSMSIntegrated Surveys on Agriculture data are available, the share of land owned solely by men is greater than that of women. The ratio of documented land area under male versus female control ranges from 2 to 1 in Malawi and Uganda to 12 to 1 in Niger (C. Doss et al. 2015).

Women have also greater tenure insecurity over the land that they use relative to men (Goldstein and Udry 2008; Goldstein et al. 2015). In Rwanda, for example, female household heads experience lower levels of tenure security than men, which constrains their willingness to make or maintain investments in structures such as bunds, terraces, and dams (Ali, Deininger, and Goldstein 2014). And gender differences in tenure and land characteristics can also influence productivity outcomes (World Bank and The ONE Campaign 2014).<sup>10</sup> In Niger, for example, men enjoy higher returns – in terms of increased farm productivity – than women to land ownership and changes in plot elevation, suggesting that differences in tenure and land quality contribute to the country’s large gender gap in agriculture (Backiny-Yetna and McGee 2015).

> 10 While some studies suggest that men and women also use land of different quality (e.g., soil fertility levels), the limited evidence drawn from objective measures of quality is not yet conclusive. In Ghana, there were differences in organic soil matter between male- and female-managed plots but these differences did not influence yield outcomes (Goldstein and Udry 1999). A small study in Uganda found no difference in soil fertility levels between husbands and wives in the same households (Nkedi-Kizza et al. 2002).

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