misleading insights regarding the profiles of landowners and gender differences in land rights in a given country.<sup>5</sup> In fact, Slavchevska et al. (2021) show how different land rights, such as rights to sell, rent, or bequeath, do not necessarily overlap in Sub-Saharan Africa, and should not be used interchangeably. Relatedly, Kilic et al. (2021b) document that having rights to bequeath and sell land - but not rights to rent out or use as collateral - is significantly linked with investment and cash crop adoption in Malawi, with especially important effects for women. Individuals who are joint owners of the same parcel may also have different decision-making roles as it relates to crop choice, timing of cultivation and input use (Acosta et al., 2020; Twyman et al., 2015). Thus, land ownership should be understood as multidimensional and as a bundle consisting of rights and decision-making in customary tenure systems. In fact, the idea that property ownership contains a bundle of rights has been widely acknowledged in economics (Demsetz, 1967; Alchian and Demsetz, 1973; Schaleger and Ostrom, 1992; and Sikor et al., 2017).

The second reason for the knowledge gaps regarding the profiles of landowners in low-income countries is the fact that the available evidence has been informed by data collected in small-scale studies and the representative insights on land ownership and rights in customary tenure systems have been out of reach due to the gaps in the availability and quality of individual disaggregated survey data. Even if landowners and right holders are individuals, nationally representative survey data on landownership has traditionally been collected at the household-level. And even when the surveys attempted to identify sole or joint landowners were identified within households (and often for each parcel owned by any household member), there have been two major deficiencies in largescale survey data collection: (a) surveys have not systematically sought to identify exclusive and joint holders of specific rights, alongside reported and documented owners, and (b) individual household members have not been interviewed personally and it has been commonplace for selfidentified most knowledgeable household members to identify intra-household landowners and right holders, which resulted in biased measurements of men’s and women’s land ownership and rights (Kilic et al. 2021b).

Against this background, the first contribution of our paper is to provide cross-country, nationally representative insights regarding land rights among men and women in Sub-Saharan Africa, with a focus on non-residential (primarily agricultural) landowners. The analysis is informed by the nationally-representative household surveys that have been conducted in Ethiopia, Malawi, and Tanzania over the period of 2016-2020 and that have interviewed adult household members in private and collected self-reported, parcel-level information on each respondent’s _reported_ , _documented,_ and _economic_<sup>_6_</sup> ownership of land, as well as his/her right to invest in, use as collateral, rent out, bequeath, and sell that piece of land. Across these different ownership and rights constructs, respondents were asked whether they had exclusive ownership and rights or held them jointly with other individuals. Additionally, respondents were asked to identify individuals

> 5 Doss et al. (2015) provide a discussion on the nuances of landownership measures and their importance for genderdisaggregated statistics on land.

> 6 Economic owners are individuals that report themselves as having control over the proceeds of a land sale in the hypothetical event that a given  parcel would be sold.

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