# **3. Descriptive patterns of gender gaps in the ownership of land and housing**

# **3.1. DHS data on women’s and men’s property ownership**

Most household surveys gather data on the asset and property ownership for the household as a whole (“does this household own any...”) from a single respondent, often the person deemed to be the ‘most knowledgeable household member’ or the ‘head of the household’. However, to assess gender gaps in ownership it is necessary to have data on which individuals within the household own the asset (Kilic and Moylan 2016).

One of the few survey programs that provide data on individual-level property ownership for developing countries across different regions is the DHS, where surveys conducted under the 6<sup>th</sup> phase or later (from approximately 2010 onwards) typically include the questions (a) “do you own any land either alone or jointly with someone else?” and (b) “do you own this or any other house either alone or jointly with someone else?” in the women’s and men’s questionnaires. And unlike many other surveys, the DHS protocols do not use proxy respondents but interview husbands and wives separately from each other and in private (ICF International 2012). Asking individuals directly about their ownership rights over assets is generally assumed to best capture their personal perceptions and avoid biases from proxy respondents (Doss et al 2020). Based on a review of DHS questionnaires, we identified 41 countries with data on women’s and men’s property ownership (see Table A2, Appendix).<sup>5</sup> Besides these advantages, it is important to acknowledge that there are dimensions of property ownership on which the DHS data cannot provide answers. First, the DHS data only capture the incidence of men and women owning any land and/or housing, and do not provide information on the monetary value of these assets. Second, ownership itself is a complicated context in societies shaped by legal pluralism and informal claims to the property. As discussed in Schlager and Ostrom (1992), property rights can be described along a continuum, which ranges from authorized user to claimant, proprietor and ultimately owner. In this spirit, Kilic and Moylan (2016) distinguish between reported owners, economic owners, documented owners and holder of various bundles of rights. These differing ownership and use rights do not necessarily fall together (Slavchevska et al 2017; Doss et al 2020).<sup>6</sup> The DHS questions that were added to the 6<sup>th</sup> round, capture a concept closest to that of reported ownership but cannot distinguish between different forms of ownership or provide information about the security of ownership.<sup>7</sup> Moreover, even though the DHS are fairly standardized, regional differences in tenure systems may affect the interpretation of questions about individual ownership. Likewise, because the DHS data ask about land and housing in general and do not refer to specific assets (e.g. a specific parcel of land, or a

> 5 The DHSs for South Africa and Liberia collected data only on housing ownership, but the countries are still included in the analysis. We do not include data sets that collect data on women’s (but not men’s) property ownership, or vice versa. In countries where data on women’s and men’s property ownership are available from multiple DHS rounds, only the most recent survey is used. Data sets released after June 18, 2020 are not considered.

> 6 For example, in many parts of Africa, village chiefs, kinship groups and extended families may engage in specific aspects of property transactions (Pande and Udry 2005; Doss et al 2015). Based on data for Senegal, Lambert et al (2014) show that even though 17 percent of women inherited some land from their parents, only 2 percent have land to bequest to their heirs, suggesting that women’s land ownership rights are often revocable.

> 7 DHSs conducted under the 7th and 8th rounds collected additional information on the availability of title deeds. However, these data are not yet available for a large cross-section of countries.

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