And even when religious law may provide women with greater protections, customary norms may still govern the allocation of property rights. Among predominantly Muslim communities in the Senegal river valley, as Aldashev et al. (2012) note, community members tended to ignore more favorable Sharia law provisions on the inheritance share for girls and instead followed patrilineal inheritance customs. The authors posit that women refrained from challenging this norm via customary institutions since it would jeopardize their social standing and protections afforded by customary law (Aldashev et al. 2012).<sup>27</sup> Nevertheless, customary norms in some settings may provide sufficient flexibility for women to access land and other key assets, even in the presence of tenure insecurity. Indeed, customary norms are mutable and can evolve toward more secure, individualized rights for women. In traditionally matrilineal areas of western Ghana, for instance, women slowly gained access to land after the introduction of a labor-intensive cash crop. Husbands transferred parcels of land to their wives in exchange for farm work on cocoa fields – leading to an expansion of women’s land rights (Quisumbing et al. 2001).

- **_Enforcement, access to justice, and service delivery_**

Women may face obstacles in adjudicating claims via formal or customary institutions that are shaped in part by the social norms and biases of the local context (World Bank 2011). Indeed, national and local administrative and customary institutions, in which men are over-represented, may not make decisions that advance’s women’s rights to productive assets (Meinzen-Dick et al. 1997), even when the statutory legal framework is favorable toward women.<sup>28</sup> A related factor may be the lack of female representation in formal judicial processes. Legal systems themselves in Sub-Saharan Africa are characterized by under-representation of female justices and lawyers (World Bank and IFC 2015). In Kenya, for example, women made up only 19 of the 51 judges on Kenya’s High Court in 2009, and none of the 12 Court of Appeal judges was female (HallwardDriemeier and Hasan 2012). In Cameroon, women made up only 22% of judges in the Magistrates’ court and 19% of the courts bailiffs and process servers in 2009 (Hallward-Driemeier and Hasan 2012).

Differential adjudication of customary law may further contribute to gender differences in property rights. Customary courts and other local decision-making bodies tend to be male-dominated and issue rulings that are less favorable toward women (Hallward-Driemeier and Hasan 2012).<sup>29</sup> In Uganda, Khadiagala (2001) argues that the establishment of local councils, designed in part to resolve disputes in a consensual manner, failed to protect women’s customary land rights. Local level institutions might also be insufficiently aware of the statutory laws that are designed to safeguard women’s property rights.

> 27 Under customary arrangements, a woman is accorded the right to return and work on her father’s land in the event of divorce, or remain on her own land in the event of widowhood until her son reaches adulthood (Aldashev et al. 2012).

> 28 Agarwal (1994) distinguishes between the legal and social recognition of rights and the fact that a recognized right in one domain might not necessarily be an enforced right.

> 29 Sandefur and Siddiqi (2013) examine household data from Liberia and find that women engage in forum shopping: female plaintiffs are much more likely to use formal systems of adjudication of land and other disputes when the suit is against a male (and opt for customary institutions when suing another female). They argue that men’s relative privilege in customary settings may lead women to seek out formal means of settlement.

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