interested in a sketch and 85% of those interested in registering house plots are willing to pay (B13 for the former), suggest that at the community level affordable types of land certification are indeed in demand.

# **3.2 Household and parcel-level evidence**

Cross-checking village level data with information more appropriately obtained at the household or parcel levels (table 4) allows us to explore the gender dimension of land certification and provides a basis for a preliminary assessment of the extent to which certification has been pro-poor. We find that (i) there is little evidence of wealth bias in access to the program or the information surrounding it; (ii) female participation in the early stages of registration was limited and there is considerable variation even among regions in the share of documents issued jointly or in the name of a female; and (iii) there is considerable interest in, and willingness to pay for, a map to complement the current verbal description of the land.

Aggregate data match well with community-level information, increasing confidence in the reliability of the latter; 89% of sampled households indicate to have their primary activity in farming, almost 50% have an illiterate and 13% a female head, and 58% live in houses with metal roof. Disaggregation for top and bottom quintiles of per capita consumption highlights that poor households are larger, more likely to have an illiterate head, and less likely to have a metal roof, but that there is no strong correlation between poverty and female headship or farming as main activity. Concerning participation in community leadership we note that, although the poor are as likely as the rich to participate in the kebele council, gender biases are pronounced as 23% of households have a male but only 6% a female participant.

With almost 90% of households indicating that information meetings were organized before the start of registration and 93% having had a household member attend such meetings at least once, oral information on the program is fairly accessible and not biased in favor of the rich. This is supported by the fact that almost 80% of households -equally for rich and poor- consider themselves to be well-informed about the program. At the same time, the share of those who received written material was low, with 15% overall (30% in Tigray, 21% in SNNPR, 16% in Amhara, and 9% in Oromia) lower. Interestingly, the poor are significantly more likely to have received such information than the rich. Note that females from poor households were slightly more likely to participate than those from wealthier ones. The program does not seem to have overcome pre-existing gender biases; compared to 72% of females (and 83% of males) who voted in the last woreda and kebele elections, only 17% of women voted in LAC elections, only about 40% of households had a female member participating in public meetings on land and LACs are more maledominated than the kebele council at large.

Rapid progress of certification is evidenced by the fact that almost 60% received a document to their land, 40% a preliminary registration paper and 60% a full certificate. Given the different times at which the process started, we find marked differences in the share of households with certificates across regions 12