# **7. Conclusion**

Individual land ownership can ease access to credit, allow for better consumption smoothing during economic volatility, as well as improve bargaining power within the household. Understanding these channels has been difficult, in view of cross-country differences in common forms of ownership (e.g. reported, economic versus documented), and different rights that landowners may have over their parcels particularly under customary land tenure. Leveraging unsupervised machine learning techniques and nationally-representative, intra-household survey data elicited in private from men and women, this paper creates unique profiles of landowners in Ethiopia, Malawi, and Tanzania, anchored in a range of constructs related to their self-reported rights to and control over land parcels.

The analysis reveals a high degree of cross-country consistency in new insights. Landowners, particularly women, often do not have full rights and decision-making power over land. Multiple Correspondence Analysis demonstrates that transfer rights (rights to bequeath, sell, rent out and use as collateral) contribute the most to the variation in the composition of the constructs related to rights to and control over land. These transfer rights are aligned with the alienation rights discussed by Schlager and Ostrom (1992).

Hierarchical clustering further shows that landowners can effectively be clustered into three categories: (1) owners with mostly exclusive transfer rights, (2) owners with mostly joint transfer rights, and (3) owners without any or with only limited transfer rights. Owners with transfer rights are shown to have all other decision-making and rights. Provided that transfer rights are included in the mix, the cluster definitions are also robust to the changes in the composition of the rest of the variables that are used in hierarchical clustering. This, together with the MCA findings, implies that household survey questions on land rights can be trimmed down to only include those on transfer rights, without any loss in our ability to cluster reported landowners.

Moreover, hierarchical clustering allows for a more nuanced investigation of structural and gender differences in land ownership across countries. For example, in Tanzania, within the cluster of landowners with no/limited transfer rights, 87 percent have none of the four transfer rights. In Malawi, this share is about 60 percent. And in general, women are over-represented in this cluster of landowners across the three countries. In addition, the results highlight the importance of collecting data on permissions to exercise rights over land. For example, we find that although landowners with either mostly exclusive or mostly joint rights typically have the same bundles of rights and other ownership variables, permissions to exercise these rights vary between the two clusters. In Malawi and Tanzania, landowners who need permission for at least one transfer right ranges from 31-33 percent within the exclusive cluster to 93-98 percent within the joint cluster. The analysis also reveals that in each country, moving from the cluster with mostly joint transfer rights to the one with mostly exclusive transfer rights, the increase in the share of individuals not needing permission to exercise any right is considerably greater among women than men. These findings motivate the need for further research on how joint owners exercise their rights and what restrictions they may face when permissions are involved.

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