# **I. Introduction**

The rights to land ownership and land use are a critical component of development policy discussions, and are associated with increased access to credit, productivity, and resilience in the face of various shocks (Carter and Barrett, 2006). Recent work by Deininger et al. (2021) finds that land rights are associated with increased investment and cash crop adoption, and that the impact of these rights differs across men and women. Evidence also suggests that the ownership of assets like land at the individual level (as opposed to at the household level) is positively associated with intrahousehold bargaining power (Doss, 2013). Given the importance of land tenure to development outcomes, as well as evidence that the impacts of land tenure rights differ by gender, accurate measurement and monitoring of land rights is essential for informed policy.

The Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) agenda recognizes the importance of land tenure by including several indicators on individual land rights. As the SDG framework strives to provide a dashboard-type look at development progress and outcomes, complex concepts such as land tenure are necessarily distilled into simplified indicators that can be widely and regularly reported. Taking the SDG indicators related to land tenure as defined in the indicator metadata, we provide evidence that the choice of measurement method may alter indicator estimations, particularly given the various nuances of land tenure that are not readily captured in the simplified indicator framework.

SDG indicators 1.4.2 and 5.a.1, which fall under the goals of ending poverty and achieving gender equality, respectively, both focus on individual, sex-disaggregated land tenure rights. Indicator 1.4.2 assesses tenure security for the population at large, based on documented rights and perceptions of security, while indicator 5.a.1 monitors land tenure security for the agricultural population, through the concepts of documented rights and alienation rights. While all 193 United Nations member states have committed to pursuing and reporting on the SDGs, only 34 countries had either fully or partially reported on SDG 1.4.2, and only 33 countries on SDG 5.a.1, as of April 2022.<sup>2</sup> The majority of the countries reporting these indicators have done so using estimated data, such as using proxies for the codified definitions of the indicators, using a subsample of the relevant population, or reporting on a subset of the sub-indicators due to constraints around data availability.

Given the heavy data burden of the SDG agenda for national statistical agencies, it is imperative that affordable, efficient, and scalable tools are readily available. The custodian agencies for indicator 1.4.2 – UN-Habitat and the World Bank – and indicator 5.a.1 – the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) – worked with stakeholders such as Landesa and the Evidence and Data for Gender Equality (EDGE) initiative to develop a questionnaire module for jointly collecting the data for both indicators (FAO, World Bank, and UN-Habitat, 2019). The questionnaire module was designed to facilitate widespread uptake by allowing for integration into various types of surveys, from detailed household surveys with extensive agricultural modules to specialized household surveys with limited scope for land data collection. To accommodate a wide variety of data collection efforts, multiple versions of this module were developed, differentiated over two characteristics: the respondent strategy and the level of data collection. On the respondent strategy, modules were designed for both a selfrespondent approach (where one or more randomly selected respondents answer only for themselves) and a proxy respondent approach (where a given individual answers on behalf of themselves as well as other household members). On the level of data collection, modules were designed to either collect data for each parcel separately (parcel-level data), which allows for disaggregation of the indicators by type of land tenure, or for all land in aggregate (aggregate-level data). For surveys that do not already collect parcel-level data, which is often the case 2 Global SDG Indicators Database, accessed April 26, 2022: https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/indicators/database/ 2