APLICANDO EL SISTEMA VIGESIMAL

Measuring women’s land rights involves a number of crucial elements that require integration into GLII strategy and indicators. Firstly, sex disaggregation is required for all GLII indicators. Gender also interacts with other factors of difference resulting in multiple exclusions from the realization of land rights.

Disaggregation by other factors of difference (e.g.

disability, ethnicity, age, income, etc.) is also important and should be coupled with adequate sample sizes that enable robust statistical analysis.

In addition, gender inequality operates at different levels of society, including within the household (or intra-household), between households, and within communities and the state, which need to be reflected in GLII indicators according their scope. This is because in many contexts, women’s land rights relate to marital status, position in the household or age; it is important that rights are legitimate in and of themselves and are

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not vulnerable to changes in social status or community, granted for an extended period of time, are enforceable and that the ability to exercise them does not require an additional layer of approval for women (Hannay and Scalise, 2014).

Within countries, women’s land rights can vary according to the household structure (male or female-headed, polygamous, extended family, and/or complex households involve outsiders or migrants etc.), age, status and position in the household (legal wife, cohabiting spouse, third wife, single daughter, daughter in law, etc., where to identify intergenerational differences in rights). Rights can also vary according to the type of community in which they live (common property, patrilineal/matrilineal systems, etc.), and because of religion. Furthermore, as people marry or move they may have to negotiate additional sets of rights and practices.

Questions regarding women’s rights should be asked directly of women privately. It is also essential to ask if they have the capacity to exercise these rights independently, or if they need to obtain consent or permission to do so, to verify if they indeed possess that right. It is also important to distinguish between the types and sources of rights, as women may experience different types of land rights compared with men (for example access and use compared with legal ownership), and these interact with different sources of rights (i.e. statutory rules and customary practice, including land allocations within families and households). In addition, the source of legitimacy for the rights bundle, along with the interaction of rights with other legal frameworks, is particularly important from a gender perspective, as the realization of rights is complicated by the interplay of different tenure regimes. It is also important to understand how women’s land rights are mediated by other legal frameworks and where tensions may occur, such as: marital/family rights; religious rights;

community rights, and formal laws and policies.

The table below summarizes the various dimensions and specific elements to be considered to properly understand women’s land rights in relation to men’s in different contexts. As mentioned above, this includes different levels of analysis, types of tenure as defined by GLII, the type of rights and the source of that right.

It should be noted that the complexity of these different dimensions affecting women’s land rights in practice does not imply that GLII should prescribe or expect that detailed disaggregation of all of these dimensions for all relevant data collection efforts. The opportunities for collection of appropriately disaggregated data in different country contexts will need to be explored through careful piloting of broader instruments designed to capture the elements considered to be key by the stakeholders engaged, which must include female experts and representatives of relevant national or local women’s organizations.

In rural areas, data at the land parcel level is also important, rather than information about total household land holdings. This is because women and men in rural areas, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, typically use different parcels over which they have different rights. If surveys focus on household heads, it may exclude the land of other household members, particularly in West Africa where men and women farm separate plots.

Currently, many of the sources of data on women’s land rights focus on the formal legal framework (for example, FAO’s Land Assessment Tool and IFAD’s Access to Rural Land Indicator). However, this does not provide a full picture of what the status of women’s land rights is in reality, so it is important to collect data on outcome measures to make sure that access to the system and how well the system performs is captured.

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There are often discrepancies between statutory law and its implementation in practice. Support and enforcement of land rights is affected by both the capacity of the system to implement them, but social norms also affect the willingness to implement statutory laws. Therefore, it is necessary to also capture gender equality in all indicators, including those concerned with the functioning of institutions for land administration and the management and resolution of land conflicts.

Gender-aware/response data collection methods, sampling strategies, selection of respondents, data collection instruments and tools and the ways in which they are applied, are vital to obtaining reliable, high quality, gender disaggregated data. Due to the pervasiveness of gendered power relations that characterize all societies, primary data captured directly from women, particularly on perceptions (indicator 2) would produce the best quality of data on women’s land rights. Larger and more representative sampling in surveys would help to include people who do not

live in traditional households and other members of the household who are often missed (e.g. women, elderly people). While there are cost implications for this, experiments with the Women’s Empowerment Agriculture Index (WEAI) have shown, for a much longer survey instrument, that the incremental cost of interviewing a second person in the household is far less than “double” because if the survey team are already in the cluster, they can interview the other member during their stay (Alkire and Samman, 2014).

There are a number of practical issues in conducting fieldwork that need to be considered to obtain valid data on women’s land rights. Practices such as matching female enumerators with female respondents, keeping the length of interviews short and arranged at appropriate times, conducting interviews in culturally appropriate places, along with interviewing all household members, or at the very least the principle couple independently, have been found to be very effective.

Levels of analysis Types of tenure Type of right Sources of rights

Intra-household

• Sex , Marital status and position in the household

• Other factors of diversity e.g. age

• Income

• Age Household

• Household structure Position in household Community:

• Urban/rural

• Patrilineal/ Matrilineal customary systems

• Freehold

• Leasehold

• Land rentals

• Customary tenure systems

• Group titling

• Licence to occupy

• Squatting on public both enshrined in law and outside of statatory law FIGURE 9: DIMENSIONS FOR CONSIDERATION IN ASSESSMENT OF WOMEN’S LAND RIGHTS

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7.1.3 RELEVANT DATA COLLECTION INSTRUMENTS