 of specific strategies to strengthen women's land rights in practice. This webinar will host a forward-looking discussion on gaps and opportunities for research on what works to improve women's land rights. The discussion will build on the findings and conclusions of a recent report by Resource Equity that summarizes the strength and availability of evidence titled What Works for Women's Land and Property Rights, authored by Alisa Scalise and myself. We have evidence that women's land and property rights lead to important social and economic outcomes for women and their families. Yet around the world, women remain significantly disadvantaged with regard to their land rights. Even when they have access to land, they often don't have rights to the land, including control over decisions related to land or its economic outputs. Women around the world still lack social and economic agency and are limited by insecure land and property rights and what they can achieve. This raises the question of what kinds of interventions actually work. What do we know and what do we need to know to help design and implement interventions and sustain lasting change? The What Works paper shows us that research today has been fairly narrowly focused on specific kinds of interventions in a narrow set of geographical areas and may not always capture what we know is happening on the ground. How do we understand the gaps so that we can target research and practice on things that we know will make a difference in women's lives? We hope this webinar will help identify opportunities and needs for additional research to inform practice and ultimately close the gender gap on land rights for men and women around the world. I'm going to start by introducing myself as well as the panelists. We'll then discuss three different questions for about an hour and we'll end with 30 minutes for questions from the audience. If you do have questions, please post them using the question and answer button at the bottom of your screen and not the chat box feature and we will answer them during the final half hour. My name's Renee Joverelli. I'm a lawyer and a co-founder of Resource Equity, a small NGO dedicated to improving land and resource rights. I've worked on these issues for 25 years and while I'm happy we have come as far as we have, I am impatient for greater change. Our first panelist is Jal Montaveo. Jal is a development economist at the World Bank's Africa Gender Innovation Lab. His main research interests focus on gender and property rights, agriculture, entrepreneurship and human capital. Ongoing work includes randomized control trials in Africa to generate evidence on policy interventions that promote women's economic empowerment. Jal has a PhD in economics from the University College London. Second panelist is Nana Amayura. Nana Amayura is the founder and executive director of Kohlendorf, an NGO based in Ghana that works to achieve land tenure security. As a land economist, development policy analyst and gender specialist, Nana Amayura has spent over 24 years delivering interventions to support land and natural resource governance and securing women's land rights. Finally, we have Cheryl Doss. Cheryl is a professor in the Department of International Development at Oxford University. She is a development economist whose research focuses on issues related to assets, agriculture and gender with a regional focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Currently, much of her work focuses on how to understand both joint and individual ownership and decision-making within rural households. Now we'll move on to questions for the panelists beginning with a question for Jal. Jal, are there examples of interventions which we might think of as setting standards for the field and are they sufficiently backed up by evidence? What can we say works for women's land rights? Jal? Thank you very much, Renee. Thank you very much. It's great to be here with all of you today and celebrate your report on what works for women's land and property rights. You know, echoing a key message of the report, I agree that there's still a lot to learn on what works and I guess it's precisely this challenge that motivates and brings us here all today. At the Africa Gender Innovation Lab where I work, we've been conducting rigorous impact evaluations of land registration programs across the continent to precisely try to answer this question. And while a lot of this work is still ongoing, I guess I'd like to share two recommendations that come out of this work in the context of these land registration programs. The first one is that, you know, we need to give women a seated decision table. And second, we need to educate men on the benefits of land rights for women. We've seen success in the field and let me walk you through it. So we know that in theory, stronger land rights enhance the incentives to make long-term productive investments. We've seen this in Benin, we've seen this in Rwanda, in studies that we are conducting there. And of course, greater investment will eventually translate in the longer term to more outputs, more incomes and consumption for the households. So, you know, strong land rights for women are clearly good news to women but also for men as members of benefiting households. However, overturning existing cultural norms and power structures can threaten those already in power. Of course, the men, you know, strengthening women's land rights increases women's bargaining power in the houses, for example, and that can lead to an increase in the female share of limited resources within the houses. So from this perspective, men might not necessarily be major champions for stronger women's land rights as it entails a somewhat relinquish of power. So this is why educating men at the point of land titling is so crucial for success. So what does the evidence say? We did an experiment in Rwanda in partnership with the Ministry of Lands. This was in the context of a land registration program. We were demarcating plots of land and providing houses with a freehold of land titling. And this was in Barar, which is most a patriarchal society. And what we did, we tested different versions of this intervention to see what works to increase the share of households willing to include women's names on the land titling. So the first version, we produced and tested a short video clip emphasizing the benefits of including women's names on the titling. So the video had two segments. The first segment entails some dramatization with actors. There were a couple discussing the benefits of joint land titling for the family, for the woman. And then we had a second segment with real life couples in the nearby communities that already went through the process of joint land titling. And so we used them as role modeling couples where they discussed why they did that and were incentivizing other couples to do it. So what we did is to one group of husbands, so this part of the experiment was with the husbands, to one group of the husbands, we show the video. And to the other group, we did not show the video. Just before they had to make the decision on whether they wanted the title and those names they wanted to include on the title. What we found is that just showing this video, she's, by the way, very cost effective and highly scalable, increased the percentage of husbands willing to include their wife's names on the titles by almost 50%. So this is, we find it extremely promising and it's interesting to test in other contexts, of course. But as I was saying, creating allies in male head of households is only half of the solution, okay? Women need to sit at the table as well. So for the second version of the experiment, we split the households into two other groups. In the first group, it was business as usual. You know, the program went there, approached the households, asked to talk with the head of the household, introduced the intervention and then eventually asked, do you want to participate? Which names do you want to include on the title? The second group of households, we explicitly require the woman of the household to be present throughout the entire interaction, namely and importantly, during the stage where the household has to decide whether they want the title and those names go on the title. And what we found, so in other words, we gave women a seat at the table. And what we found was that these also made a very big difference, reducing the share of households that shows a solo title in the name of men only by almost 60%. So in some, educating men and including women in key decision-making processes along around land rights is crucial for success. These results suggest that, you know, adapt to the appropriate context, these two policy instruments can significantly increase women's land rights. Over to you, Renee. Thank you, Jau. Nana Amma, I have the same question for you. Are there examples of interventions which we might think of setting standards for the field? What can we say works for women's land rights? Thank you very much, Renee. And hello to everyone. Thank you very much for joining us on this webinar. And honestly, I couldn't agree more with Jaui for the two key points he made that it's important to involve men in joint titleing with women. And it's also important to actually involve women in decision-making in land. Those are very specific and concrete things that work for women. But on the whole, it would be very difficult to say categorically what works for women everywhere because, as we know, gender issues have space and time value. And so what works for some women in a particular location today may not work for the same women or for women in the same area at another time. Or to put it the other way, the issues that women face today in one area may be different from the issues that other women face in the same time in a different location. And therefore, having the understanding that women or gender issues have time and space value gives us the challenge that it would be very difficult to say categorically what works for women everywhere as far as land rights are concerned. But that's notwithstanding. It's also important to say that we have some broad principles that really apply and that give the confidence that they underpin whatever we want to do to bring about securing land tenure or land rights for women. Such things as documentation is important. But we also need to realize that land is local. For Africa, land is cultural, land is social, land is political, land is economic. And therefore, the conversation around securing women's land rights cannot be done at the global level with the understanding that whatever strategies that are perfect would apply to all these different dynamics in the different locations. What works for women are interventions that consider all the different dimensions that I have spoken about, the cultural dimension, the social dimension, the political dimension, the economic dimensions. What works for women is actually interventions that are contextualized, interventions that really situates whatever has to be done in the entire society. Interventions that do not single out women for attention but actually consider women as part of a bigger society and therefore defining and designing interventions, having that society in mind. It's also about recognition and respect. And therefore, what works for women is actually the interventions that allows the society to give that kind of recognition for women's land rights and respect for those rights. And the context of society, in this case, refers to also includes policy actors because a lot of the interventions that work for women, as we have seen in many cases, are isolated in local areas. But if those interventions that have worked in the local areas do not feature in policy discussions, then it means that they remain isolated and the impacts remain only limited in that sense. Again, what works for women's land rights is research that is not technical, but rather easy to understand and easy to apply. Research that women can actually identify with. Again, this is an area that we have seen over and over again that a lot of research has been done. A lot of information has been chained out as far as women's land rights is concerned. But if you look at the level at which this kind of information is packaged and disseminated, you realize that, first of all, it is very technical. It is very bulky for many women. And for those who actually need that kind of information to work with, it becomes a challenge. And therefore, it creates that gap that you have the information at one end. But those who actually need the information to use it are actually not being able to assess due to the technicalities involved, due to lack of access, due to the volumes of that information. What works for women is also the need for consolidating information because there are all kinds of initiatives going on. A lot of things happening, a lot of research going on. And many a time, all of these are dotted around different locations or within different spaces. Consolidating all these information is useful to help women and advance women's land rights. And it's important also to have all of these working, not only as a research component as it were, but also extensively disseminating in various forms. Because if the findings from research is presented in a very formal research document as we know it doesn't reach women the way women would be able to take it up and work with it. So in a whole, I would say that yes, there has been so much work done. Yes, it is possible to find what works for women, but it's important to take note of some of these key issues, key concerns, key roadblocks so that we will be able to bring forth very good research, very good interventions and initiatives that actually advance the work of women's land rights. Thank you, Nana Amma. So two important points I take away from the many important points you make. Research needs to be accessible and local context matters. Those are really important points to get across. Cheryl, what are your thoughts on the same question? What works for women's land rights? Well, thank you. I'm delighted to be here. It's always challenging to go last because both my colleagues have made really good points. I think for me, some of what I would have to say really echoes what Nana Amma was just saying about the importance of local context. When we wanna think about what works for women, we need to know what the particular constraints are in the particular locations that they're living in and working in. In order for women to have land rights and to be able to exercise their land rights, we need to have the legal framework so that they legally have the rights. The social norms have to be in place. And so I really appreciated Jao's comments about educating men. We need to educate men and women both about the rights that they have and also how to protect their rights. We need to think about women's land rights in the context of men's land rights as well and community land rights. So that we're thinking about, when we talk about women's land rights, we often are really only thinking about their land rights in respect to what they have within their household and within their local communities, but also thinking about when their communities are under threat and how we protect their land rights there so that they have a voice. So it needs to be both the pieces that they have the rights and that they're able to exercise them. So thinking about what works or thinking about what are the particular constraints that they're facing in those kinds of places. So there've been lots again, lots and lots of programs that have had an impact in a particular location. Lots of work being done currently on land titling. We know that just putting women's names on the land title may or may not have a real impact on whether they get the benefits of having that land. Does their community see them as owning the land if their name is actually on the title? Have some of those fundamental understandings about it? Have those changed? So lots of work being done on land titles, but we need to understand what that means. What kind of rights do women, are they able to exercise when their name is listed on the title? What are the conditions under which that actually gives them much more and stronger kinds of land rights? So really thinking in other places, what's important is having women have the information about it. So programs such as paralegal programs to get that information out. So the real challenge on all of this is addressing the interventions to what the constraints are that are happening in those local communities. When I go and talk about this, one of the things that people always want to say whenever you're talking about gender is that gender is very locally specific. And so we can't make these big interventions, we can't really say anything, it's too complicated. But we do this all the time with all kinds of other interventions, right? When we think about any kind of interventions for agriculture, agriculture is local. We have to worry about rainfall and soil type and access to markets and all of these kinds of things. And we don't ever say, oh, we shouldn't work on that because it's too difficult. So we know how to work on local things that are locally specific. In other contexts, we can certainly do that with gender and with women's land and property rights. Thank you. Thank you, Cheryl. I really appreciate that, especially the last point that gender is not unique in its need to be local. That's a very important point as well. So let's turn to the second question. We'll go back to Zhao. Given your understanding of the field as it is today, where do you see the biggest needs and opportunities in terms of evidence to support practice on women's land rights? Zhao. Thanks, Renée. I think there are at least two things I'm dying to learn more about. First is we really need to, actually building on what the other panelists mentioned, I think we really need to understand better what are the impacts of strengthening women's land and their security? And in particular, what are the impacts on their earnings and income sources, including off-farm employment and earnings? And the second one is, the second key question is, what are the effects of complementary interventions that complementary land rights interventions in settings where women face multiple constraints? So to explain why these questions are important, let me just quickly highlight two ongoing studies that the gender interventional are is conducting. One in Rwanda, the other one in Ghana. So both evaluates the impact of land registration programs, okay? And what is very interesting in both cases is that the preliminary results from those two studies show very little evidence of increased land investments in response to land registration. In fact, in both cases, we see that farmers that benefited from the intervention, they start allocating less time and effort to farming, shifting it toward off-farm income-generating activities. And importantly, this reallocation of labor out of the farm is not accompanied by reduction in productivity. And in fact, we see this is accompanied by an increase in incomes as well as in food security. So these findings are consistent with this notion that insecure land rights lead people to inefficiently allocate too much time and effort and other resources to the land, to the unprotected land, to precisely to try to guard it. And in Benin, we have also evidence consistent with these. It was also an impact evaluation of a land registration program. And what we found is that women reallocate their time away from parcels, plots of land that were titled and towards neighboring plots of land where the program didn't reach. So they were not, they remain untitled. So it could be that what these land registration programs are doing are helping women transition out of agriculture. And if that is the case and if that's the right thing, then we should think of ways to further facilitate this transition by providing complimentary training and credit, for example. So they could also be the case that the fact that we don't observe a clear link between land registration and the investment it could just also be because these women face a multitude of other constraints. And those constraints, they hinder the true potential of stronger land rights. Think about liquidity. Now I have a piece of land title. I'm assuming that land title indeed strengthens my land rights. Okay, so now that that might give me incentives to make a long-term investment on this plot of land, but I need the liquidity in order to make these upfront investments. If I don't have savings and if I don't have access to credit, I'll not be able to make those investments. And the same argument could be made with information and access to markets. Now with stronger land rights, I perhaps might be more incentivized to say grow a cash crop to sell in the market rather than just focus on subsistence farming. But I need information precisely specific information and not to grow and sell those crops. And of course I need reliable access to markets both to acquired inputs and to sell my output. And we know that human farmers are disproportionately disadvantaged when it comes to these important aspects. So what I'm trying to say is that my message is that we really need to learn more about the mechanisms through which stronger land rights empower women and what could be the role of complementary interventions in bolstering the effectiveness of stronger land rights. Over to you, Renée. Thank you, Joe. And thank you for that point that we need to go beyond just land rights. Nana Amma, what about you? Do you have some thoughts on the same question? Nana Amma, are you there? Sorry, I think I was muted, sorry about that. Hello. Hello, go ahead. Hello, Renée, can you hear me? Yes, I can hear you, go ahead. All right, sorry. So what I was saying was that in addition to what has been said, in fact, it's important to also recognize the fact that the interventions and initiatives towards women's land rights need to be sustained. What I mean by that is, so there are a lot of programs and funding arrangements to support the work for women's land rights. And a lot of the times, you know, as we know projects, they are time bound and they have specific, you know, outputs to be delivered or results to be shown. And once they are time bound and the time is up, we move on to the next. And probably the next may not necessarily be a women's land rights specific program, but it could be something else. When there is no sustained attention, then what happens is that we have pieces of work being done along the way. And by the time we come back to the piece of work that was done, then the gains we made may have been dissipated or may not have grown to the extent that we wanted it to grow. So as long as we all think women's land rights is important and it's important not only for the woman, but for her family and the entire community, then we want to sustain the attention we give to women's land rights and all these complementary efforts so that the gains can actually be enhanced and we can actually broaden the impact it has on all the different categories of stakeholders including the women themselves. The other thing that is also very important to focus on is the way we look at results. What do we call results of the work we do? From my experience over the 24 plus years, what I've realized is that for many development partners, the result is graduated in a certain way that the higher level results are what it looks very fancy for. So results from a very high level with the numbers. But those fancy full results at the high level which is so much touted may not necessarily be what is very relevant or impact for the women that we want to target. And therefore, as development actors, it's important to look at what we call results. Looking at results at a high level is important because it gives us a framework within which to operate. But it's also important to appreciate the results at the local level. For example, in my work, I have always stood to the point that sensitization and awareness creation is a key element in everything that we do. What results do we get out of dedicated attention to sensitization and awareness reason? It may not be the kind of results we get out of that may not be the high level results that may be so fanciful to be projecting at that high level. But for me and for my experience on the ground, that really works. It lays a foundation for the women themselves to participate in interventions and really work to contribute to sustain those interventions. So it's important to look at how we actually value results not only at the high level but also at the mid and micro level so that it contributes to looking at things that work for women together. The other thing is also local capacity. So a lot of the work being done in women's land rights, we have research or research professionals who do a lot of research at the high level. If you go to the local level where the interventions are actually implemented, you realize that the capacity is not that high. And therefore it gives it a bit of a gap in how we are able to professionally and expertly handle the conversations and the dynamics at the local level to be able to generate the desired results. So it's important that we work on that to be able to enhance opportunities for addressing women's land rights. And finally, I want to talk about the funding base because a lot of the funding is from top down and so by the time it gets to the local level, then the amount of resources dedicated to actually handling the interventions on the ground may have become very little. And so not much is done at that local level. And yet that is where action needs to be taken so that the results can show on the broader level. So those are key things that I would want to talk about when you talk about the biggest needs and opportunities in terms of the way to support what women's land rights could be. Thank you, Renee. Thank you, Nana Amma. Cheryl, where do you see the biggest needs and opportunities in terms of evidence to support practice? So I see two big gaps. The first one is bigger, I think, which is that we have many, many small studies. We have the RCTs that Jau is talking about. We have the much more grassroots kinds of experiences that Nana Amma is talking about. And it's often really hard to learn something from these indifferent contexts. People talk about what worked. And again, we heard great examples of specific places in which an intervention worked and had a positive impact. But most of the reports and papers and things about these don't give us enough information to understand the context in which these kinds of interventions are being done. So we know that it worked in one place, but we don't know, and we know that this kind of an RCT, this kind of an intervention, training men with a video have this kind of an impact. But we don't often have enough information in the reports and papers to know whether that intervention might work somewhere else. And I'm seeing a lot of that right now in the chat where people are saying, well, in my particular location, this is the situation, right? And a few responses that say, well, think about it this way, we've tried this. What we need in as we collect this information and in the reporting and writing of articles is much more information on the background and context so that we understand why a particular intervention may have been successful there. And we can start to learn these kind of meta pieces from it. So what are the kinds of information that I think we need to be always including and really thinking about what the context are? First of all, just thinking about the local context of the women and their community. What are their livelihoods? What are they doing? What kind of education do they have? What's going on is the community close to a city far from urban areas. So things about the women in the community themselves. We need to know something about the land and the land tenure. What is this particular land being used for? Makes a huge difference in how women's property rights are seen and recognized and whether they're able to enforce them. Is land particularly scarce in this area or less scarce? Some work I did comparing Ghana, Karnataka, India and Ecuador finds that in a lot of areas in Ecuador, women are more likely to have land rights in places where the men are all moving out because there's much better opportunities in the city so that women get land rights at precisely the moment when land becomes a much less viable source of livelihood. So we need to understand those. We need to obviously understand the laws and the social norms. So the laws and the social norms for each intervention that's being done, what is the legal context in which it's being done? And then also thinking about what the threats are in that particular location. Are there land grabs that are threatening land tenure security for everybody? Are they from big international organizations and firms? Or are they from local people? What are the kinds of threats? Is it that agriculture is becoming much more productive? And as it becomes increasingly productive and you can earn higher incomes for it, that's often a threat for women and their land rights. Is this a post-conflict environment? What happened during the conflict regarding land rights and how might that shape the way these interventions are taking place? I think often the people who are doing these interventions have that information, but it's often not documented enough that it's possible then for people to go and look across the kinds of interventions to pull out these lessons of when and where and under what circumstances might these interventions work. My second concern or set of issues that I think we need more information on is understanding the ways in which women want their land rights. And particularly thinking about whether it's better for women and in which context is it better for women to have individual land rights, their own land title or their own piece of land that is recognized by the community, their family and the legal system that it's theirs. And when do they prefer to have these joint titling kinds of situations? Obviously some of that is individually and personal, a woman who's in a good marriage where they cooperate and they work together and everybody in the household benefits may see joint titling as being a really the best option and somebody who's in a violent marriage and wants to leave might really wanna have her own piece of land. But these are also context specific for the in the broader community. So understanding when it is that it's seen as being better. We often jointly title land for women because that's the easiest first step. But when is that the best step for women and when do we need to think about individual titling women's own individual land rights? So those are my two pieces of evidence that I think we need. Thank you, Cheryl. I wholly agree that we need to better understand the context of research to understand what works and that we need to understand what women want as we're making, as we're developing projects. So let's move to the third and the last question. Jao, what do you think are the biggest substantive or technical obstacles to addressing those needs and taking advantage of opportunities? Thank you, Renee. So most of our work at the Genital Innovation Lab is grounded on in large scale land and government programs, not all of our work, but most of it. And because of that, I think the greatest obstacle, but also the greatest opportunity for scale is seeing our learning being implemented by policy makers. So on that, I can think of two crucial ingredients for success. The first one is this need to create and foster a culture of evidence-based policy in governments. You know, at the end of the day, without policy makers buying in, the evidence will not be used to design better policies. And the second ingredient for success is to identify and cultivate government's appetite for more gender equality, like strong land rights for women, you know, without which there is little demand for evidence. But, you know, this is also indulgence. It responds to the evidence. If we are able to present rigorous causal evidence on the benefits of empowerment to policy makers, we hope to change that culture. You know, something that we learn with experience is, you know, to cultivate this culture of evidence-based policy in governments is very important to work with them from the beginning in the design of these rigorous terms. You know, that really gives a sense of co-ownership between the government, the policy makers and the researchers. It's also very important to identify champions within those organizations, both evidence-based policy and women's empowerment. You know, a great example of that is our ongoing collaboration with the Ministry of Land in Mozambique, where we've been jointly working on the design of the impact evaluation of their most land projects, which is a large-scale rural land registration program. You know, we've been together since the beginning, designing the evaluation, thinking about interventions to help women in the context of the program. And this is very important to ensure that the study is seamlessly integrated within the project. And we were able to design it to specifically answer the questions that the policy makers have. So we also had, you know, this is just an example. We had very good collaborations with other governments, such as in Uganda, Cotiguar, Rwanda, Danine, et cetera. Another point I wanna make is that it's also very important to work with non-government partners. You know, NGOs typically operate at a much smaller scale, and that gives them much more sometimes flexibility to innovate and try new things. You know, in the more quality areas we can create, more likely our government partners will scale up those innovations and further test them. Also in Mozambique, for example, we are currently working with Cadasta and then CDA Clusa, and together we are testing these very interesting new interventions to improve land rights, as well as give them access to agricultural inputs using the Cadasta platform for registration of land rights. And in Uganda, for example, the study I mentioned before about the information and giving women a say in the decision-making processes was done in collaboration with the Ministry of Lands, but also with the local NGO Associates Research, which had a tremendous local knowledge of the issues and was able to flexibly experiment these different interventions. So this has been helping us a lot. I think this relationship, very strong relationship with the governments, but also working closely with the local NGOs. Of course, I gave some examples of success here, but much more can be done in sub-Saharan Africa and in other regions of the world to create and foster this critical culture of evidence-based policy to strengthen women's land rights. Over to you, Renée. Thank you, Jo. I wonder if you could answer a follow-on question. Do you think there are limits to rigor given the great need for contextualization? I don't think we should sacrifice grief. I don't think the need for contextualization crowds out the ability to be rigorous. I do agree that findings that are found in a specific context and feel proven otherwise, they apply there. So I really think it's important to invest more in replication studies. For example, the study I was mentioning where we provided this information, some of these pieces of information, they are kind of generally applied almost in any type of patrilineal society. But things will be very different if you are talking about the matrilineal society. So there probably the information we want to provide will be different and so will be the incentives to encourage stronger women's lands rights. So I think we can be rigorous and we should be rigorous. And we should be very careful when designing these interventions and testing them to make sure that they are adapted to the local context. And we should do as many experiments as we can across different contexts to precisely understand the nuances of each context and understand what works there in the rigorous way. Thank you. Nala Amma, what is required to increase the capacity of people who work at ground level? Whoops, sorry. Do you agree with Jal's answer? In your opinion, what do you think are the biggest substantive or technical obstacles to addressing those needs? Yeah, so I agree to a large extent, what Jal has said. And I think one thing that I really liked about what he said is the fact that we need to really cultivate appetite by the appetite of policy actors so that they can actually take on board some of these initiatives and interventions so that it really reflects on the broader scale. And in fact, that is what many organizations, NGOs do through policy advocacy so that they really engage with policy actors and get them to understand some of these issues and the ongoing interventions to address women's land rights. But in addition to that, I also want to say that we need to work the appetite not only of the policy actors, but also of the traditional institutions. Especially for Africa, we work with many traditional institutions who are based at the local level. And it is at the local level where these interventions take place. So whilst we are interested with having policy actors supporting and making sure that these interventions and the lessons from it inform policy, it's also important to have the buying of these local traditional institutions. In Ghana, for example, we have the traditional leaders, the chiefs and the queen mothers and they are responsible for land. In some parts of Africa, you have similar arrangements but in other parts of Africa, the traditional leaders may not necessarily be responsible for land governance, but they also play a role in community governance. Therefore, whichever way you look at it, it's important to work the appetite of all those within the institutional framework for land governance so that they can actually be partners in promoting and pursuing the women's land rights agenda. In addition to that, I would also say that we need to work the appetite of the women themselves because there are a lot of situations or some situations I should say where you see that the very women in the community, in the society whose land rights are being promoted and who actually are involved and should be actually involved to take steps towards supporting such initiatives and actually helping to make it work may not necessarily be there yet. They may not have gotten themselves clearly into the ideas and so it affects the way we are able to achieve results. So what I always say is that we should be advocating with the women and not for the women because if we advocate with them then they themselves are the ones who are representing themselves with the backing of all the work that many of us professionals are doing to help them achieve the land rights that they are doing. The other thing I also want to talk about is the fact that so far, we have had so much funding gone into research work already. So if you are looking at the main funders for women's land rights I'm sure we can count that so many have supported women's land rights agenda. But as I've said earlier, most of the funding from these agencies have largely remained at high level and research and testing and so on. So it appears that we have gotten a lot of support already. Whereas in reality, underground, a lot of this support has not gone into direct implementation. And so we have a challenge there. And therefore, much as we see that a lot of this research has been done and a lot of work still goes on, still has to go on underground, we have the challenge of meeting this gap, bridging this gap where at the global level it would be seen that we need still some dedicated attention to women's land rights and not having the situation where the support given so far for the high level work, which is important because if we don't have those high level work and the validation and all of that and the testing, it will not give us the framework within which to upgrade. But we need to understand that much as a lot of the funding has been given already, a lot of funding and support, technical support and resources still needs to be given so that a lot of the interventions at the local level can also be done. For me, I think if we are able to pay attention to some of these ideas, it will help us to deal with some of the obstacles we have in promoting women's land rights. Thank you, Renee. Thank you, Nana Aama. Cheryl, you get the final word of the webinar. What do you think, Carmen Degas? You're lucky. They get substantive or technical obstacles to addressing those needs. So I think we've talked about a bunch of the technical obstacles. And I think there's nice, there are a number of technical obstacles, including that it's challenging to think about how you implement projects at the local level and we could think about that as being a kind of technical obstacle. I think those are all things that we can solve and those are relatively easy. We can start, we can learn these kinds of things. If you ask me that question, what is the biggest obstacle to women's land rights? It's that there are deeply entrenched social norms, reasons about power that powerful forces that are protecting and keeping women out from having land rights. We can talk about, oh, that if we simply educated, it's really important to wet the appetite and of men and women to increase women's land rights and to do the kinds of work that Jiao was talking about earlier about engaging men. But if we don't acknowledge the fact that there are these deeply entrenched power dynamics that prevent, they're not just preventing women from having land rights, but also how much land is available, who's able to have that kind of land, kind of at the national level, how is land allocated between small holders and large agriculture, government, whatever, right? But if we ignore those powerful forces about land and just try to come up with technical solutions, I think we're never gonna get there. The challenges, and again, I'm seeing these things all in the chat, people worrying about these kinds of things. Presumably, everybody on this call today is interested in promoting women's land rights, but I'm always amazed when I actually go a little bit broader out in communities and are not simply talking to the people who are working on women's land rights, how deeply entrenched these values are that women should not have land rights and that giving women land rights would be threatening to a whole bunch of power relations. So we have to engage with that as well. I think the only way that's gonna change is by the grassroots organizing, organizing by women, organizing by women engaging men, outside groups, NGOs, working with those groups to help them see, learn from other contexts, but that's gonna have to happen along with any of the kind of technical interventions that are happening at this other level. So I think, I mean, to me, that's the obstacle. We can do all these technical things. We've done a lot of really great technical kinds of things, but there's some really fundamental changes that are gonna have to happen within societies before women are really gonna have equal land rights and equal rights more generally. Thank you, Cheryl. I am a strong believer in the need to organize women and I'm wondering, Cheryl, do we have evidence that organizing women is part of a successful strategy? I think we don't have very good rigorous evidence of this in part because that information often isn't collected. We've got this data on the kinds of interventions that have been done and those often aren't looking at how they're being done and what the context of whether women are engaged, whether they're being supported and started by women. So we do have examples of local women and women being engaged. Often examples that are coming out of work that very grassroots NGOs are doing, much less kind of rigorous studies in the way that, yeah, I was talking about them. So I think there's lots of, there's evidence that suggests that, but there's not a strong body of evidence in a rigorous kind of way. And until we start documenting what's happening with those local kinds of women organizing and how that's shaping the context, we're not gonna have that kind of evidence. That's not it, right? Women organizing and challenging things isn't an intervention that anybody's doing that anybody's evaluating. So we don't have that kind of evidence. Thank you, that's really helpful. Now we're going to move on to the question and answer part of the webinar and there are lots of questions. So we probably will not get to all of them, but we'll give it a try. The first question is from India. India has a Hindu Secession Act, which has been amended. In 2005, it gives women equal rights, daughters equal rights in intestate parental property, but brothers use love to deprive sisters of their share by making them relinquish their rights, even though they have them legally. What is the way out of this? What kinds of interventions might work in this case? I don't know who wants to take that on, anyone? I'll have to call on someone. I want to say something on that question. So what I can say is my little question about the question is, what does he mean when he says that the brothers use love to get the sisters to relinquish their interest in the land? So what usually happens is that the women themselves may not necessarily understand the dynamics around land rights and how land rights impacts on them as women. And therefore, in many communities, you see that the women themselves see them as getting ready or being prepared for marriage, and therefore that is what is paramount in them. So from the work we have done, and in fact, in many communities in Ghana also, you have situations like that where brothers would say that because their sister is going to get married and move to another man's household, the woman does not necessarily need to hold on to their family's property or the inherited land they have received. When you educate them to understand what the ownership of that piece of land means with or without being married, it helps the women to take the right action because if the brothers use whatever they want to use to entice them, and the women understand why they don't need to be enticed, that really helps to solve part of the problem that they will not allow the relinquishing to take place because once it is inherited, it means all those within the siblings are also part-owners of that. So sensitization, awareness-raising, education on land rights and land rights impact on us as women is important for such girls and women to be able to hold on to their properties. That is just one suggestion that I can make. I think the other panelist may also add on to it. Yeah, I have one comment on this, which is I think that one of the reasons that women are pushed to do this and that are willing to do this is because they want to maintain strong family ties. But also it's a real sense of security that if something happens to their marriage and they've given their land to their brothers, then their brothers have a social obligation to take care of them. I think we need to think about, these social relations are important, right? And we don't necessarily want everybody to cut all of their ties with their families. But it would certainly help for women if they were more secure. If they knew that if their husband died, they would, there was a way for them to have a livelihood without having to go back to their brothers' families, right? So this wouldn't be about changing anything about land, but changing the laws and the opportunities for women so that they wouldn't need to rely on their brothers in that kind of way, that they would have some kinds of opportunities for themselves. And so they wouldn't have to make that bargain giving up their land so that their brothers would take them back in if they needed it. Thank you, Cheryl. So the next question is one that I have as well. When formal land rights are collective, land titles do not say anything specific about gender. How would you go about, how would you intervene in this way to strengthen women's land rights? Anybody? This is open. Go ahead, Cheryl. Sure. I mean, the challenge is when it's communal land rights and it's formally designated as communal land rights, the real question is whether there are women who have a seat at the table in terms of how those rights are being used. And so often they don't. There's often also tension between kind of the collective, people who are really working for collective land rights or indigenous groups for other kinds of groups and the women's land rights community, but the place where it can work together is if we make sure that women's voices are heard in those communal, within those systems that are governing that communal land. And that's hard, right? It's hard to have an intervention that says, we're going to intervene so that women's voices are heard. We can make, we can ensure that women are on those committees, those kinds of things. But it's got to be a case there that women are at the table where the decisions are being made about that communal land. Anybody else? Yeah. Okay, we move to the next question. This is for Zhao, since he hasn't said anything. The observation, or answered a question, the observation that women invest resources and activities other than subsistence farming when land rights are secure is interesting. Could, have you heard from women why that's so and what did you make, did you make the observation, sorry, that only when women had secure land titles in their name or when the household, the family had secure land title? So this evidence is coming from different contexts. One of them is Rwanda and in that case, actually the project required both spouses names to be on the land title. I think, but in other cases, that was not necessarily so. So I don't think we don't know yet the precise answer to this question. We don't know whether this effect that we are seeing on sometimes we see investments on land, sometimes we see a shift of resources away from the land towards off-farm income-generated activities. We don't know yet whether those defects are very depending on whether we are tightly in the land just in the woman's name, in the name of the couple or just in the name of the husband. So I think we still need to learn more about that. And we definitely need to do, most of the results that I've been discussing they are based on quantitative evidence. And I agree they can only go so far in explaining the precise reasons and the line behavior we see in response to these interventions. So I think it's really important to pair these studies, these quantitative impact evaluations with qualitative studies. Conduct focus group discussions both before and after the interventions with both women and then in the community. So we need to do that in the course of these impact evaluations. For example, in the study I was mentioning Uganda, we did these focus group discussions with men and women at the beginning to try to understand the local appetite for including women's names on the land items. And we were actually surprised to learn, not for surprise, what we were surprised was with the results of the study, but what those focus group discussions signal to us at the time was that these would be extremely difficult. Both men and women were skeptical for the most part, were skeptical about joint land items. They wanted land titles and actually one of the pieces of our information intervention was to be very clear about what are the implications of land cycling and the benefits of the practical legal implications. So they wanted land titles and they understood what it was, but they were skeptical about including both spouses' names on the titles. And then when we went and actually implemented intervention, even in the absence of any, it's called gender incentive, beauty formation, or adding women present, we saw that almost 60% of the households decided to show the joint after rather than rather than a sole attack on the name of the husband. This was, I mean, still low. This means that 40% of married women do not have land rights. And now that lack of land rights is formalized. So still very low, but somewhat perhaps surprising, we're expecting a smaller demand for joint land cycling. So I guess what I'm trying to say is that we need to combine quantitative analysis with qualitative analysis to better understand the results and the confidence. Thank you, Joe. And someone asked whether these studies that you're referring to will be available after the webinar, are they on the World Bank website or how can people get them? So we have a website, the World Bank Africa Gender Innovation Lab. We have as a website where we have links to both policy briefs that summarize the different studies we do, both on land rights, but also on other areas that we work, and also as links to the academic, the technical papers. Some of these studies are still ongoing. So those that have not yet been produced, but we have policy briefs summarizing the different findings. I invite everyone to visit and download those materials. And I would also be happy to share with my partner and the organization in the field and see how we can distribute for them. Great, thank you very much. So what about polygamy? Does anyone have experience in securing women's land rights in polygamist societies? Yes, so actually we did a project in Ghana in one of the districts and it was under the Millennium Challenge Corporation where for the first time rural land pastels were being titled. And so it was done in such a way that we were looking at not only the former land rights that existed that were being titled, but also the customary land rights that had been granted in oral terms by the traditional leaders to families. So in that area, we found out that there were situations where most of the women were in polygamist marriages. And therefore, how would you incorporate them in this conversation so that the rights they have would be protected? To start off, what we did was that first of all, we wanted to understand what's actually existed before the introduction of this intervention. What was the arrangement? And in many cases, if you start off from there, you realize that even if the arrangement that existed was not necessarily highly protective of the woman, there are always some arrangements that exist. And so beginning from there, we are able to unpack what informs that arrangement and therefore use that as basis to steer the conversation towards making it more, it will stronger strengthening that position and enhancing the opportunity for security and for all the women. So in one case, for example, the man had acquired a large area and he had three wives working on the parcel of land. And what he did was that so the first wife was working with him before all the other women came. Even for the first wife, the kind of right she is supposed to have on the land as a partner to the husband was not existing. And therefore, even though in the society, they recognized her as the first wife and therefore having a lot of influence on decision-making on the land, she wasn't really recognized by the land rights authorities in the local area as a joint owner of the land. So we began from there and through that, we were able to work with the traditional leaders and the husband to understand how the role that each of these women have played on the different parts of the land in form or influence the way they should structure the agreement so that all the wives will be captured in different capacities. So we have different kinds of customary arrangements in Ghana according to our laws. And so we were able to define the arrangements to fix each of the different categories of land rights and they were documented as joint owners. So in some cases, one man and one of the wives, the man and another wife in different parcels, in some cases, one man with the women as partners in the land because in this case, we're not looking at land as just a cultural subject but also land as an economic subject for which all four of them were partners in this economic activity. So it involves a whole lot of skills in understanding what exists and a whole lot of skills in navigating the discussions with all the parties involved and an understanding of what the law says in terms of the types of interests that can be granted and then moving from there, working through dialogue to be able to negotiate and have a fair agreement that can be documented for all the different women. But we didn't push because usually what happens is that if you push, so the mere fact that this person is a wife means that she is necessarily entitled to part of the land. That is not necessarily how the approach would be because if you do that, then what happens is that a wife may be working with a husband on the land. Another wife may be doing another business, petty trading. Doesn't mean automatically that because she is also a wife, a third wife or maybe a second wife, she is entitled to it, not necessarily. So understanding the context, the background to what they have done is important to help define how to move on in ensuring that all of them actually gets benefits to what is due then based on what the existing arrangements are. In fact, we have been pushing this a lot in the new land bill and so far we have made some headway into it but a lot of what still needs to be done as far as polygamous marriages are concerned. Thank you. Thank you. I'm interested in the last thing you said that you're working on it in the land bill because it seems like it would be really difficult to make a legal rule where there's so much family context. What kind of rule are you thinking about in the land bill? Nana Ama. Yeah, so what is happening now in Ghana is that in the new land bill, we have advocated for a provision in the bill which says that if a man or if a spouse acquires property, usually they argue with us that why do we always assume that it is the man who acquires and the woman has to benefit. So if a spouse acquires property whilst they are married, then automatically that property is jointly owned by both he or she and the spouse. Unless it is, I mean initially that was the clause. So once you are married and a property is acquired, then the law recognizes that property to be for both spouses. And if there are other spouses, then the property will be shared based on the, I mean sharing arrangements outlined in the laws. What the, I mean the argument that the rebuttal we received on that was that it cannot be that automatically once you are acquired, then it is said to be for your partner or partners, for you and your partners. But rather it is when you are documenting a new state specifically that it is for you and you, that is what the MPs were saying, then it does not have to be for you and your partner or partners. So there is an argument on that, but at least we have crossed the first hurdle which recognizes the fact that property that is acquired while still married is automatically assumed to be for the partners who have been married. And the peculiar situation in Ghana, which makes this very crucial is because if you go to a lot of these farming areas where they invest a lot in cash crops like cocoa, palm oil, cashew, and so on and so forth, what happens is that the men move from their local area and travel to another part of their country where there is further land for that kind of agricultural investment. So they go, they approach the traditional leaders for land and once the land is granted, they start clearing their land. By this time all the women or wives of this man will be in the original area where the man came from. So the moment the land is ready for cultivation, then the man will bring the wife and children to come and work and develop the farm, nurture the crops until it's fruition. But because the acquisition was done by the man under our customary arrangements, even if the women and the children work on the land their entire lives under our culture, they are not considered to be share owners of the land. And therefore that is why we pushed to ensure that even if the land is acquired by the man, even without the active involvement of the woman, then definitely it's, I mean, because they have both worked on it, it is for both of them. That first level has been achieved, but the level we are still working on is the caveats. That's the parliamentarians want to include. And then we are still working on that, but they still want to insist that there has to be a caveats. Otherwise it's going to create a lot of problems for them or for marriages in their society. So yeah, that is what is happening in Ghana at the moment. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. We have a question from Morocco that I want to get to. In countries where Islam radicalism, the simple fact of talking about women's rights to land or gender justice is a danger to women. In Morocco, the state has used women as a screen by using their names to talk about collective land, which has put them in additional vulnerable situation, especially when we know that the state has modified the lambas to monopolize land for the benefit of certain oligarchy. The question is, the problem is, depending on several parameters, context, culture, but the question is how do you protect women while using an inclusive approach? Anybody like to answer this? Jao or Cheryl, do you have any experience with this? Nana Ama? So I'll say something. I mean, I think this is one of those cases where you really need to have the work that's being done led by local women. They're the ones who are in danger and they're the ones who are facing the risks. So I don't think it's, I don't know that there's a way to go in and intervene on behalf of those women in that kind of a context without really involving them in the design and figuring out what's an appropriate kind of thing to do. There is no way as an outsider you can know what those kinds of things are. So finding who those women are, what the organizations are that are working with women on those kinds of issues and asking them what kinds of support they need and what would be useful. And there are kinds of support that you can do, right? There are things that international kinds of organizations can do. Having a voice, talking about this in public international forums that the local women can't do. But I think that is particularly the kind of place where you have to have those kinds of partnerships and where they're really led and directed by local women. Thank you. Anyone else want to jump in on this? I agree. I think you have to let women lead and you have to find the women who are working on the issues. Anama, did you want to say something? To add to that I mentioned earlier, we have the traditional or local level institutions of leadership. So in many African societies, you have chiefs or whichever name they give to them. They are local leaders, traditional leaders who are recognized and who are seen as authentic leaders for communities. So in many cases, you have the male leadership and then you have the female leadership. So in Ghana, for example, you have the chiefs and you have the queen mothers. So to handle or to deal with the issues of inclusion when you are looking at these communal level processes, one approach that has worked is to empower the female leaders in the community. So in Ghana, for example, we have worked with a lot of the queen mothers because they themselves are women and they themselves have their own issues as women which may not necessarily be the same as the individual women in the community because as women leaders, they have the issues of limited involvement in decision making with the traditional leaders who are men. But because they are recognized traditional leaders and they are seen as authentic community leaders when they are empowered, when they are trained and they are sensitized and they are used as entry points for engaging with women and as entry points in navigating the inclusion of women in some of these communal level processes. It helps to pave the way first of all because there is recognition for the established structures in the community and there is ownership of the process by the local women themselves and it also promotes the opportunity for handling the process without necessarily introducing new things that may be foreign to the local people and which may be considered culturally unacceptable. Thank you, Nana, Amma. So we probably have time for one more question, maybe two. Let's go back to joint titling and land documentation. Are there any best practices in translating joint titling land documentation for women into economic empowerment? We have found that even when women have documented rights, they still have limited control and decision-making power over land and productive resources. Maybe we can start with Jiao on that. Yes. So there's actually this, you know, most of the work I do in General Innovation Lab is not most, all of it is focused in South Africa, but there is this interesting study in Peru by Erica Fields, it's another study where they examine a land titling program that explicitly targets gender equality land ownership and what they found is that women became more likely to appear as owners on property documents as a result of the program were more likely to participate in household decision-making. So, and then they found that that led to eventually translating it to reduce fertility. So that is evidence that clear evidence, making a clear link between land registration for women and greater decision-making power. But I guess more generally, I guess most of the studies on land registration programs, that is changing now, but most of them, they were not able yet to generate variation, experimental variation across households on whether the women is actually on the title versus not being on the title. So it's very difficult to compare households where the woman is on the title versus households where the woman is on the title because those households might be systematically different from each other. So it could be that the households where women is more empowered, houses where the women's names are on the titles, women are more empowered there, but that might be the reason why their names are on the title in first place. So establishing this causal impact of strong land rights on women's empowerment, it's a very important thing to do and need more evidence. So in Uganda, we're trying to do that, right? Because some households we are incentivizing them to go for joint targeting and others we don't have those incentives in place. So hopefully as we collect follow-up data, we'll be able to establish that link more rigorously. But just to add as well that it could be that this land registration programs might have to be accompanied by other complementary interventions targeted to women to really lead to a sustained large economic empowerment for women. Stronger land rights are fundamental, they are very important, but we might need to do something else in addition to strengthen land rights for to bolster the effectiveness of land rights in terms of empowerment. Thank you very much. Anyone else have something to add? Possibly Cheryl. Yeah, let me just... So I think two pieces on that. One is I agree there's lots of complementary kinds of things that need to go along with it. There's no reason why just putting women's name on a title is gonna change things unless for example the women know that their name is on the title and they understand what that means. So there's quite a few other things that would have to go along with that. It probably will change more as there becomes situations where women's names are put on the title and then when their husband dies they actually do have some legal claims to it and people start seeing that putting women's names on the titles has an impact over the long run. I guess I would also say that we might expect that that would be empowering in a number of ways for women if they know that they now have secure land rights and that they would be able to enforce them. One thing might be for them to engage more in agriculture and make more decisions on the agricultural land, but it also might be the case that what they do as a result of that is are more secure in their land rights and are then able to engage in other kinds of economic activities. And so if we define the impacts narrowly we may be missing some of the broader kind of story particularly in communities where we're starting to see rural and structural transformation other kinds of opportunities becoming available knowing that your name is on that piece of land may make you secure enough that you then feel like you could start your own small business or do something else. So we need to think about it more broadly than just looking at their engagement on decision making and agriculture. Thank you very much. We are almost out of time. I just want to make one final comment. Is there a place where all of this is collected all this rich experience? The answer is no, but we are making resource equity is making a stab at it. And we have a research consortium where we're collecting some studies and data and kind of trying to have those available for people to look at by country and also by topic. We also have a help desk so people can write in with specific questions and then we try to go out and find the answer for you. So that's, you can find us on resource equity website. And I do know that a lot of information from both Jiao and Cheryl is definitely available online in terms of studies. So, but if you have specific questions please feel free to write to me and I will try to get you to the right place. Thank you so much everybody. Really appreciate your input. Cheryl and Jiao and Nana Ama I think it's been a great discussion and I've really learned a lot. So I really appreciate very much and thank you all for attending.