- Land is either owned or rented. Seventy-eight percent of the holdings are owned, 14 percent are rented and the remaining ones are under more than one form of tenure. The Government owns about 0.15 percent of the total land area (20).
Fifty percent of farmers are owner-operators and 26 percent are pure tenants (4).

- Tenancy contracts guarantee tenants with land, credit, access to irrigation networks and agricultural input in exchange for their labour on the farms owned by a landlord. The most frequent system of tenancy is sharecropping - batai - in which the produce is shared by the landlord and the tenant, usually at a 50 percent rate.

- Leases are mostly without contracts, for one year or one season only; often they might be prolonged for a longer period but without security for the tenant (21).

- In Punjab, where nearly 65 percent of the cropped area is, tenancies are split evenly between share and fixed rent contracts. Sharecropping is the predominant form of tenancy in Sindh, where more than one third of the land is tenanted and about two-thirds of land is under sharecropping (10).

- The main  categories of land holders are:
i. Landlords who own more than 150 acres of irrigated land or 300 acres of non-irrigated land.

ii. Small landlords who own 25 to 150 acres of irrigated land or the equivalent amount of barani land, dryland areas not served by canal irrigation.

iii. Family owner-cultivators who possess 7.5 to 25 acres of irrigated land or a corresponding area of non-irrigated land.

iv. Marginal owner-cultivators who own less than 7.5 acres of irrigated land, and some of whom rent areas to enlarge their holdings. This group consists mostly of subsistence farmers who have an average farm size of 2.2 acres. In addition, many of these small peasants work as agricultural labourers in order to earn a living, and farm their own land only a side/part-time occupation.

v. Tenants who have some acres of their own, in addition to their rented land. Some of them are tenants of government land.

vi. Tenants-at-will who are landless and enter in tenancy contracts with landlords.

vii. Landless rural labour: people who provide their labour to landowners against a share of the produce (21).

- The Land Commission of the Province enforces the 1972 Land Reform Regulation within the Province. A Commission may nominate one of its members to be the Chief Land Commissioner, as provided for by Article 4.4 of the Land Reform Law (16).

The Commission manages land disputes. Where any dispute or difference arises between two or more Commissions, the case shall be referred to the Federal Government whose decision thereon is final, as regulated by Article  4 [7] of the Land Reform Regulation (16).

- The Federal Land Commissions supports the Federal Government in deciding on disputes arisen between two or more Commissions, as provided for by Article 4A [2] [ii] of the Land Reforms Regulation (16).

- District governments have jurisdiction for land administration, valuation and acquisition.
At the provincial level these functions rest on the Board of Revenue, while at District level they rest on the District Collector Office (DCO) and on the Land Acquisition Collector (LAC).

- The Revenue Department keeps land ownership records (14). The Patwarim, the lowest state functionary in the Revenue Department, is the land record clerk in a tehsil – town. The Patwari’s tasks include visiting agricultural lands and maintaining record of ownership and tilling (22).

- The Agricultural Census Organisation, which works as an attached Department to the Statistics Division of the Government, collects statistics relating to various aspects of agriculture, including those included in agricultural censuses (8).

Several banks and organizations have introduced group-guaranteed schemes to allow women to access credit without collaterals.
These include:
- the Khushali Bank;
- the First Women Bank;
- the Pakistan Agriculture Development Bank;
- special institutions like the Poverty Alleviation Action Fund (PAAF);
- NGOs.

In 2005, micro-credit to women formed 36 percent of PAAF’s disbursement; furthermore, 22.5 percent of the borrowers of the Khushali Bank were women (14).

- Women have to ask for permission to leave the house and are not allowed to participate in the local Water Users Associations, even if they are the principle managers and users of potable water at the domestic level. Violation of the norm of seclusion on the part of women, can lead to physical abuse.(14).

- High levels of illiteracy among women hamper their access to information (14).

- The lack of information concerning the land registration system and the procedures involved negatively affect women’s capacity to claim their rights to land. Moreover, the absence of available and accessible protection and justice aggravates the situation (14).

- Women generally lack the knowledge and the resources to resort to court to have their rights to inheritance enforced. Furthermore, the division of property can take years, if the property in question is under litigation or dispute (14).

- Women are generally unable to provide the collateral required to secure a loan. Additionally, most women do not have the National Identity Card which is necessary to access credit (8).

- Women who receive property from their husbands as part of the marriage contract, face difficulties in gaining access to the official documents providing for the transfer of property from their husbands upon marriage, due to the fact that Union Councils, where the records of the marriage registrar are kept, have no linkage with the Revenue Department, where the land ownership records are kept (14).