- Land ownership can take the following forms, as provided by Article 13 of the Constitution: i. State ownership ii. Co-operative ownership and iii. Private ownership (16).

- In 1996, out of 17 828 201 total holdings, 66 percent were owned or in owner-like possess; 10 percent were rented from others; and 24 percent were under more than one form of tenancy (24).

- Sharecropping – barga – is the only admissible form of tenancy contract under the 1984 Land Reform Ordinance. Barga is the tenancy agreement by which a farmer cultivates the land of another farmer on a crop-sharing basis. The owner in most cases does not invest anything but gets a 50-percent share of the produce. The share-cropper invests his labour, seed, water and fertilizer to get the other 50 percent of the crop. In case of crop failure, the bargador or tenant loses everything (20).

- Khas land is unoccupied land that is legally owned by the Government and managed by the Ministry of Land State land. It is land which is legally reserved for distribution to landless households.

Khas lands are: i. lands already possessed by the Government; ii. lands accredited from the sea or rivers; iii. lands vested in the Government as ceiling surplus; iv. lands purchased by the Government in auction sales; v. lands from miscellaneous sources such as surrendered, abandoned or confiscated land.

In assigning Khas land, the Ministry shall give priority to the following people: flooded tenants’ families; widowed or divorced women; families without a homestead or agricultural land; landless families with homestead land only; families with homestead land and less than 0.5 acres agricultural land (14).

- In 2005, rural holdings totalled 24 562 900, of which 59.18 percent were farm holdings. The average owned area per holding was 0.90 acres. Ten percent of the rural population was landless (25).

- The Land Reform Board is formally responsible for the implementation of land reform legislation. The Board also provides advice and recommendations to the Government on laws, orders and rules applicable to land (19).

- The Land Appeals Board is the highest revenue court in matters of land, serving as the final arbiter in matters of khas land, changes in records, plot demarcation and taxation which cannot be resolved at lower levels (19).

- Within the Ministry of Lands, land management functions are carried out at field level through the Commissioner at the division level, the Deputy Commissioner at the district level, the Assistant Commissioner at the Thana precinct level, and the Tahsildar at the Union level.

The Ministry consists of three departments with the following responsibilities:
 i. The Directorate of Land Records and Surveys that conducts cadastral surveys to update data on land ownership and use.
ii. The Land Reform Board that administers khas land.
iii. The Land Appeal Board, the highest revenue court in the country (19).

- The Land Reform Board administers khas land and manages abandoned and vested property, in addition to being responsible for the implementation of land reform. It also updates maps and land records between surveys, sets and collects Land Development Tax (19).

The Board carries out its functions through Upazila, sub-district land offices and Union Tahsil offices, which are the revenue office at the lowest level (19).

- About 2 million of all the clients of the lending programme of Grameen Bank are women. Many other non-governmental organizations (NGOs) provide credit to women without collateral by means of micro credit schemes. As of 1999, 75 3001 women had accessed micro credit programmes run by major non-government agencies (17).

- Brac, a Dhaka-based NGO, has lending schemes for women aimed at: i. providing credit to enable women to lease land from private owners; ii. providing credit for production purposes with a special grace period so that women can start repaying the loans after harvest; iii. provide credit for leasing khas land from the government; and iv. purchasing low quality land and leasing it to women, so that they can cultivate the land and repay the loan from the output.
More than 98 percent of the organization’s 7.37 million borrowers and savers are women (26).

- Civil society organizations stimulated public dialogue on land reform before the 2001 elections, highlighting ownership of land as a key factor in achieving women’s empowerment. However, in practice, no reforms have taken place to address the issue of women’s access to land (15).

- Rural women are not aware of their rights and of the legal provisions that could support them in achieving them. High rates of illiteracy exacerbate the information gap (17).

- Women cannot access credit from the private banking sectors because in most cases they do not own assets which can be used as collateral. Moreover, women are not familiar with bureaucratic procedures and requirements (17).

- The number of female-headed households is increasing as a consequence of male migration. The increasing landlessness forces men to leave rural areas and often the country in search for wage labour, leaving women working on the land without being able to dispose of it (17).