Impact
Land is a key asset for poverty reduction. However, systemic discrimination has tended to reproduce prevailing inequalities in land access, ownership and control between men and women, and continues to do so. The governance of tenure is therefore a crucial element in determining if and how people and communities acquire rights to use and control land and natural resources.
Key results
Indicator 1.4.2 measures disparities in tenure security among the adult population, disaggregated by sex and type of tenure, assessed based on “legally recognized documentation” and “perception of tenure security”. Together, these two subindicators determine the prevalence of secure tenure rights to land in a population.
Sex-disaggregated data regarding tenure rights to land are available for 33 countries, but only for the subindicator that measures legally documented tenure rights to land; data regarding the share of people who perceive their rights to be secure (available for 22 countries) are not yet available on a sex-disaggregated basis.
The available data suggest that the proportion of women with legally recognized documentation of their land tenure rights is significantly below the average for the adult population in most surveyed countries, with the exception of Malawi, Rwanda, Togo, Uganda and the United Republic of Tanzania. This finding corroborates the figures for SDG Indicators 5.a.1 (which deals more specifically with agricultural land, and provides a measure of the share of women among agricultural land owners) and 5.a.2 (which captures the strength of legal frameworks guaranteeing women’s and girls’ equal rights to land ownership and/or control).