Soil Health and Gender

Soil health and gender: Why and how to identify the linkages

Women’s land rights as a pathway to poverty reduction: Framework and review of available evidence

This paper reviews the literature on women’s land rights (WLR) and poverty reduction. It uses the Gender, Agriculture and Assets Project (GAAP) conceptual framework to identify pathways by which WLR could reduce poverty and increase wellbeing of women and their households in rural areas. It uses a systematic review search methodology to identify papers for inclusion, but adopts a more synthetic approach to assess the level of agreement and the amount of evidence within this literature. The paper examines the evidence from qualitative as well as quantitative studies on each of these pathways. Owing to the scarcity of experimental studies, the review of empirical work is based mostly on observational studies. We find some evidence on these relationships, but many of the key pathways have not been empirically analyzed. The evidence is strong for relationships between WLR and bargaining power and decision-making on consumption, human capital investment, and intergenerational transfers. There is a high level of agreement, but weaker evidence on the relationship between WLR and natural resource management, government services and institutions, empowerment and domestic violence, resilience and HIV risk, and consumption and food security. There is less agreement and insufficient evidence on the associations between WLR and other livelihoods, and a higher level of agreement, but still limited evidence on associations between WLR and credit, technology adoption, and agricultural productivity. Notably, we find no papers that directly investigate the link between WLR and poverty. Many gaps in the evidence arise from a failure to account for the complexity of land rights regimes, the measurement of land rights at the household level, the lack of attention paid to gender roles, and the lack of studies from countries outside Africa. Many studies are limited by small sample sizes, the lack of credible counterfactuals, lack of attention to endogeneity and selection bias, and possible response bias on questions of domestic violence and empowerment. There are very few rigorous evaluations of reforms that strengthened WLR. The paper concludes that gaps in the evidence should not deter the careful design and implementation of programs and policies to strengthen WLR, given the ongoing land tenure reforms in many countries. Different modalities and mechanisms for strengthening WLR could be tested, with appropriate counterfactuals. Program designers and evaluators can strategically identify pathways and outcomes where evidence gaps exist, and deliberately design studies to close those gaps.

Gender in agriculture: Closing the knowledge gap

This book includes a synopsis: Quisumbing, Agnes R.; Meinzen-Dick, Ruth Suseela; Raney, Terri L.; Croppenstedt, André; Behrman, Julia A. and Peterman, Amber. 2014. Synopsis of Gender in agriculture: Closing the knowledge gap. IFPRI Issue Brief 84. Washington, D.C.: International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). Women play important and varied roles in agriculture, but they have unequal access, relative to men, to productive resources and opportunities. Closing these gender gaps would be good both for women and for agriculture. This was the message given by The State of Food and Agriculture 2010-11, a report of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). As it prepared the report, the FAO drew together a wealth of background information based on a growing body of research and statistics on women in agriculture, and it commissioned the International Food Policy Research Institute to edit a book based on these background studies. The resulting book, Gender in Agriculture: Closing the Knowledge Gap, is a compendium of what we now know about gender gaps in agriculture and why such gaps matter.