Mind the Gap: Why Land Rights are Critical for Gender Equity in Agriculture

Growing up in rural Kenya, Florah Kirira saw her parents struggle to eke out a living through farming. When it came time for her to choose a degree program at university, she watched as many of her peers turned away from farming. But Florah went against the grain and chose to study agriculture. 

Today, Florah is a farmer herself. She now manages a quarter of an acre on her father’s plot in her home village and is helping farmers — in villages much like the one she grew up in — to not only survive, but thrive. 

“I looked at it as an opportunity for me to help these farmers, my parents and farmers around the country to make their lives better by helping them increase their productivity,” she says. 

Despite her success, there’s one big problem: legally, the land she manages doesn’t belong to her. Like millions of women in sub-Saharan Africa and around the world, her right to use and access the land depends on a male relative. An estimated 400 million women around the world make a living through farming, yet less than 15 percent own land. That includes much of the 60 percent of employed women in sub-Saharan Africa who work in agriculture, leaving them without a key building block for success. 

Without rights to land in their own names, women like Florah risk losing access to land if that relationship changes – through death, divorce, migration, or simply a change in plans. The gap in land ownership is a key reason African women are unable to fully participate in agriculture – and barriers are widespread. A 2019 report by McKinsey notes that in one-fifth of African countries, married women don’t have the same rights to land as their husbands, and in one-third of countries, daughters do not enjoy the same inheritance rights as sons. 

Fortunately, there are programs working to close the gap in land and agriculture. Collaborating with Farm Input Promotions Africa (FIPS), Florah trains Village Based Advisors (VBA) to conduct agricultural trainings and apply demonstration-based farm lessons in rural villages in Africa. In Kenya and Tanzania, the VBA program is supported by Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) and FIPs is collaborating with Bayer in helping expand the program’s reach to smallholders across East Africa. 

The program combines both village-level trainings and demonstration plots for showcasing enhanced seed varieties and inputs, teaching a community of farmers the best practices for incorporating the technologies into their own plots. Both women and men are trained as advisors to ensure adequate gender representation. 

Including women farmers in training activities is critical. Access to inputs, extension services and credit are often out of reach for those without rights to land, further widening the gender gap in agriculture, says Everlyn Musyoka , Smallholder Strategy Lead Africa for Bayer Crop Science. 

“(Women) cannot access the same benefits that their male counterparts do because of the lack of land rights.” 

For many women, limited access to financing and agricultural inputs hampers their productivity, leaving women with finite means to provide for their families. But the burden of expectation remains. 

“Women, from a cultural perspective, are the backbone of the African households,” Everlyn says. “They have the responsibility to feed the family – it doesn’t matter if they have a source of income or not. The general expectation is that the women will have to put food on the table to feed their families.” 

Women are often left to make agonizing choices about how to apply their limited means. That choice often comes down to investing in their land, or in their families. 

“Do I invest in new technology, or do I continue with my old ways, but at least I’m able to pay school fees for my children?” says Everlyn, describing the type of dilemma a typical farmer might face. 

It’s a choice no woman should have to make. The lever for change is to make agricultural value chains do more for women – to ensure that they not only participate in the value chain, but that they’re rewarded. 

The private sector is increasingly aware of the need to expand opportunities in value and supply chains for women farmers. sara mbago-bhunu , Regional Director East and Southern Africa for IFAD, notes that several public-private partnerships have applied training initiatives to change socio-cultural norms around women’s participation in agriculture, helping to encourage communities to recognize the value in women’s economic and social contributions. 

One such partnership, between Illovo Sugar Africa and USAID, focused on improving land tenure security for communities in the company’s Maragra Sugar Estate in Mozambique. The Responsible Investment Project formalized land rights for landowners within Illovo’s 6,500-hectare estate through a mapping, titling and registration process. Of the 1,642 beneficiaries receiving land titles, 1,088 were women. 

Another collaboration that is moving the needle on women’s rights in agriculture forward is between Soafiary and IFAD. The innovative women-led agribusiness recently received a $3.6 million loan from IFAD which will increase the business’s capabilities to source directly from smallholder farmers and support inclusive trainings on climate-smart agriculture techniques.  

According to Sara, such efforts create space for women to participate in decision-making on land management and paves the way for their equal ownership of economic resources. 

For agribusiness and related companies, initiatives aimed at securing and respecting land rights can both mitigate risk for their investments and create economic opportunities for women while helping to fulfill corporate social responsibility commitments. 

Efforts to create opportunities for women entrepreneurs like AGRA’s VALUE4HER are critical as they champion the premise that women’s contributions to the agriculture sector are foundational. For Everlyn, that understanding is essential to advancing development for Africa, in farming and across society at large. 

“We know that women play a very critical role in agricultural value chains. … If you remove women from the equation, I don’t know how the next generation would survive,” Everlyn says. “We realize that there's no community, there's no society today in Africa that can actually grow by excluding the women.”