Over the past decade, the Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI) has consistently shown that governments need to look at discriminatory laws, social norms and practices to achieve gender equality and promote women’s empowerment. This 2019 global report provides an overview of the main outcomes of the SIGI in relation to women and the family, their physical integrity, access to productive and financial resources and their civic rights. Building on these outcomes, this report provides a set of policy recommendations to enhance governments’ efforts to deliver their gender-equality commitments through a three-pronged approach: starting with legal reforms and transformative gender policies, enforcing laws through community mobilisation and empowerment, and learning about the efficiency of policy through monitoring.

This chapter presents an overview of women’s restricted access to productive and financial resources. It examines discriminatory social institutions – formal and informal laws, social norms and practices – that restrict women’s access to and control over critical productive and economic resources and assets across 180 countries, covering areas such as secure access to land, secure access to non-land assets, secure access to formal financial services and workplace rights. The chapter also seeks to provide policy makers with the necessary tools and evidence to design effective gender-responsive policies in order to improve women’s economic empowerment.

Secure access to land assets
Key messages

Despite important advances in legislation to strengthen women’s land rights, significant gaps between countries and regions remain. To date, 164 countries explicitly recognise women’s rights to own, use, make decisions and use land as collateral on equal terms with men. However, only 52 countries guarantee these rights both in law and practice because of discriminatory customary laws. Whereas there are very low levels of discrimination in Europe (26 countries), Africa stands out as the poorest-performing region on this indicator, despite the fact that access to agricultural land is even more important for women’s empowerment opportunities in most African countries.

A major element of the remaining challenge is weak law enforcement and implementation, often contributed to by women’s limited legal awareness. Even with theoretical equal rights, women rarely exercise them. They tend to have limited knowledge of their statutory rights and customary laws often define land tenure as a male privilege. Under customary and traditional inheritance systems, for example, women are often required to give up their rights in favour of male relatives when they become divorced, widowed or orphaned.

Deeply entrenched norms and customary land-tenure laws confine women to subordinate and dependent status. While women contribute significantly to agricultural production, their status gives them very low decision-making power, restricting their opportunities for economic empowerment. Women represent 43% of the agricultural labour force, but 65% of unpaid family workers in developing countries but only 15% of agricultural landholders (FAO, 2011[1]).

Reducing extreme poverty, hunger and creating resilient societies requires securing women’s access to and ownership of land. Among the SDGs 132 Goals and 59 targets are unlikely to be met without progress towards securing and protecting women’s land rights. Providing women’s equal access to productive resources could increase the production of female-operated farms by 20% to 30% in developing countries (FAO, 2011[1]). Moreover, women’s land ownership is linked to income growth, greater bargaining power within their households, better child nutrition and higher educational attainment for girls (Markham, 2015[2]).

The best score in this indicator is shared by 53 countries. In these countries, women enjoy the same rights and secure access to land assets as men in law and in practice. However, despite the fact that the proportion of female agricultural landholders (19%) exceeds the global average (15%), it is far from equality (50%).