Although 70 per cent of Africa's farmers are women, patriarchal customary law often holds sway, excluding them from owning or controlling land. Even in matrilineal societies, where property and land inheritance follows the female line, such as those in Malawi, in reality the maternal uncle — or mwini mumba — will control the land.
Such discrimination in land access and decision-making is a key barrier to empowering poor women, lowering their status in the community and preventing them from borrowing money against collateral to improve their farming methods or to start small businesses.
Digitising land ownership is something of a double-edged sword. If land registry digitising projects were to blithely record the name of the head of the family as the proprietor of the land, this could further erode women's limited control over land. But, done with sensitivity to the complex dynamics around land ownership, they could offer the chance to record women's rightful access to land officially, while also providing quick and easy access to title deeds.
The challenge is how to do this when land is so often considered the property of the male household head. One way could be to record the name of the person who farms the land, rather than the person who traditionally controls it.
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