TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF RESEARCH ON WOMEN FARMERS IN AFRICA: LESSONS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH INSTITUTIONS; WITH AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

male and female labor for agricultural activities? The
preceding discussion provides insights into why these
questions are important and how they can help researchers
determine whether access to labor will be a constraint to
the adoption of maize technologies.

In addition, although many of the static studies of
gender and labor allocation give us useful insights, it is
important to understand how labor patterns are
renegotiated when economic opportunities change. The
gender divisions of labor by crop and by task do not
remain constant as new opportunities arise. The effect of
these changes on the welfare of individual household
members, especially women and children, will depend on a
number of institutional factors.

Land

Decisions about technology adoption are affected by access
to land and the security of land tenure. Individuals with
insecure tenure will generally be less likely to invest in new
technologies that require complementary immobile inputs.
An individual’s land tenure depends on formal legal
structures at the national level, mechanisms at the local or
village level, and rules for allocating land among household
members.

Land tenure arrangements vary considerably across
Africa. In some areas, women have traditionally held land
and maintained rights over it. In other areas, men retain
the rights to land, but provide women with access to it
through marriage. In discussing women’s access to land, it
is important to note the extent to which women have
formal and customary rights over the land that are
independent of their husbands. It is sometimes argued that
women’s access to land is generally not a problem where
social institutions allocate land to both men and women or
where women can borrow or claim unused land (Bryson
1981). This suggests that it does not matter how an
individual obtains access to land or how access to land
changes with varying economic conditions. However, both
women’s access to land and the security of women’s land
tenure will affect decisions regarding the adoption of
technology.

Access to Land

There are a number of means through which people in
Africa have access to land: they may own it outright, they
may have land allocated specifically to them through their
lineage or village head, or they may acquire land through
marriage. To date, the literature on land tenure and
adoption has focused on the relationships between
landlord and tenant, not between male and female
members of a lineage or household.

Formal land markets, in which titled land is bought and
sold or rented for cash, are relatively rare in Africa, though
in southwestern Uganda, for example, active rental
markets for land are reported (Grisley and Mwesignwa
1994). Formal land markets generally require that the land
be titled or registered through government agencies. Legal
structures that restrict women’s ownership of land—either
officially or unofficially—will affect their access to land.

In northwestern Zambia, Hansen reports that farmers
buy and sell the rights to use cleared land. The land itself
cannot be sold, but the rights to use cleared land can be.
One initially acquires the rights to use land by clearing it
(Hansen 1994). It is not apparent whether this pattern
would affect men and women differently, except that
women usually require male labor to clear land.

Land may be allocated through traditional means, e.g.,
the lineage or village head allocates land to individuals. In
part, these allocations will be based on the head’s
perception of different individuals’ need for land. To the
extent that women are perceived as needing or being
capable of farming less land than men, we can expect their
allocations to be smaller.

Finally, women may obtain access to land through a
male relative, however, that access may also entail
limitations on the uses of the land. Among the Beti of
southern Cameroon, women cannot inherit land. They are
granted food plots by their husbands, but they cannot
plant cash crops on them (Koopman Henn 1983). In
Hausaland in Nigeria, trees are individually owned, but
the owner of the trees is not necessarily the owner of the
land on which the trees grow (Jackson 1985). An

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