What’s Mine is Yours: Evidence on Property Rights and Women’s Empowerment in Côte d’Ivoire

This study evaluates two interventions with the potential to strengthen women’s property rights.

Marriage upgrading: The primary intervention under study is “marriage upgrading”, which will assist couples who are customarily married to enter into a civil marriage within the default ‘community of property’ regime. A field officer will administer a short video to both spouses in randomly selected households, explaining the legal implications and potential benefits of civil marriage under this regime. The field officer will then offer the couple the option to receive a fully-subsidized marriage license under the community of property regime. This offer will include: full coverage of the administrative costs for statutory marriage; assistance with the retrieval of necessary documentation (including a specially-issued birth certificate from their natal community); assistance with the completion and submission of necessary administrative paperwork; and a small wedding celebration with refreshments. Couples who accept will be given an appointed time to appear before the sous-prefét for the marriage.

Land reallocation: This intervention will consist of an information package in the form of a short video. The video will expose selected beneficiaries to tailored messages on the potential benefits of a wife’s land ownership. This intervention will take place during the land rights “clarification” phase occurring in each village as part of PAMOFOR. A field officer will schedule an in-person household visit with each randomly selected couple and ask the couple for their consent to show them a brief video on the tablet. The officer will communicate that the video is intended for the couple only, but will record anyone else’s presence during the viewing. After the viewing, the field officer will explain that s/he has come to propose that the husband give a part of his land, ideally a minimum of 0.5 ha, to his wife during the upcoming free land certification. If they accept, after their plots have been measured during the delimitation phase of PAMOFOR, a certificate will be issued for that plot in the wife’s name alongside the certificates for the other (husband’s) plots.

2020-10-23

2024-10-02

Shorter-term: perceived tenure security, decision-making over land use, crop choice and investment in land, time-use, labor supply, relationship quality.
Longer-term: agricultural productivity and revenue, off-farm revenue, expenditures, bargaining power.

Longer-term: agricultural productivity and revenue, off-farm revenue, expenditures, time-use, bargaining power.

gender attitudes, credit access, political participation.

We will draw a random sample of households based on the sample eligibility criteria (being a customarily married, landowning Ivorian-born couple). These households will be located in three of the PAMOFOR regions (Agneby-Tiassa, La Mé and N’Zi Comoé).

Within these villages, treatment will be randomized at the household-level. Assignment to the treatment and control groups will be performed using stratified within-village randomization, following a household census in each study village to screen for eligible households. The selection of households within each village will be further stratified by marital status (monogamous or polygamous) and duration of marriage (above or below the median). The research team will add matrilineal status as a stratification variable provided the “cell size”, to be validated at baseline, is sufficiently large.

Our primary comparison will be between Marriage Upgrading and Control. This will give us the causal estimate of a woman entering into statutory marriage. We additionally plan to compare the impact of Marriage Upgrading to that of Land Reallocation (see attached pre-analysis plan for additional details).

To test for the presence of within-village behavioral spillovers (e.g., wives in the control group increasing their decision-making over household resources by modelling their treatment neighbors’ behavior), we will also identify a set of “pure” control households residing in villages outside of the gender intervention zone.

Not available

Randomization done in office by a computer

Randomization will be at the household-level (effects of PAMOFOR project overall—evaluated separately—will be at the sous-prefecture level).

No

N/A

Approximately 2,000 households

622 households offered land reallocation intervention;
615 households offered marriage upgrading intervention;
830 control households, 150 of which in villages where no gender intervention is taking place.