The gendered land tenure security in Tanzania: variations through Geo-demographic factors

Abstract

Context and background Gender and land tenure security rights have been subjected to diverse debates for ages. Men are seen to be more secure than women. These epistemic conclusions have even drawn various efforts to ensure equality and or equity in land rights. Nevertheless, the conclusions from empirical literature ignore the variations of gendered land rights security or insecurity occurring around Geo-demographic factors such as locations, age, sex, education levels and marital status. As a result, simplistic stances have masked policy and regulatory contributions of specific evidences of what land rights and where men or women possess and why. Goal and Objectives: The paper examines the gendered variations of land tenure security in terms of Geographical and demographic factors. It also makes an analysis of the level of land tenure security between men and women in Tanzania. Methodology: The paper makes use of data mainly collected from a case study of land formalization projects in Iringa and Babati districts. Mixed approaches of quantitative and qualitative methods of collecting and analyzing data were adopted. These included questionnaires survey, interviews with key informants (KIs), Open Government Data (OGD) and review of documents were undertaken. A total of 341 households were engaged through questionnaires, and 56 interviews with government and non-government officials. Open Government Data (OGD) and Private Data Portal mainly Prindex and Our World Data were systematically reviewed. The frame of analysis embodied different descriptive statistics such as Choropleth maps, scatter plots and frequency distribution analysis. These were produced by Our World Data grapher and the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). Data from interviews were analyzed by qualitative methods mainly content analysis. These involved transcription of field notes and pictures, categorizing themes and summarization. Results: The study found that there are intra and inter-gender variations in levels of security and insecurity of land rights in Tanzania. In other words, not all women are insecure or all men are secure of their land rights. Security and insecurity of land rights vary with Geo-demographic factors and these have great policy and regulatory significance. Hence, homogenizing and universalization of women’s and men’s land rights affect policy and legal interventions towards realizing gender equality in land rights. Consequently, Geographical and demographic factors ought to be considered for transformation of land tenure insecurity.

Keywords

• Gender, Land tenure, Security, Geo-demographic