The Geopolitics of Gender and Land Governance in West Africa: Between Legislative Reform and Ground Realities

Land justice cannot be reduced to a matter of administrative registration or the allocation of land titles. It refers to the effective ability of individuals and groups to access land, use it sustainably, and dispose of it without fear of arbitrary dispossession. When examined through a gender lens in West Africa, it reveals a deeply asymmetrical space of power, where formal rules and actual practices operate according to divergent logics.

The vast majority of ECOWAS member states have incorporated into their legal systems the principle of equal access to land regardless of sex. However, in rural areas and urban peripheries, it is customary systems administered by councils, family heads, and, above all, corrupt family networks that continue to regulate in practice the allocation, transmission, and settlement of land disputes. It is within the gap between these two normative orders that women’s exclusion from land ownership takes root and is perpetuated.

Within this framework, women’s land rights are most often conditional rights of use, granted by tolerance within the husband’s or father’s lineage and revocable at any time in the event of marital breakdown, the death of a spouse, or displacement. It is not so much the absence of law that produces this vulnerability, but rather the inability of institutions to enforce the law over local customary power relations.

WHAT DO THE FIGURES REVEAL?

The available comparative data make it possible to measure the extent of the gap between formal rights and actual ownership. In Senegal, where the National Domain Law has guaranteed equal access since 1964, women account for only 1.1% of registered land titles, compared with 13% for men. In Mali, this figure reaches only 3.7%; in Benin, 7.5%; in Niger, 9.4%; and in Côte d’Ivoire, 11.2%. These disparities do not vary significantly according to the age of egalitarian legislation or the degree of its technical sophistication. They do, however, reflect the depth of the institutional asymmetries that structure local land governance within each of these contexts and realities on the ground.

THREE DOCUMENTED CONFIGURATIONS

Beyond statistics, field investigations make it possible to identify recurring configurations through which women’s land exclusion is concretely produced and reproduced.

The first configuration is that of widows’ dispossession through inheritance practices. For example, in Burkina Faso and Mali, documented cases cited in FAO reports on patrilineal practices show that upon the husband’s death, the management of land plots is systematically taken over by the in-laws or transferred to the sons, regardless of the provisions of the family codes in force. A widow who refuses levirate marriage that is, union with the deceased husband’s brother as a condition for remaining on the land finds herself expelled without any effective remedy. Formal law exists; the institution capable of enforcing it is absent. This situation is widespread across Africa and is by no means limited to Burkina Faso or Mali.

The second configuration is that of land recovery after value enhancement. In Côte d’Ivoire and Benin, the RFLD report (2023) documents a practice consisting of allocating degraded or marginal plots to women’s groups. When these women succeed, after prolonged effort, in restoring soil fertility and turning the land into productive farmland, customary landholders exert pressure to reclaim these improved plots. Village land management committees, called upon to settle such disputes, frequently rule in favour of men in the name of social cohesion, thereby effectively neutralising the protection that formal law is supposed to provide.

The third configuration is that of inheritance exclusion through the instrumentalisation of residence norms. In Senegal, the PROCASEF study (2024) confirms that rural councils systematically circumvent the provisions of Article 520 of the Family Code, which guarantees equal inheritance rights, by allocating land to sons on the grounds that daughters, destined for exogamous marriage, will transfer the family patrimony to another lineage. Although this argument has no legal basis, it remains socially effective, and women who challenge it expose themselves to a level of stigma that makes legal action practically prohibitive.

It should be recalled that refusing to comply or relinquish claims may lead, beyond a legal battle, to mystical or spiritual confrontations in which only the strongest prevails. Such, one might say, are African realities.

THE IVORIAN CASE: ANATOMY OF AN INCOMPLETE REFORM?

Côte d’Ivoire constitutes a particularly instructive case study on the limits of legislative reforms when isolated from their political context. Law No. 98-750 of 23 December 1998 on rural land tenure, amended several times up to 2019, establishes equality of access to land ownership. Yet it was conceived and enacted in a context marked by the rise of the ideology of Ivoirité, which transformed land into an instrument for excluding non-indigenous populations in the forest zone, thereby durably complicating the conditions for its implementation. Since then, the implementation of this law has been repeatedly delayed, contested, and amended, without the underlying land tensions being defused.

Implementation data confirm this reality: during the initial certification campaigns, only about ten certificates were issued to women out of 4,000 certificates delivered. The PAMOFOR programme, financed by the World Bank, has since increased this number to more than 33,000 certificates, 22% of which were allocated to women a real improvement, yet one that still leaves the majority of Ivorian women farmers without formal land titles. The PRESFOR programme, projected to reach 6.2 million beneficiaries by 2029 and including an explicit gender commitment, nevertheless continues to rely on a model of change driven by external funding cycles, which remains structurally fragile. Rising tensions linked to violent extremism in the northern part of the country add a further destabilising variable to an already precarious process.

SUB-REGIONAL LEGISLATIVE REFORMS: REAL PROGRESS, LIMITED IMPACT

Several states have undertaken reforms that should be acknowledged without overstating their effects. Benin and Burkina Faso have adopted land laws and inheritance codes establishing strict equality between men and women; Benin has also reduced land acquisition costs to facilitate women’s access to land. Niger introduced specific protections for female heads of household, widows, and divorced women in its Rural Code. Senegal supplemented its legislative framework with a ministerial circular issued in June 2018 imposing quotas for land allocation to women. The WiLDAF/FeDDAF-West Africa network supports these developments through legal awareness programmes and assistance for women claiming their rights in rural areas.

Nevertheless, these reforms face three converging obstacles that limit their effective impact: the predominance of male customary councils in the practical settlement of land disputes; the geographical and financial inaccessibility of state judicial institutions for rural women; and the pressure of social control, which makes recourse to formal justice a highly costly act for any woman who dares to pursue it.

SECURITY DIMENSIONS: WHEN CONFLICT DEEPENS EXCLUSION

The analysis of land governance in West Africa cannot be separated from the regional security context. In areas affected by armed conflict and forced displacement the Sahelian belt and its surrounding zones, directly affecting Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, and increasingly the border areas of Togo and Benin women’s land insecurity intensifies qualitatively. Displaced women simultaneously lose their land-use rights, their community-based social protection networks, and their bargaining power within the customary structures of host communities. This triple rupture finds no adequate response either in humanitarian law, which does not specifically address the land rights of internally displaced persons, or in national land policies, which structurally exclude non-resident populations.

Conflicts between farmers and herders, whose intensity is increasing as a result of climate change, constitute a second aggravating factor. They disproportionately affect women, whose room for manoeuvre to defend their rights within local conflict-resolution mechanisms is the most limited.

EMERGING STRATEGIES: TOWARDS A COMBINATION OF FORMAL AND CUSTOMARY SYSTEMS

Faced with the limitations of isolated legislative reforms, field practitioners have developed approaches whose common logic is to combine the tools of formal law with the dynamics of customary legitimacy rather than oppose them.

Simplified community-based formalisation relies on transfer or long-term lease agreements signed before the village chief acting as guarantor. These documents do not constitute land titles in the sense of state law, but their strength lies in the social recognition they mobilise: in the event of a dispute, the community cannot deny an agreement witnessed by its own chief.

The training of rural paralegals drawn from the communities themselves often women leaders trained in basic land law and mediation techniques makes it possible to intervene in conflicts at an early stage, in local languages, without exposing women to the stigma associated with formal judicial procedures. The International Commission of Jurists has documented the effectiveness of these mechanisms for several decades across the sub-region.

The collective purchase of land by legally registered cooperatives replaces the fragility of the individual rights of an isolated woman with the contractual strength of an organised group, against which informal attempts at land recovery are significantly more difficult to exercise.

Beyond this analysis, it should be remembered that each country has its own socio-cultural realities that shape both the challenges and opportunities for improving women’s situations. Nevertheless, this does not prevent the formulation of recommendations that can be adapted to different contexts and realities.

National land policies should be equipped with quantified gender objectives, accompanied by independent monitoring mechanisms and measurable public accountability frameworks. Above all, awareness-raising and education efforts targeting both men and women on these issues should be strengthened.

Empowering and equipping women to break the glass ceiling, change mindsets, integrate local land governance bodies, and exercise their right to speak should help guarantee women’s effective participation in decision-making beyond mere formal representation and contribute to meaningful improvements.

It is also important that regional normative frameworks incorporate explicit provisions protecting the land rights of women displaced by conflict, thereby filling the gap left by humanitarian law in this area.

Customary chiefs should be involved as actors of institutional change through incentive mechanisms, awareness-raising initiatives, and the signing of village charters. Experiences in Benin and Burkina Faso show that such an approach produces more sustainable results than directly bypassing traditional authorities.

NORMATIVE AND EMPIRICAL REFERENCES

FAO Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests (VGGT, 2012).

African Union, United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, and African Development Bank, Framework and Guidelines on Land Policy in Africa (2010).

Resolution 262 of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights.

Ivorian Law No. 98-750 of 23 December 1998 on Rural Land Tenure and its amendments (2004, 2013, 2019).

Burkina Faso Law No. 034-2009 of 16 June 2009 on Rural Land Tenure.

Law No. 64-46 of 17 June 1964 on the National Domain (Senegal) and Ministerial Circular of 5 June 2018.

Senegal Family Code, Article 520.

PROCASEF Study, Land Rights and Gender Inequalities in Senegal (2024).

RFLD Report on the Ivorian Land Legislative Framework (2023).

PAMOFOR and PRESFOR Programmes, World Bank, Côte d’Ivoire.

FAO Initiative, Niayes Region, Senegal.

WiLDAF/FeDDAF-West Africa, Legal Awareness and Land Rights Advocacy Campaigns.