Ownership and control of assets

Tools

• Preferences over Joint vs. Individual Asset Rights 
• Asset Rights upon Marriage Dissolution
• Understanding the Meanings of Ownership
• Rights when Land is Owned Jointly
• Enumerator Characteristics and Reporting Bias
• Asset Control and Benefits Scale

Overview

Gender inequalities in the ownership, control, and use of assets are a widespread and pervasive development challenge. Persistent gender gaps remain in women’s access to land, housing, and financial assets (Doss et al. 2015; Kieran et al. 2017; Gaddis, Lahoti, and Li 2018). In many contexts, women are also less tenure secure, and often have less influence on decisions such as the sale or the economic use of the assets they own than men (Doss and Meinzen-Dick 2020; Kang, Schwab, and Yu 2020). Expanding women’s control over assets is key not only for improving gender equality, but also for promoting economic development and wellbeing (O’Sullivan 2017; Doss, Kieran, and Kilic 2019). There is strong and rising evidence showing that strengthening women’s property rights can have positive impacts including greater female bargaining and decisionmaking power (Fafchamps and Quisumbing 2002; Melesse, Dabissa, and Bulte 2018; Meinzen-Dick et al. 2019; Mookerjee 2019), reducing domestic violence (Amaral 2017; Peterman et al. 2017), increasing consumption and human capital investments (Muchomba 2017; Harari 2019; Calvi 2020; Milazzo and Van de Walle 2021), improving children’s nutrition and human capital (Allendorf 2007; van der Meulen Rodgers and Kassens 2018; Deininger et al. 2019), and reducing child marriage (Muchomba 2021). Improvements in women’s tenure security are also associated with more land investment and reduced inefficiencies (Ali, Deininger, and Goldstein 2014; Dillon and Voena 2018; Goldstein et al. 2018).

The design of effective policies to expand and strengthen women’s property rights requires using the right set of measurement tools that can accurately account for the multiple types of ownership, control, and use rights over land and other assets. Researchers and policymakers have made important progress addressing many of the challenges posed by the heterogenous conceptualization of asset ownership across contexts. But knowledge gaps persist regarding the extent of women’s ownership and rights over assets, the nature and implications of gender differences in reporting data on property rights, and the best practices for questionnaire design and data collection protocols. The ultimate goal of MAGNET is to generate rigorous empirical evidence to advise on the best tools to measure and analyze women’s control over assets.

Listed above are links to tools MAGNET has developed for measuring ownership and control of assets. For each tool, we provide the motivation behind the tool, a sample portion of the survey, and measurement properties from contexts where the tool has been tested. Additionally, the full survey, a statistical annex with more detailed validation data, and Computer-Assisted Personal Interviews (CAPI) files, can be obtained by following the IFPRI Dataverse link near the top of each tool page.