This indicator focuses on the legal aspects of land tenure and measures the actual adoption of legal reforms that ensure women’s rights to land and helps to identify the causes of gender disparities in control over land.

The indicator measures the level to which a country’s legal framework supports women’s land rights, by testing that framework against six proxies drawn from international law and internationally accepted good practices , in particular the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) ratified by 189 countries, and the Voluntary Guidelines for the Responsible Governance of the Tenure of Land Fisheries and Forestry (VGGT) endorsed unanimously by Committee of Food Security (CFS) members in 2012.

Land Department

Land Department

Biennial

Percentage (%)

The focus on land of Indicator 5.a.2 reflects the recognition that land is a key economic resource inextricably linked to access to, use of and control over other economic and productive resources. It is a key input for agricultural production; it can be used as collateral to access financial resources, extension services or to join producer organisations; and, it can generate income directly, if rented or sold. It also acknowledges that women’s ownership of and/or control of land is critical for poverty reduction, food security, inclusiveness and overall sustainable development objectives.  Finally, gender equality in land ownership and control is a human right. For example, Article 3 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) guarantees equality between women and men, and prohibits discrimination based on sex in Article 2. Article 26 of the treaty enshrines equality before the law and can be applied to defend women’s right to non-discrimination and equality, not only with respect to civil and political rights, but also with economic and social rights. Further, the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), emphasizes that discrimination against women “violates the principles of equality of rights and respect for human dignity".

The six proxies through which indicator 5.a.2 is monitored are the following:

Proxy A:  Joint registration of land compulsory or encouraged through economic incentives

Proxy B:  Compulsory spousal consent for land transactions

Proxy C: Women’s and girls’ equal inheritance rights

Proxy D: Allocation of financial resources to increase women’s ownership and control over land

Proxy E: In legal systems that recognise customary land tenure, existence of explicit protection of the land rights of women

Proxy F: Mandatory quotas for women’s participation in land management and administration institutions

N/A

The qualitative and legal nature of this indicator required the development of nuanced and articulated methodology that could be feasible, universally relevant and meaningful. 

The computation of results under Indicator 5.a.2 involves three different steps:  assignments of a “stage of incorporation” for each proxy, classification of country according the number of proxies located in primary or primary and secondary legislation and consolidation of all country results for global reporting.

This indicator is used by the Land Department to look at the extent to which the legal framework (including customary law) guarantees women’s equal rights to land ownership and/or control; enables policy-makers to assess whether legal and policy reforms are needed to guarantee women’s equal rights to land ownership and/or control.

Indicator 5.A.2 entails an important challenge in terms of the assessment and computation of the results due to the reference to customary law in the title of the indicator. Customary law is not a homogenous system of law. Therefore, unless it is recognised by the general legal system, it will be extremely difficult to monitor whether or not customary law guarantees men and women equal rights to land ownership and(/or) control. In order to guarantee feasibility of the assessment, the choice of the methodology has been to monitor customary law to the extent that it has been recognised in the legal framework of a country. This however is a major limitation for the purposes of the SDGs of “leaving no one behind’ as it excludes from the assessment many legal systems where customary practices which have not been endorsed in statutory law which are one of the major factors of discrimination against women. Further, given that customary law does not exist in all countries, it is not universally applicable, and computation of the results represents a major challenge.

The data collected for the SDG indicators is collected at the national level to ensure that it is representative of the country situation. This means that the 5.a.2 assessment to determine the existence of the proxies should focus on legal and policy instruments that have nationwide authority. In countries where law-making power for land or gender matters are not within the authority of the national government (or are shared between the national government and a sub-national government level), there may be a number of different state/provincial or county laws and policy that can be analysed. Further there may be inconsistencies between these different sub-national laws in terms of the presence of a proxy and the degree of its integration in the legal and policy framework. 

All the metadata shown in this document was gathered from United Nation Statistics Division. The metadata was extracted from https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/metadata/.