Lesson Learned

When targeting interventions to increase land tenure security and improve access to land administration institutions, project design and evaluation design should continue to consider that social norms may affect outcomes for women.

When targeting interventions to increase land tenure security and improve access to land administration institutions, project design and evaluation design should continue to consider that social norms may affect outcomes for women. During design and implementation, the Rural Land Governance Project identified that women face additional practical barriers to obtaining rural land possession certificates (APFRs) and sought to address them. Communications and awareness raising activities also were tailored to women’s needs from the start. Despite these interventions, the evaluation found that while over 80% of respondent men indicated they would personally be willing to put wives’ names on an APFR, large numbers indicated that this was “not possible”, and of those, over three-quarters gave the reason as because it was against local custom and practices in the community due to customary law. Wives data shows that over 99 percent of both treatment and control wives report that they do not have rights on any of the fields that they personally own or manage. This is in parallel to more positive findings, including that women in treatment communes had increased decision-making power within the household, that women in treatment areas are more likely to be aware of APFRs and land institutions than in control communes, and that 97% of APFRs issued to women was in treatment communes. In the time since this first Compact in Burkina Faso was designed and implemented, MCC has enacted a series of policies and tools to further deepen the agency’s abilities to analyze the gender dimensions that may influence the design of projects, project logics, and evaluations. These include MCC’s updated Gender Policy, new Gender Investment Criteria, the recently launched Inclusion and Gender Strategy, and a Land and Gender Toolkit providing an analytical framework for use in compact and threshold development. These policies, strategies, requirements, and tools are applied to all land sector analysis and program design, further operationalizing MCC’s commitment to gender equality and inclusive economic growth. MCC’s Monitoring and Evaluation Policy has also been recently revised to strengthen the linkages among project logic, project objectives, and evaluation design.