Abstract
The underlying motivation of this study is to account for the spatial variation of factors affecting women’s access to land, which has been largely ignored by the traditional regression-based model studies, much to the detriment of spatially varying relationships. Using household and individual-level data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), this study used Geographically Weighted Regression to explore and analyze the spatial relationships between women’s access to own or family land and determinants that influence women’s access to land in Africa. The results demonstrated that HIV-positive women in West Africa and Ethiopia were more likely to have access to own land than family land. Educated women in North, West and Southern Africa were less likely to have access to own land than their non-educated counterparts. Population density exhibited predominantly negative influence over women’s access to both own and family land. The relationship between rural areas and women’s access to their own land was mostly not significant across the continent. However, both rural and urban women in West Africa and Ethiopia were negatively associated with access to family land. Women within the 15–24 age group in West, Central and East Africa were more likely to have access to own land than family land, while those within the 25–34 and 35–49 age groups had a better chance of gaining access to family than own land, with the results being significant in Southern, West and North Africa. While some of the reasons for these variations have been discussed in this paper there is still need for further investigation particularly focusing on smaller regions since this study shows that women’s access to land changes as one crosses geographical boundaries even within the same country.
Highlights
At the center of most African economies is agriculture, which employs 65 percent of Africa’s labor force and accounts for 32 percent of the continent’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP)
The results indicate that both models were well specified, explaining approximately 78.8% and 75% of the variation in women’s access to own and family land, respectively
Comparing the models using their Akaike Information Criterion (AICc) values, Table 1 shows that the model for family land had a better fit when compared to the one for own land since its AICc value was lower by 21.079
Summary
At the center of most African economies is agriculture, which employs 65 percent of Africa’s labor force and accounts for 32 percent of the continent’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This domination of agriculture suggests the importance of land as a basic tool of development, livelihood and a significant determinant of income earning power and a question of fundamental human rights. Several socioeconomic and demographic factors have been identified as key determinants affecting women’s access to land in Africa These include marital status [3,4,5], age, level of education [6,7,8], place of residence (rural/urban), wealth class [9,10], number of children, and monogamous/polygamous relationships.
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