Impacts of Rural Land Reform on Households in Burkina Faso
Heather Huntington, Kate Marple-Cantrell, Paavani Arora
This study presents the endline findings of the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) Burkina Faso Rural Land Governance (RLG, 2009—2014) project evaluation. The RLG project focused on improving citizens’ access to land administration services and land documentation and was implemented between 2009 and 2014 in 47 of Burkina Faso’s 302 rural communes in two phases. Three rounds of data collection took place in this evaluation – in 2010, 2012, and 2021. The study includes a causal impact analysis for indicators that can be addressed rigorously, including: investment behavior on land (e.g., constructing buildings, planting permanent crops, improving irrigation infrastructures or electricity, investing in various agricultural inputs), use of collateralized credit for land improvements, fear of loss of land (e.g., because of government expropriation, lack of documents, or other villagers), total number of conflicts on land, general perception of land security (e.g., whether the individual fears the arrival of new populations to exploit the land for agricultural purposes), perception of inequality in access to land for women. The study also explores project effectiveness in reforming land laws and regulations, enacting sustainable operational changes in land governance, and the development, performance, and sustainability of new land administration institutions established by the project through a performance evaluation approach. The impact evaluation found no effects on perceptions of land tenure security, land conflict frequency and occurrence, producers’ investment decisions, and incomes and livelihoods. In terms of impact results for subgroups, the evaluation found mixed and inconsistent results across outcome families; there is some evidence of a significant positive impact of the project on perceived tenure security for youth and large (top quintile) landholders, along with weakly significant negative effect on perceived tenure security for female and urban respondents. As such, the evaluation does not find improvements in land tenure or other outcomes for women due to the project activities.
Event: World Bank Land Conference 2024 - Washington
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