Land tenure regimes for women in Community Resource Management Areas (CREMAs) in Northern Ghana: Opportunities and threats

Frank Akowuge Dugasseh, Clement Aapengnuo and Marianne Zandersen

Land Use Policy, 2021, vol. 109, issue C

Abstract: This paper analyses women’s access and security to land under customary land governance in Community Resource Management Areas (CREMAs) in Northern Ghana through document analyses and surveys of 312 land right holders and tenants from 13 communities. The key interest is to investigate the potential for combining customary land practices with land title registration and education in improving women’s economic empowerment and social development in the Dorimon and Zukpiri CREMAs. The paper focuses on the motivation of land right holders to grant land rights to women through land use agreements and reasons for terminating such agreements, and provides critical perspectives and data to support the development of tenure security indicators for community protected agro-ecological areas. The study also assesses the position of women in anticipation of forest carbon credits as against their current land holding rights and concludes that despite inherent weaknesses of customary land governance in protected areas, opportunities exist to scale up and expand the formalisation of land use rights through CREMAs, education and the use of Voluntary Savings and Loans Association to enable women gain access to sufficient land. This could significantly help improve women smallholder farmers’ tenure security to land, provide livelihood options, enhance food security and ensure their participation and profit from entering into result based ecosystem payment scheme such as REDD+.

Keywords: Land rights; Tenure security; Women, Community Resource Management Area (CREMAs); Evolutionary Theory of Land Rights; REDD+; Village Savings and Loans Associations (VSLA) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264837721003252
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:lauspo:v:109:y:2021:i:c:s0264837721003252

DOI: 10.1016/j.landusepol.2021.105602

Access Statistics for this article

Land Use Policy is currently edited by Jaap Zevenbergen

More articles in Land Use Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joice Jiang ().