Tefera, T. (2013) ‘Land Ownership- the path towards rural women empowerment: A case from Southern Ethiopia’, International Journal of Sociology and Anthropology, 5(9), pp. 330–338
The central theme of the study was assessing women’s role in the development process and factors determining it. According to the author, women have found to contribute little in the development of the country and their gain from the same is also very limited. Accordingly, women empowerment is one of the various mechanisms that will enhance women’s status and thereby facilitate many development programmes that will bring about positive change in the community. Women in Ethiopia are also subjected to gender based discrimination that limits their access to resources, particularly land. With the primary goal of improving women’s economic and social status, the Ethiopian government reformed various policies and programs. Among these the 2005 land proclamation that stipulated land certification shall be issued jointly for the husband and wife is the prominent one. The proclamation further required that women shall be entitled to land inheritance equally with men. Despite the legal reform, customary practice negatively affected realisation of women’s access to the land.
The study was undertaken in the Oromia and the SNNP region of Ethiopia. For the purpose of study area selection, the author used A three-stage stratified random sampling technique. Following this, 394 study participants were randomly selected and participated in the study.
According to the findings of this study, regardless of the positive change brought by the policy and program reform, males/husbands still dominate most investment and production decisions. Examination of women’s autonomy over economic resources reveals that women’s participation in resource use showed an improvement with the reform; however, their authority on income control has declined by around 6%. In addition, while 57% of women were found to have a decision-making role on self-earned money without the land reform, the percentage of women who reported the same declined to 54 %with the land reform. Regarding women’s decision-making role, the study indicated husband is the decision-maker of the house whereas, women/wife has hardly engaged in any sort of decision-making in land matters, they have no autonomy over resource use and self-earned income and no authority in the control of resources while the value of one implies a complete empowerment on the same indicators. However, such is not true in Female-headed households, whereby the disaggregation of the women empowerment index by headship status shows women-headed households were more empowered than the wife of the man in male-headed households. With the policy reform, practical change is brought on women’s access and control over the land, and the patriarchal structure is challenged to the benefit of the women. However, such is only one dimension of empowerment and to ensure all rounded women empowerment it needs a long way to go. Hence ensuring women’s empowerment in all aspects of their life needs multidimensional interventions such as legal reform, economic incentive, community sensitization and enhancing gender equality in political engagement.
Finally, the author argued that improvements made as a result of policy reform should be accompanied by measures which improve economic benefit sharing and resource control of women.