Rights when Land is Owned Jointly

The Measures for Advancing Gender Equality (MAGNET) initiative aims to broaden and deepen the measurement of women’s agency, based on the development of new tools and rigorous testing and comparison of both new and existing methods for measuring agency, and promoting the adoption of these measures at scale. By increasing the availability of innovative meaningful measures of agency for a broad range of contexts, we hope our work will lead to an improved understanding of what women’s agency is, how it manifests and how it can best be measured across contexts given the research question at hand.

Expanding women’s asset ownership is key not only for improving gender equality, but also for promoting economic development and wellbeing. But survey respondents often report owning assets jointly with others, including their spouses, children, and extended family. But it is not always clear what is meant by joint ownership and what rights or control the respondent has regarding the asset. Measuring the extent of women’s property rights also requires understanding the role played by joint ownership. This tool, Rights when Land is Owned Jointly, allows us to elicit subjective assessments regarding the rights of each member of a hypothetical married couple who own property jointly, with variations on the type of ownership (joint vs. sole), mode of acquisition, and selling rights. To fully understand individuals’ understanding of joint ownership, it is useful to have this tool alongside modules that solicit information on individual’s ownership of the asset. This data study includes following files.

1. A survey document (including implementation guidelines)