Advancing women's land rights is a priority for the international development agenda. Little consensus exists, however, on which rights should be monitored and reported, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa where individual property rights and customary tenure regimes coexist and where much agricultural land remains unregistered. In such contexts, data collected on land ownership may provide only a limited complete picture of women's and men's land rights. While some surveys collect information on women's land ownership, others collect information on women's management of land or control over the output produced. This study examines the extent to which these various dimensions of land rights overlap in six countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.poverty reduction through increased productivity and increased participation in income generating activities.

We use OLS and decomposition techniques to investigate gender differences in agricultural productivity in Uganda. Using nationally representative surveys from years 2009-2012, the analysis applies different gender dummiesfemale head of household, female plot holder and female plot manager-to investigate how the variable of choice affects the calculation of the gender gap. Our analysis obtains different results depending on the gender variable of choice. The study finds that regardless of the variable of choice, the gender gap in agricultural productivity decreases or disappears when factors of production and crop choice are controlled for. The conditional gender gap is about 10 percent and significant when using female plot manager as the gender variable, while we find no conditional gender gap when using the other gender variables. The use of time fixed-effects and decomposition contributes evidence that the typically available gender variables are insufficient for identifying how gender and decision-making of different household members play a role in productivity. This finding is problematic for targeting effective interventions to increase agricultural productivity and reduce gender inequalities in agriculture. Finally, we find that the older status of female heads, holders and manager of plots, child dependency ratio and limited access to adult male labor are factors decreasing productivity in female plots in Uganda.

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This study has been prepared within the UNU-WIDER project on 'The political economy of social protection systems' which is part of a larger research project on 'The economics and politics of taxation and social protection'.

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