Women’s empowerment and climate adaptation: Do joint land titles promote food security of households facing extreme weather events in Tanzania?

Authors – Tim Wegenast, Niklas Hänze, Roos Haer.

Abstract :

Promoting gender equality, climate change adaptation and food security are major challenges of present times. This study underlines the tight interlinkages of these issues by arguing that women’s empowerment may contribute to securing access to a nutritious diet in a scenario of increasing climate vulnerability. Furthering women’s land rights through joint land certification promotes women’s intra-household bargaining power. This, in turn, encourages the adoption of adaptation practices such as crop diversification, plantation of fruit trees, and intercropping and leads to improved food consumption patterns. We thus expect joint land titling (i.e., issuing land certificates in wife’s and husband’s names) to foster the food and nutritional security of households facing extreme weather events. To test our hypothesis, we combine temperature and rain data with information on land titling, farming practices, and food consumption provided by the Living Standards Measurement Study-Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) for more than 25,000 households in Tanzania. Employing a combination of coarsened exact matching, propensity score matching, and a differences-in-differences approach, we show that joint land certification drives access to a diverse diet in regions affected by weather extremes. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that the adoption of climate-smart agriculture may partly explain our findings.