Women and Land Ownership in Rural Burkina Faso

In spite of numerous land laws, women’s access to land ownership in rural Burkina Faso remains low (22.52%). This low level of access to land ownership limits rural women’s food and financial autonomy, and deprives them of the means to provide for themselves, their children and their households, in terms of both food and health. Multilevel logistic regression analysis using EDSBF 2021 data shows that 16.14% of women’s access to land ownership in rural Burkina Faso is explained by the community effect. To improve women’s access to land ownership, the individual factors (age of the woman, marital status, parity/sex of children, activity status, ethnicity, religion) and contextual factors (region of residence, proportion of women involved in community decision-making) identified may prove useful to take into account in intervention strategies.