The effects of increasing tenure security on women’s empowerment and food security: Evidence from Ecuador

This paper examines how a rural land administration program in Ecuador affected women’s empowerment and household food security. Although the program did not grant formal land titles, it provided parcel owners with individualized, georeferenced cadastral maps in the public setting of community meetings. In cases where parcel holders were in common-law unions, cadastral documents identified both partners jointly as landowners. Using a doubly robust estimation method that combines a difference-in-differences approach with inverse probability weighting, we find that the program had no significant effect on aggregate levels of empowerment. However, the results indicate that female beneficiaries gained improved access to credit, spent more time on nonagricultural activities, and generated more off-farm income. Beneficiary households also increased their food security and shifted their production portfolios toward crops and livestock with higher market value. These results suggest that increasing informal tenure security can enhance women’s participation in productive and consumption-related decision-making, thereby improving both their own and their family’s overall welfare.