No Land, No Food: Why Expanding Land Rights for Women is Crucial to Addressing the Hunger Crisis in Burundi
By Lora Boll
Throughout the world, women engaged in smallholder agriculture play a critical role in local food systems, often supplying the staple crops that households consume daily and providing the majority of farm labor. Despite their importance in agriculture, however, women face immense barriers compared to men in accessing the resources needed to produce food—the most critical of these resources being land.
Perhaps nowhere are the consequences of women’s limited ownership and control of land more evident than in the tiny East African country of Burundi, where a patchwork of cultivated fields—maize, beans, bananas, cassava, and sweet potatoes—cloak layers of mountainous terrain and texture the lush green landscapes. Agriculture forms the backbone of Burundi’s economy and society, accounting for 39.6 percent of the country’s GDP and employing 90 percent of the rural population. At the same time, over half of Burundian households experience chronic hunger, and the rate of stunting for children under five years of age is the highest in the world at 55.8 percent.
Women comprise the majority of the agricultural workforce in Burundi and perform 62 percent of the total hours of labor dedicated to farming, anchoring the food supply by producing staple crops such as maize and cassava for household consumption. Despite their critical role in the food system, however, women earn less income than men, enjoy less access to and control of household resources, exercise less influence in financial decisions, and experience higher levels of food insecurity.
Why these disparities exist and what to do about them features strongly in discussions around advancing rural development in the country. However, much of the advocacy work around rural development revolves around improving education for girls, preventing gender-based violence (GBV), incorporating gender sensitivity components into development projects, distributing hygiene products, and establishing microfinance options for women. Missing from the analysis is an honest assessment of the structural dynamics cementing the status quo.
At the core of structural disparities in Burundi and the challenges female farmers face is the land tenure system and the gendered inequities that exist around property ownership. Given the country’s small geographical area and booming population dependent on subsistence agriculture, land access is a fundamental factor contributing to the food security crisis in Burundi. About 73 percent of Burundi’s area is currently allocated to agriculture—an increase of 142 percent since 1960. In the same period, Burundi’s population nearly tripled, while per capita food availability declined significantly, and few opportunities for employment beyond agriculture emerged. In 2022, the average household farmed about 0.27 hectares of land, while the generally accepted minimum for economic viability is 0.90 hectares. The fragmented plots of land cultivated today are in many cases no longer large enough or productive enough to support household caloric intake requirements.
Land shortages in Burundi harm female farmers in particular, despite the fact that the Constitution ostensibly establishes equal rights to land ownership for all Burundians regardless of gender. In reality, land transfers and ownership are regulated by vague and largely ineffective land codes, which do not mention women or establish legal protections for female farmers. Only an estimated 5 percent of land is officially registered with the government, leaving ownership to be established through heavily disputed oral testimony and customary practice. Following Burundi’s tumultuous history of ethnic violence and mass displacement, 90 percent of court cases in the country relate to land tenure. Traditional gender norms favoring men meanwhile strongly influence social structures and roles within households and communities, dictating the distribution of decision-making power. A 2012 Afrobarometer study revealed a widespread conviction in rural areas that land ownership should be restricted to men. In the absence of a strong institutional framework protecting women’s rights, the majority of land distributions follow customary patriarchal patterns, excluding women from owning property both individually and jointly.
These patterns are perhaps most glaringly evident in the case of land transfers through inheritance. In Burundian tradition, women do not inherit land, and without laws protecting a woman’s right to succession, the possession of familial property defaults to the male head of the household. While Burundi’s Constitution includes some provisions for gender equality, the codes related to inheritance entirely exclude women and girls from succession regardless of their ties to the land. As a result, most women farm land belonging to male relatives and miss out on the privileges and security associated with land ownership.
Globally, studies consistently link improvements in women’s access to and control over resources with better food security and resilience for entire households and communities, prompting in large part the current emphasis in the development sector on targeting women with development assistance. Limited access to land—the foundational resource for agricultural production—therefore introduces substantial challenges for women engaged in farming and impacts wellbeing beyond the confines of an individual household.
When land is scarce or occupied without permanency, farmers tend to lean on unsustainable practices, depleting natural resources and risking the long-term productivity of farms. In Burundi, many farmers cope with land shortages by carving into forests, reclaiming marshland, farming steep slopes, and planting too much too often on the same plots of land. The environmental damage resulting from these poor agricultural practices presents serious risks to staple food production and disproportionately impacts women producers, exacerbating the effects of climate change and increasing vulnerability to flooding, landslides, large-scale erosion, and soil degradation. By contrast, owning land increases the likelihood that a farmer will invest in climate-smart land management practices and experience enhanced resilience to climate shocks.
Farmer cooperatives similarly allow farmers to pool resources such as land, practice sustainable agricultural techniques with higher yields, and participate in protective safety nets that increase resilience. Moreover, studies of women’s agricultural participation worldwide show a positive correlation between land ownership and involvement in farmer cooperatives. Farmer organizations provide a range of benefits to members, including access to larger markets, improved bargaining power, credit, government subsidies and financial services, higher incomes, collective procurement of inputs, information sharing related to climate-smart agriculture and improved technologies, risk sharing and mitigation, improved social cohesion, and overall increased production with reduced costs. In Burundi, however, many cooperatives only admit heads of households as members—a title often tied to gender and land ownership—barring the majority of female farmers from participating and making use of the opportunities available. Without access to cooperatives, women plant, harvest, tend the land, and navigate markets with higher risk and fewer resources, placing them at a huge disadvantage in the food system landscape.
Finally, many women cultivating land that does not belong to them miss out on the income generated from agricultural activities, since husbands or male family members usually control the cash reaped from their property. Without legal ties to the land and associated income, women have little influence in financial decisions at the household and community levels, even though women’s involvement in decision-making at all levels has been shown to promote improved food security, nutrition, stable livelihoods, and resilience for entire communities.
Land is a key resource for farming sustainably, producing sufficient food, accessing external resources and safety nets, and improving financial autonomy and decision-making for women—all of which play a significant role in ensuring household food security. For women engaged in smallholder agriculture, landlessness poses a serious threat to farming successfully and bringing home enough food to feed their families.
At various points since 2004, Burundi’s National Assembly reviewed potential reforms to the inheritance system that would expand women’s rights to succession. Despite numerous rounds of discussion over the past 20 years, however, no legal changes have materialized due to cited concerns that promoting land rights for women would spark division and undermine the country’s traditional way of life. Codifying land inheritance rights for women—the principal producers of the maize, beans, rice, and amaranth that Burundians eat daily—is nevertheless essential for ending gendered disparities in agrifood systems and promoting food security for smallholder farmers and their families. In order to succeed in achieving the country’s stated vision for rural development and gender equality, the land tenure system must be reformed to secure women’s rights to ownership both individually and jointly.
Burundi provides an example of how barriers to land ownership for women can intensify the difficulty of producing staple foods and magnify the risks of hunger. However, land ownership barriers and their consequences are not unique to Burundi. In sub-Saharan Africa—the epicenter of global hunger—only 13 percentof women own land individually, compared to 36 percent of men. Despite their central role in agriculture, the vast majority of farming women face discriminatory practices related to land rights, with detrimental consequences for food production and household food security. Equitable access to land tenure, civil services related to land ownership, and legal protections for women are critical for ensuring smallholder farming households have enough to eat. Efforts to support female farmers with developing resilience and achieving food security must therefore start with examining the institutional environments at the heart of current disparities and advocating for reforms that allow women to thrive.
Lora Boll is a Mickey Leland International Hunger Fellow with the Congressional Hunger Center and holds a master’s degree in Social Work, Policy, and Administration from the University of Chicago. She currently works with World Vision International in Bujumbura, Burundi, coordinating emergency responses to climate shocks and supporting food assistance and agricultural resilience projects. While a master’s student, Lora focused her studies on international social welfare and child wellbeing and participated in an exchange program with the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, India, centered on community organizing and localized development practice. Her areas of interest include gender equity in agrifood systems, child nutrition and education, sustainable agriculture, and climate resilience. Before joining World Vision, Lora worked as a Program Assistant with the UChicago TRiO Program and completed internships at Changing Worlds, Family Focus, and Youth for Unity and Voluntary Action (YUVA). She holds a B.M. in Music and a certificate in Human Needs and Global Resources (HNGR) from Wheaton College in Illinois.
International Women’s Day 2017 - Burundi is by UN Women and is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
