Paper short abstract:

Drawing from recent fieldwork in a Mossi village in Burkina Faso, this paper explores the issue of women’s roles and strategies of land use by highlighting the discrepancies between local perceptions and the standardized vision of gender roles framing many development interventions in African countries.

Paper long abstract:

Governments and development agencies are among the primary actors fostering women's access to land in African countries. In Burkina Faso, interventions such as the creation of communal fields and the introduction of private forms of land acquisition aim to improve women's contribution to the household economy. However, international NGOs promote the emancipating role of women within rural economies as better fitting the standardized vision of gender roles. Local actors attribute disparate meanings to the use of natural resources, therefore complicating the common understanding of land as a gender-bound asset. Although in parts of the country the patriarchal system does not allow women to inherit land, married women usually gain access to a small plot from their husband. Furthermore, they are able to bargain for a larger and more fertile field with male-family members and other community members. In very exceptional cases, this also includes single women willing to pursue economic independence from their parents. Within this framework, development interventions override customary tenure systems and fail to consider the importance of gender dynamics in land attribution. Based on ethnographic cases, I explore how women conceive of land as a multifaceted asset: a duty to their in-law family, a source of bargaining power, and a difficult good to manage. Drawing from recent fieldwork in a Mossi village of the Centre-East region of Burkina Faso, this paper deals with the issue of women's roles and strategies of land use by highlighting the discrepancies between development discourses and local perceptions.