Paper short abstract:

Women have rights to land and strengthen their marriages by cash crop investment. Since women own land conservation programmes should develop tree crop programmes for women, but to be effective, support programmes need to be aligned with women's strategies to control their crops.

Paper long abstract:

The Gola Rain Forest National Park seeks to encourage sustainable development of plantation crops as a livelihood incentive for households and communities in forest edge communities (FEC). Women also have an interest in planting tree crops, but their planting strategies vary by type of marriage. Women's planting strategies are examined in four FEC, sampled by types of marriage - where the woman belongs to a village land-holding lineage and the husband is also from a village land-holding lineage, where a woman belongs to a land-holding lineage but her husband is a stranger, where the woman is a stranger but is married to a husband belonging to a local land-holding lineage, and where both partners are strangers lacking any local land rights. In four sampled villages, 221 women reported that they owned over 58,000 cash crop trees (mainly cacao or oil palm), but 57 percent of these trees were located outside the surveyed village, reflecting a woman's desire to have sole control over her crops. For women, owning tree crops in her own right insures her children's education and her old-age subsistence, but because of women's land acquisition strategies much of this activity is invisible or overlooked. Ethnographic work on women's land rights and land management activities is essential if external assistance to FEC is to be correctly applied. Since women own land the implication is that conservation programmes should develop tree crop programmes for women, but this should be done with an awareness of women's tree-crop ownership strategies.