Skip to main content

Discussion details

This article, published in February 2105 in the journal Agriculture & Food Security and written by a team of CGIAR authors, considers that productive resources are essential to the livelihoods and food security of the world’s rural poor. Gender-equal ownership of resources is considered key to increasing agricultural productivity, equity, and food security. This paper discusses the variability of local understanding of ownership by showing seven domains resource ownership was associated with by a small cohort of respondents. Qualitative research was conducted between December 2013 and March 2014, with 138 respondents (57 women and 51 men in Tanzania, eight women and ten men in Ethiopia, and six women and six men in Nicaragua). It shows the flexibility of systems governing resource entitlements among the studied communities and their impact on food security. Irrespective of these understandings and systems, resource arrangements favored men. The study concludes that an understanding of local meanings of ownership might reveal important and unnoticed aspects of resource allocation, as well as provide guidance for initiatives that seek to provide locally relevant approaches to improving gender equity.