In the west of Côte d'Ivoire, women's difficult access to land

“It is difficult for us women to access land. Men tell us that since we don’t inherit it, giving land to women is a waste. Hortense Dan, née Tiassé, bluntly sums up the injustice suffered by her Ivorian compatriots. Striped scarf tied on the head, Mrs. Dan, who receives in the courtyard of her house in the small foggy village of Gouakpale, in the Tonkpi region, in the west of Côte d’Ivoire, has the easy verb, the authority naturalness and the tenacity necessary to change situations. Hortense Dan is here the head of a cooperative of women farmers, and if her fight was tough, it was not in vain. “Our husbands are learning that women have a right to land,” she says proudly.

Land is the first asset in these rural regions of the country and yet most women are deprived of it. In quantity first: only 12% of Ivorian women owned it in 2021, according to official data from the Rural Land Agency. Then in quality, since they generally do not have control over the plantations intended for trade – coffee, cocoa, rubber, cotton, cashew – and are often confined to market gardening alone. Ownership of land is everywhere considered a male affair. “My father bequeathed us three hectares of cocoa, and I considered it was for my brother and me alone, recognizes Samuel Flin Kpale, a resident of Gouakpale. I refused to consider that my sisters could have access to our lands. Or even come and talk to me about their management! »

But things have changed here. Hortense Dan’s husband agreed a year ago to give her part of his land: on her one and a half hectare plot, she grows cassava, rice and okra. Samuel Flin Kpale now involves his sisters in the management of his cocoa plantation. “If a woman was able to lead Liberia, I don’t see why other women couldn’t be able to cultivate fields!” “, he jokes.

Patrilineality

The reason for this change? Gouakpale is one of the 30 villages targeted by the Support Project for Women’s Access to Land Ownership (AFPF). A pilot project under the aegis of the USAID agency and whose government has entrusted the reins to the American Terah De Jong, assisted by the Ivorian sociologist Ghislain Coulibaly. Since its launch on October 1, 2021, the AFPF has established itself in five rural localities in each of the regions of Poro, Béré and Tchologo (north) and Cavally, Guémon and Tonpki (west), with the objective of to support women’s access to land, even if traditions die hard.

“We are in a patriarchal society, recognizes sociologist Ghislain Coulibaly. Power is essentially held by men, and transmitted between men. The vast majority of women do not inherit land, but neither do they have the ability to pass it on. Two systems of succession coexist in Côte d’Ivoire: matrilineality among most Gour and Akan, and patrilinearity among the Mandé and Krou. “But the common denominator of the two systems, continues the sociologist, is that women are excluded from land management to be assigned to their sole reproductive role. »

To get out of this impasse, the AFPF began by popularizing and enforcing the law where parity is inscribed in black and white. The Ivorian Constitution adheres to the principle of equality between men and women in land ownership, and the 1998 law on rural land and the 2020 Town Planning and Land Code do not make any distinction between genders in terms of land ownership. land matter. But a preliminary survey carried out in 2022 by the AFPF among the target villages revealed that 84% of respondents had no knowledge of the legal provisions concerning rural land and its inheritance. Three-quarters believed it was legal to bequeath more to sons than daughters, and almost half believed that only men had the right to obtain title deeds to land.

Food Safety

It was also necessary to sensitize customary or religious leaders as well as local authorities. For the most reluctant, the AFPF has concrete arguments. To local politicians, they remind that Ivorian women represent half of the electorate, and that making a gesture towards them can be a profitable strategy. To the customary chiefs, that women are traditionally in charge of market gardening, essential to the food security of a community: rubber, coffee and cocoa are subject to market fluctuations, but rice, eggplant and okra which feed the villagers when the crisis comes.

“More generally, men are reminded that they too suffer from patriarchy, points out Ghislain Coulibaly. They bend under the weight of the responsibilities incumbent on them, and they have everything to gain by sharing these responsibilities with their partners, who are only asking for it. Because Ivorian women must own their land to get out of precariousness, since the death of a husband, a brother or a father, a separation or a repudiation can deprive them of it.

“If a widow wishes to continue to benefit from the so-called family patrimony, explains Ghislain Coulibaly, she is imposed the levirate, that is to say to remarry in the family circle of the deceased. Sociologically, it is thus considered as a good, and its consent is rarely sought. The only alternative is to return to his family of origin… provided that his father, if he is still alive, or his brothers agree to give him a place, which rarely happens spontaneously. “In the event of social breakdown, concludes Ghislain Coulibaly, the vast majority of women are therefore made vulnerable and impoverished. »

“Mediation”

This is what happened to Marie Guei, a resident of the village of Yaoudé, in the Cavally region. When her husband died in 2017, her in-laws robbed her of all her inheritance. “I have five children, and I found myself with nothing,” she says, still emotional. I had to manage day by day to be able to feed them. Mr. Guei and his widow were not civilly married, but linked by a dowry, like 92% of respondents in the West Zone in the 2022 AFPF survey. However, only civil marriage confers land rights on the wife. . The AFPF therefore encourages people to legalize their union at the town hall, even if it means the local authorities having to organize collective marriages to reduce the cost of the procedure.

As for Ms. Guei, she took her case to Guiglo’s “legal clinic”, and won. “We opted for mediation,” explains the director of the N’Guettia Kossonou clinic, who followed the case. In the village, everyone recognized that she had helped her husband to create a plantation of five hectares and that she had worked alongside him for fifteen years. The brothers of the deceased ended up giving in, and Marie Guei was able to recover her share of the inheritance, two hectares of rubber in production. But his case is still rare: only three land disputes have been resolved since the start of the operational phase in April 2022 through the AFPF, which hopes to reach 100 resolutions by 2024.

But its future is uncertain. Because the AFPF, financed by the American agency for international development (USAID) with a budget of more than 5 million CFA dollars (4.6 million euros), should only last three years for the moment. The pilot phase will end on September 30, 2024, and the actors of the project hope then to be able to extend it to the national scale, to initiate a fundamental change in Côte d’Ivoire. They still do not know if they will have the means, or if the beneficiary farmers of the thirty targeted villages will have been only a handful of lucky ones.