ACCESS AND CONTROL OF LAND IN MBOONI RELATED TO ISSUES OF FOOD

SECURITY WITH PARTICULAR REFERENCE TO GENDER RELATIONS

BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN

Mbooni Constituency is an electoral constituency in Kenya. It is one of the constituencies in

Makueni County. It has a population of 184,624 and covers an area of 949.20 Sq. Km
(approximately). The Akamba people live in Mbooni constituency.

Definitions of “Access” and “Control”

Access to land is the right to enter upon and use land. These rights can be granted to male and
female members of the family or lineage

Control over land is one’s ability to take decisions with regard to the land (e.g. to determine the
size of land used for farming activities and whether the land will be used for food or cash crop
production) and the ability to transfer land titles, whether by sale or inheritance (land ownership).

In the past men in Mbooni and even today;

 Had greater decision making power to determine the size of the land used for farming
activities;
 Had more rights to transfer rights in land to their children;
 Had more opportunities to register land in their names as they had more secure access to
land and they were in a better position to defend their land rights;
 had greater rights to grow perennials and cash crops, an activity that enhances one’s
control over land
 were more involved in forest clearing for agricultural use, which is a primary determinant
of initial access to land and land ownership; and
 were said to have greater potential to be leaders (e.g. of the family and lineage) and
therefore were considered to be better qualified to take decisions affecting land.

Access to land in Mbooni

Access to land is determined to what you have inherited or what you have bought. It goes with
the size of the family and the size of the farm. People who are economically stable may have big
farms for production and also may engage in livestock.

Access rights of different categories of women to land in Mbooni

There are differences in access rights, not only between men and women but also between
different categories of women, for example between widows with children, widows without
children, daughters, stepdaughters and adopted daughters.

Access rights of widows

The access rights of widows with children in Mbooni are different from widows without
children. The clan or the elders may give the widow with children more land if the land is
inherited. Widows with children maintain full access to land after the death of their husbands,
where the widow without children may be less vocal. Women with girls only also may get
problems with access to what they are supposed to own because the clan sees the girls to be on

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their way to get married and own land elsewhere. If the man had more than one wife, the one
with girls only is given her share after the one with boys get their share. The first wife could get
the best piece of land compared to the other wives.

Access rights of daughters

There is difference between the access rights of biological daughters on the one hand, and step
and adopted daughters on the other. In most cases biological children often maintained full
access to their father’s land after his death, whereas step and adopted daughters do not have the
same privileges. Step and adopted daughters are considered to be members of a different
patrilineage and children of a different man and therefore it is said that they have to claim their
benefits from their own line of descent. Step or adopted daughters also have fewer rights than
step or adopted brothers.

Access rights of women with physical disabilities

Women with disabilities, depending on the severity suffer much as a result of both their status as
a woman and their physical condition. Some may get small plots to cultivate and if they have
severe disability they get assistance from family members to perform their farming activities.
Majority do not have access to rights of land thus making them feel very vulnerable and
dependent on others.

Impact of marriage on access to land

If a woman divorces her husband she loses the land. Even if she comes back she will occupy the
land occupied by the sons if she had left the sons In the case of a man, however, he is not limited
by circumstances, even if he leaves town or the village. He can come back home with his
children and is still the heir of the land. Men are therefore not affected by changes in their
marital status. For a woman to divorce, there is no security of the land you have prepared and
the food you have harvested because you leave everything behind. When conditions are worse
some women carry their children with them with nothing to eat.

Acquiring land
Men acquire land through inheritance from their fathers, shares, purchasing agreements and the
allocation of land by the lineage, whereas women acquire land through inheritance from their
mothers and the allocation of land by their spouse, shares, purchasing or through acquiring loans.
Some of the very deserving women who have never married could be given pieces of land to
cultivate for children as they wait to sort out their differences and go back to their homes

Control of land
Control over land is mainly for the men due to the higher status credited to them by society, as
head of the family, as clan heads, decision-makers and controller of family assets. As much as
the husband is alive the woman will own the crops they grow but not the land. The real owners
are men. Women cannot make decisions on the crops to grow and the size of the plots to grow
crops.Thesedays both sons and daughters inherit land and women have the ability to purchase
land. Despite the constraints encountered by women with regard to land o, there is an increase in
land ownership amongst women in their communities. This is as a result to women’s increased
abilities to purchase land (often with incomes generated through trading activities) and their

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increased receipt of land as gifts from parents, grandparents and/or spouses. Thus, traditional
barriers to women’s acquisition of land are beginning to break down in Mbooni constituency.

Decision-making with regard to land

Male dominance in decision-making is a strong feature within the Akamba in Mbooni. Men have
the feeling that they had been leaders since biblical times and continued doing so because of their
closeness to their fathers and grandfathers. They knew the traditions and history of their lineage,
had conquered land for the benefit of the lineage and were more familiar with the land
boundaries. Women were considered to be too weak to be leaders, as traditionally they were not
permitted to go to war, they could not settle land disputes effectively and therefore they could
lose large portions of land to opposing lineages. It also underestimates the ability of women to
participate effectively in decision-making and their capabilities to become leaders and major
decision-makers if given a chance.

Currently women in Mbooni have obtained more opportunities to own land through the purchase
of land, by renting land or by receiving land as a gift. In addition, positive law reform measures
in Kenya had made it easier for women to inherit land and to register land under their own
names.

Women’s roles and responsibilities have changed within the agricultural sector. Women have
taken up more agricultural tasks and had shifted their focus from only farming on family plots to
also farming on individual plots. In addition, they had become more involved in the cultivation
of cash crops such as green grams and cow peas and fruits for sale. People within the
community have become more gender sensitive and women had become more empowered.

Security of land tenure and agricultural productivity

If women in Mbooni would obtain greater access to and control over land, it would have a
positive impact on the household food supply household income and family welfare, due to their
increased agricultural productivity. In addition, more secure land rights would give the users of
the land greater control over their labour, in the land and crops, access to extension services,
access to credit and inputs, bargaining power, and a higher status within the community. If
women are to increase their productivity to the benefit of their families and households, as well
as the local and regional markets, they also require an increased access to and control over other
resources.

ACCESS AND CONTROL OF LAND IN MBOONI RELATED TO ISSUES OF FOOD

SECURITY WITH PARTICULAR REFERENCE TO GENDER RELATIONS
BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN

Access and control of land in Mbooni is for both men and women are very sensitive when it
comes to food security. Without enough land for both men and women, there will always be
food shortage in a family. Sometimes even with good productive land, lack of finances and
modern technologies in farming also affect production. Whenever there is a drought in Mbooni
women and children are the first affected as prices of staple foods rises. In most cases in

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Mbooni, the women more often than men, experience extreme poverty. As well, female-headed
households fare less well than male-headed households due to the obstacles women face and
because of the generally higher dependency ratio in female headed households. The absence of a
male wage earner in the family usually has very negative consequences on income, and women
are generally less able to command labor

Gender Discrimination
Compared to men women have little time in concentrating in agriculture. They have to share in
production responsibilities, household chores and care responsibilities and community care work.
Women face various forms of discrimination as economic actors. Whether self-employed or
waged workers, whether working on-farm or off-farm. Such discrimination diminishes their
economic autonomy and contributes to their weak bargaining position within the household.
Their participation in household responsibilities and care duties continues to be common. The
care economy in particular aggravates women’s time poverty because care responsibilities
require additional time apart from work in production activities. They typically work more
hours than men, but much of their work is in the informal sector, including in family or
household production activities. This work is typically unremunerated, and generally
undervalued and unrecognized. Because girls often have less time to invest in education, women
commonly achieve lower levels of education than men and thus have fewer employment
opportunities outside the home. The lack of opportunities is often reinforced by discrimination in
the labor market, As a woman the position within the household, the burden from the care of
children and elderly, food preparation, and other other chores, time, poverty, fewer opportunities
to seek education and outside employment, lower levels of education, language barriers, mobility
barriers-all these forces discourage women from improving in their role as food production.

Women in Mbooni face discrimination in all these areas. Their greater vulnerability to food
insecurity in times of crisis compounds the problems of food insecurity. They are typically
discriminated against as food producers, as waged workers, and as self-employed workers in off-
farm activities. Discrimination is common even in the forms of solidarity organized by
government programs or, informally, at household or community levels. Even when women
produce food, the intra-household allocation of food may well disfavor them due to beliefs about
the value of females as compared to males. In Mbooni women tend to eat the least, or to eat
leftovers after other family members have eaten. The best food goes to the husband, and the
other is served for the children. The ability to access food depends on power—power to produce,
power to purchase, and power to access food in intra-household allocation mechanisms. When
women have less power than men, this translates directly into weaker access to food Coping
strategies adopted by families in the face of higher food prices and loss of income commonly
impose a disproportionate burden on women.

Current Challenges
Access through Market Acquisition
Women may typically acquire assets through the market, but low earnings and little collateral
most commonly limit this opportunity. Women are not remunerated for the work they do in their
traditional roles, and their earnings are typically low when they do have some source of income.
They also typically have less knowledge about land markets and legal registration requirements.

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The economic impacts of the current global financial and economic crisis are also strongly
gendered. Men are concerned about their social status, and women are concerned about the well-
being of their family and children. Women are seen as being more flexible and quick to adjust to
new conditions, being ready to do any kind of work to feed their children.
The current ecological crisis and, especially, climate change impacts, are foreseen affecting
women disproportionately. The prevailing mechanisms of intra-household allocation are
expected to result in increasing undernourishment of women and girls as food prices go up.
Additionally, given their predominance as small-holder agricultural producers, women in
Mbooni will be particularly hard hit by climate change due to their lower bargaining power and
discriminatory practices in the agriculture sector. Declining yields will diminish their ability to
feed their families, or will result in the loss of purchasing power, particularly for the poorest rural
households who are net food buyers. Many of these households survive by combining food
production for their own consumption with income-generating activities.

Another factor contributing to the marginalization of women and girls is their poverty
resulting from the triple burden of combining production responsibilities, household chores
and care responsibilities, and community care work. Poverty may increase with climate change,
as it could well be more difficult for women to secure water, food, and fuel for cooking and
heating (Parikh and Denton 2002; UN Women Watch 2009)Climate change will reduce
food security, not only because of the reduced availability of productive resources and its affect
on food supplies, but also because of expected reductions in time for caring practices (Tirado
et al. 2011). The anticipated increase in burdens on women and girls implies a diminishing of
their capacity to exploit opportunities for income-generating activities or education (Tirado et al.
2011; Masika 2002).Climate change will also disproportionately affect women and girls because
of their greater vulnerability to extreme weather-related events—such as droughts and floods—
due to gendered norms in society.

Underreporting of women’s activity in agriculture is another major obstacle. The role of women
in agriculture is often not well recognized, due partly to the fact that women’s work in
subsistence agriculture is often part of the non-cash economy of the household (since little or
none of the output gets marketed).

Men more than women are likely to exit agricultural work at home and seek income in other
sectors. Men migrate first, for longer periods and to more distant destinations, in part because of
social norms concerning gender roles. Higher levels of education, on average, provide men more
opportunities for off-farm employment. Women who are left behind sometimes must shoulder
debts incurred to support the migration of men, in addition to coping with and managing
household production activities. This may cause women to abandon household production and
take up waged labor in their vicinity.

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Recommendations

Education
Expanding opportunities for women outside agriculture, particularly by raising the level of
education of women and by delaying the age of marriage, is crucial to countering these trends.
More education will mean acquiring more knowledge in farming and getting better jobs with
better payment to enable farmers to use high technology in farming

Creation of more opportunities for women requires that parents be provided incentives to invest
in the education of girls. However, improved access of women to waged employment, especially
off-farm,
is only part of an appropriate response to the feminization of agriculture.

Government and/ extension workers to providing support to agricultural producers on a gender-

blind basis has usually resulted in all intended beneficiaries being treated as if they were men.

Women should be fully informed about their rights and of the advantages of asserting them. The
illiteracy of many poor rural women, their almost complete lack of legal literacy, and language
barriers make achievement of these goals difficult.

There should be several land distribution programs to educate women, women and children in
registration of property in the names of the married couple, or allocation of property only in the
names of women household members or their children.

Communication
Extension should come up with new technology methods to reach their small scale farmers and
especially women in the remote Mbooni areas. They should introduce simple mobile phones to
alert the women on market prices to save them from brokers. They can also come up with
brochures to put them in small markets and churches to capture those women who do not go to
the big markets. This will be a follow up after the education sessions.

There should be better Access to Food through Decent Rural Employment

The constraints women face in accessing land has repercussions not only on their ability to
improve their productivity as farmers, but also on their ability to access other livelihood
options. Without the ability to own, control, and mortgage land, obtaining credit to launch
off-farm businesses is difficult. . They may also purchase food with income from waged
employment—either on- or off-farm—or self-employment. Finally, they may access food
through redistributive mechanisms in the form of government- and NGO-supported social
protection measures, or through informal forms of solidarity within households or communities.

School Feeding Programs

There should be school-feeding programs and conditional cash transfer programs linked to
school attendance by girls. They contribute to food security both directly (with food for low-
income students) and indirectly (by improving educational opportunities for girls).Low levels of
education are a significant obstacle women face in obtaining off-farm employment in Mbooni.
School feeding programs improve the nutrition of students and thus learning outcomes;•

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encouraging school attendance, particularly for girls. They ensure poor households receive
foodstuff by sending their children to school, and supporting local food producers through food
purchased for schools.

Cash Transfer Programs

There should be Cash transfer programs target the poor households within Mbooni. The program
will provide cash or (at times) nutritional supplements, usually to mothers and primary
caregivers. This will improves the children’s enrollment and attendance in school.

Programs that improve girls’ access to school are therefore essential for poverty reduction as
well as improved nutritional outcomes. In Mbooni, many poor households are unable or
unwilling to send girls to school. The reasons include school costs, both direct and indirect (e.g.,
school fees and the cost of uniforms and books); opportunity costs (girls in school are not
available for household work); and lengthy commuting to school. While the fewer employment
opportunities for women can in part be explained by their lower levels of education,
discrimination in turn is a cause of underinvestment by parents in girls’ education.

Better Access to Food through Social Protection

Social protection plays an essential role in assuring food security. Such protection can be
provided on an informal basis by family and community networks, by NGOs, or formally
organized by government and local collectives. It is vital, of course, for individuals’ and
households that cannot produce food for themselves, or who have no income to purchase food.

Adult learning
These programs should provide women with information about their rights and practices that can
improve household nutritional outcomes. They may also allow women to participate in meetings
and broaden their social network. On the other hand, the cultural norms and time poverty that
reduce the mobility of women must be addressed directly

Cash for Work

There should be cash for work programs designed to provide employment to families that have
no other source of income, against payment of a wage (cash-for-work) or food (food-for-work),
or a combination
of both.

Conclusion
A large number of gender inequalities in access and control to land in the Mbooni constituency.
Women had less access and control to land than men due to gender-specific constraints. Local
traditions and customs favors men over women in terms of land rights, land ownership and land
inheritance. Men are reluctant to change existing practices and women were experiencing
difficulties in changing traditions and practices that discriminate against them in terms of land
acquisition and security of land tenure. Local traditions and customs generally favors men over
women in terms of their access and control to land, due to the higher status ascribed to men by
society and their dominance in decision making process. Divorce generally implies a decrease in

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a woman’s access and control to land. Land rights of widows are strongly linked to whether they
have children from their late husband, as widows with children have greater access and control to
land than widows without children.

In Mbooni, hardly do women own land, more so the customary beliefs are against women
engaging in land related issues. This explains why Kenyan women don’t participate in solving
land disputes, land distribution committees. Unmarried women are considered to be in a
transition stage and while there are no legal barriers to the ownership of land, they do not own
major forms of property in their right (Slayter, 1998). Financial institutions extends credit to only
people who can offer collateral security, therefore it is only when women own property then their
potential to access institutional credit which is vital in the world of contemporary Agriculture can
increase. Title deeds mostly in Mbooni are for men. For Mbooni women who have no title
deeds, it’s a drawback because they cannot access loans for farm inputs or maintain their
livestock.

References

1. African Journals of Social Sciences, Volume 1 Number 2 (2011); pp.20 -35

2. Tirado et al. 2011; Masika 2002).
3. Parikh and Denton 2002; UN Women Watch 2009