This paper presents preliminary results from a land titling experiment in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The experiment used targeted subsides to induce random variation in the price that land-owning households faced when purchasing a land title. In addition to these general price discounts, the paper reports impacts on overall demand for titling and female co-titling from conditional vouchers that required households to include a woman on the land title application in order to apply the full discount.
Willingness to pay for land titles is, on average, between $40 and $50. This is high as a proportion of owners’ incomes, but low relative to the unit costs of cadastral surveying required to produce legal titles. In short, demand is not sufficient to allow the Ministry of Lands to sell titles at a profit in low-income, unplanned settlements in Dar es Salaam. However, once the Ministry incurs the large fixed costs of cadastral survey work for a given neighbourhood, this paper suggests the Ministry would increase revenues by engaging in price discrimination to offer lower prices to low-income households.
Turning to the gender dimension of land titling, the experiment reported in the paper strongly suggests that, on average, both general and conditional subsidies have identical impacts on adoption of certificates of right of occupancy (CROs). This reveals that households are not deterred by the requirement of co-titling women. Conditional on purchasing a CRO, households which were allocated a conditional voucher were much more likely to include a woman on their title application.
These two results, taken together, indicate that small price incentives are an effective means of encouraging de jure empowerment of women in the implementation of land titling schemes. However, it remains to be seen whether or not these strictly legal improvements in women’s land ownership will result in actual de facto improvements in the lives of urban landowners, in particular for the lives of women.
The fact that the ‘price of empowerment’ for women in Dar es Salaam appears to be very low raises new concerns. For instance, households might be co-titling under the belief that de jure improvements in women’s land ownership will not translate into real changes in women’s household bargaining power. Future rounds of this research project will take advantage of follow-up data to determine whether or not co-titling results in any palpable changes in women’s welfare over a longer time horizon.
