Land Registration, Agricultural Technology Adoption, and Investment in Mozambique : Evidence from a Field Experiment with Women Farmers

World Bank

Published

01 Jul 2026

Coverage

Mozambique

This policy brief presents findings from a randomized field experiment in Mozambique evaluating two interventions targeting women farmers: formal land registration and a subsidized climate-smart agriculture input-and-training package. Land registration temporarily raised perceived tenure security but did not increase agricultural investment or productivity. The input-and-training package produced adverse outcomes, with harvest values falling significantly due to a shift toward an unfamiliar, shock-prone crop. Negative social learning further reduced climate-smart practice adoption among neighboring households. The brief draws four policy lessons: land titling should be prioritized where tenure insecurity is most acute and coupled with assessment of impact over longer time horizons; conditioning title on women’s names may not be sufficient to shift intra-household authority; bundling multiple technologies at once may be counterproductive, especially when complex or unfamiliar to farmers, and sequencing agricultural innovations incrementally may prove more effective. Finally, new practices should be piloted at small scale before broader rollout to avoid visible early failures that dampen community-wide adoption.