Land registration as an opportunity to expand women's land rights: early insights from Senegal

Owning land can open important pathways out of poverty. Yet, in Senegal, most women have no formal claim to it. In fact, only 6% own agricultural land and just 2.5% own their homes. This inequality can begin early, when daughters are overlooked as land is passed down within families. Over time, this leaves women with fewer assets, less access to credit, and less protection in the event of divorce or widowhood. Large-scale registration programs therefore present both a risk and an opportunity: they can extend formal land ownership to millions, but they can also cement existing inequalities if women’s and girls’ inclusion is not deliberately built into the process. To address this, the Africa Gender Innovation Lab (GIL), in partnership with the Government of Senegal and the World Bank PROCASEF team, designed and is now evaluating an intervention that integrates gender considerations directly into the land registration process. The innovation here focuses on land surveyors, the frontline actors of registration programs. Because they interact with thousands of landowners, the potential for large-scale, low-cost impact is substantial. But there is a difficulty: surveyors are recruited to register parcels, not to challenge social norms. So how do you turn land surveyors into advocates for women's and girls' access to land? Our intervention used two motivational levers: a competition and a three-day training. The competition rewarded surveyors who registered the highest share of plots including at least one daughter among a designated group of households. Meanwhile, the training focused on equipping surveyors with the knowledge and practical tools necessary to discuss women's and girls' land rights with the families they visited. This blog focuses on this training and what we are learning about using frontline actors to challenge customs around women’s land ownership. A training to spark change The training was designed to be lively and participatory, tying new material to surveyors' own experience and giving them an active role. Sessions combined storytelling, short videos, peer testimonials, and presentations to make learning tangible and engaging. To turn ideas into action, the training relied on experiential methods: participants worked through real-life cases in role-plays and quizzes, with immediate feedback from peers and trainers. The curriculum, developed with local partners, covered the legal and historical backdrop of women's land rights in Senegal (including older customary systems, with matrilineal lines and family-based management, under which women often held stronger claims than the modern framework gives them), the stereotypes that affect who gets listed on a title, and the arguments surveyors can draw on when encouraging households to include women and girls. At the end of the three days, each participant left with a summary brochure compiling the main arguments to use when encouraging households to register girls on land titles. Early signs: strong buy-in So far, 159 surveyors have been trained across 8 regions of Senegal. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive: 93% pledged to promote girls' inclusion during fieldwork and 86% rated it "very important" to include girls on titles. One surveyor reports: "I particularly appreciated the section on women's access to land and the stereotypes that hold them back. The illustration of rural women without land titles was very powerful and helped me grasp the practical barriers they face." Our next task is to investigate whether this strong buy-in materializes into more women and girls registered and what this means for downstream outcomes. This is what the impact evaluation, conducted with a broader team of researchers, is designed to measure. Looking ahead Agencies leading similar reforms in Côte d'Ivoire and Benin have already expressed interest in adapting the approach, exemplifying the kind of replication of scalable solutions we strive for at the World Bank Group. The emerging evidence from Senegal offers an important insight for policymakers in the region: expanding women's land rights does not require a separate program and should not be added as an afterthought. By training the people already doing the work, it can be built into the registration process itself—at low cost and with potential for significant scale. The final impact evaluation results will tell us whether land surveyors’ early buy-in converts into lasting change on the ground. In the meantime, our approach offers a practical template that other countries can adapt and test in their own registration programs.