Peru's PETT/COFOPRI Joint Land Titling — Formalising Spousal Co-Ownership

From 1993, Peru's rural land-titling programme (PETT) registered land parcels nationwide, and from 2000 it adopted joint spousal titling as standard practice for conjugal-society land under Legislative Decree 667; PETT was financed mainly through Inter-American Development Bank loans and merged into the agency COFOPRI in 2007.

Henrik Wiig's quasi-experimental study (World Development, 2013), surveying 1,280 rural households across 69 communities in four highland departments, found women in communities with joint-titled land participated in 70.2% of household decisions versus 64.9% in comparison communities, a gap that widened to 15.5 points once regression-adjusted; the effect concentrated in investment and agricultural decisions (17-25 points). Nationally, PETT is reported to have formalised 57% of roughly 1.5 million parcels as joint titles; Phase I issued about 900,000 titles by 2001 and Phase II issued 1,098,078 titles (831,348 registered).

An FAO review states that titling's effects on women's bargaining power are "difficult to trace" and that implementation "has so far largely favoured men"; no study, including Wiig's, was found to measure any effect on domestic violence, and PETT's first phase (1993-2000) excluded many women lacking the identity documents titling required.