Rwanda's Land Tenure Regularization Programme — Titling Land in Women's Names

From 2008 pilots and a national rollout from 2010, Rwanda's Land Tenure Regularization Programme used aerial imagery and community-based adjudication to register and title land parcels at a cost on the order of a few US dollars per parcel, reaching near-universal coverage by 2013. Land held by married couples must be registered in both spouses' names, with clearer, non-discriminatory inheritance recording for widows and orphaned daughters.

A quasi-experimental evaluation published in the Journal of Development Economics (2014) found large increases in investment in soil and water conservation structures, with female-headed households roughly 19 percentage points more likely to invest than male-headed ones - evidence that resolving women's greater tenure insecurity produced the strongest response. Customary pressure on women to cede inherited land to brothers persists in some communities.