Pakistani women work in a rice field ahead of the UN International Day of Rural Women, in Lahore on 14 October 2016. ARIF ALI/AFP via Getty Images.
Strengthening women’s property rights in Pakistan brings opportunities – and new challenges
Digitising land records in Pakistan increased daughters’ chances of inheriting agricultural property by over 50%. However, it also triggered unintended consequences – from earlier marriage to a reduction in school attendance and national ID card ownership for daughters who inherit land – highlighting the need to pair property rights reform with measures that balance women's economic empowerment and wellbeing.
In rural Pakistan, around 70% of working women are engaged in agriculture – yet only 2% of women own land. The consequences of women being denied access to the financial security that land ownership provides extend beyond property itself.
Evidence from other developing countries – including India, Nepal, Kenya, and other countries in sub-Saharan Africa – reveals that when a woman owns land, it gives her a safety net, a stronger voice in household decisions, greater ability to manage risks, and more resources for her children’s schooling and health.
Conversely, exclusion from land ownership reduces women’s bargaining power, limits their access to credit and savings, and can weaken their protection against poverty and domestic abuse. Despite legal provisions in Pakistan that allow women access to land, constraints within the land administration and enforcement systems mean that women continue to be excluded from land ownership.
What changed under Punjab’s new land management system?
In 2009, the Government of Punjab, in conjunction with the World Bank, initiated the Land Records Management and Information System (LRMIS) programme to computerise all agricultural land records in the province of Punjab. Before the reform, millions of agricultural records were maintained on paper by local officials (patwaris) who had discretion over land transactions.
Bureaucratic inefficiencies, particularly the ability to influence local officers during inheritance transfers, made it easy to sideline female heirs. The LRMIS centralised and computerised records, established sub-district service centres, introduced biometric verification for inheritance mutations, and made land information publicly accessible.
A new study supported by the International Growth Centre leverages the phased roll-out of the LRMIS programme across sub-districts in Punjab between 2011 and 2014 to examine the impact of the reform on women’s inheritance outcomes, and other dimensions such as household investment in children, which may change both in response to realised inheritance and in anticipation of future inheritance.
We use data from the 2018 Punjab Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW) household survey to assess the reform’s impact on daughters’ inheritance and marriage outcomes, and the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) 2008-2018 to examine the effects of the reform on girls’ school attendance.
Figure 1: Roll-out of LRMIS at the sub-district level, 2011-2014
Notes: This map shows the phased roll-out of the LRMIS, with shaded areas indicating the sub-districts in which agricultural land records were digitised in each year from 2011 (left) to 2014 (right). Figure generated by the authors.
How did digitisation affect women’s socio-economic outcomes?
The primary result is that stronger, more transparent record keeping translated into more daughters receiving land. Women whose fathers passed away after the reform were 8.7 percentage points more likely to have inherited and kept property as of 2018. Relative to the pre-reform mean of 12.9%, this represents a very large increase – over 50%.
Figure 2: Effect of the reform on the likelihood of female land inheritance
Notes: The figure shows the results from a regression of female land inheritance (that is, when a woman inherited and kept the land) on treatment status (if her father died after the land reform was implemented), controlling for sub-district and year of death fixed effects. The sample includes all women whose father’s death occurred within 7 years of the reform. The blue bar represents the mean likelihood of female land inheritance in the control (pre-reform) group, while the red bar adds the effect of the reform to the control mean. Figure generated by the authors using PCSW data.
The effect that the reform had on increasing the likelihood of female land inheritance is an important and encouraging result. However, additional preliminary evidence also suggests that households may adjust on other margins:
- Increase in early marriage and childbearing: From the age of 18, women whose landowning fathers passed away after the reform are more likely to be married; by age 20, they are also more likely to have children.
- Increase in marriage without consent, with lower quality husbands: Women whose landowning fathers pass away after the reform are more likely to marry without their full consent, and are more likely to have spouses who are considerably older and have lower education or earnings. These marriage market outcomes suggest that families may resort to strategies such as marrying daughters at younger ages to exclude them from inheritance negotiations or arranging consanguineous marriages (common in Pakistan) to keep land within the family. These unintended marriage effects could also stem from female land inheritance serving as a substitute for more liquid dowry assets.
- Lower school attendance: Even while the father is still alive, the reform has a negative impact on school attendance. These effects occur only among women in landowning households, suggesting that families reduce investments in their daughters’ education in the anticipation of inheritance, reflecting an education-land trade-off.
- Reduction in formal ID ownership: We also find that women who turned 18 after the reform was rolled out are less likely to hold a Computerised National Identity Card (CNIC), suggesting another possible anticipation effect of the reform – families try to find a loophole around the new system and continue disinheriting daughters, as a daughter could be disinherited even after the reform if she does not appear in the national ID database.
Complementary policies can strengthen women’s gains from inheritance
These results demonstrate that improving the enforcement of existing inheritance laws through administrative digitisation and accessible service centres can improve women’s economic outcomes. However, although preliminary, additional findings also highlight the need to pair property rights reform with complementary measures to protect women’s wellbeing, including:
- Supporting girls’ human capital: Introduce targeted scholarships, conditional cash transfers, or school retention programs in areas undergoing titling reforms to reduce the incentive to substitute schooling for land transfers.
- Protecting marriage agency: Strengthen legal counselling, community outreach about women's rights, and accessible grievance and legal aid channels to mitigate the spillover effects of inheritance on marriage outcomes.
- Monitoring downstream outcomes: Effects of the reform on marriage market outcomes may vary in the long run as preferences and norms adjust, and female inheritance becomes more widespread. Hence, it is important to incorporate routine monitoring into land administration reforms to track not only mutations and titles but also household outcomes such as marriage consent, dowry, and childbearing.
The results of our study highlight both the institutional success and policy challenges of the reform. While digitising records can help reduce one important channel through which women are excluded from land ownership, it does not address the broader patterns of exclusion, nor does it automatically secure better life outcomes for daughters. Additional research is needed to better understand the potential household responses which can undermine the gains to women’s economic status.
Further research can improve our understanding of women’s property rights
To complement the existing evidence and address key data gaps in the PCSW and MICS surveys, we are currently fielding a phone survey of agricultural landowning households. This survey collects comprehensive information about the family roster, inheritance outcomes for both women and men, and additional information such as dowry and consanguineous marriage outcomes, intra vivos land transfers, non-land inheritance, land size and quality, and subsequent land use and decision-making. This survey will allow us to test whether anticipated or realised changes in land inheritance affect these additional outcomes, and to confirm whether effects vary depending on the size of the legally mandated inheritance according to sibling composition.
Furthermore, building on this foundation, a new impact evaluation is underway that examines the Punjab Urban Land Systems Enhancement (PULSE) project – a province-wide reform that offers co-owners the opportunity to partition jointly-owned land into individually titled plots.
While PULSE is primarily a land partitioning initiative, it relies on the same digitised and biometric-linked land records as LRMIS. This evaluation will assess whether gender-targeted outreach, conducted through village-level sessions and door-to-door visits, can improve women’s awareness, participation, and outcomes in the division process.
The authors gratefully acknowledge funding from the International Growth Centre (IGC), National Science Foundation (NSF), National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), Identification for Development (ID4D), and Umbrella Facility for Gender Equality (UFGE) at the World Bank:
"We thank the local administrators and service-centre personnel who facilitated access to administrative records, and Shams Sadiq, and Faizan Imran who supported data management and analysis. We are grateful to colleagues and reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts. We also acknowledge Versatile Consultant for leading the data collection of this project."