Women's Land Ownership Rights and Agricultural Productivity: Evidence From Smallholder Farming Systems in Nasarawa State of Nigeria

Women constitute the majority of the agricultural labour force in Nigeria yet own a disproportionately small share of the land they cultivate, a structural asymmetry with direct implications for household food security, farm-level efficiency, and national agricultural output. This study examined the relationship between women's land ownership rights and agricultural productivity among smallholder farming households in Nasarawa State, north-central Nigeria. A cross-sectional survey of 260 women smallholders was conducted across three agricultural zones of the state, using a multi-stage sampling procedure. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, a Cobb-Douglas stochastic production function estimated by ordinary least squares, a Heckman two-stage selection model to correct for nonrandom sorting into land ownership, and an Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition to partition the productivity gap between women who own land and women who farm under use-rights or borrowed arrangements. Results show that only 23.8 percent of women respondents held documented or formally recognized ownership of the land they farmed, with the overwhelming majority accessing land through a husband, male relative, or community allocation that conferred use rights without transferable title. Mean maize equivalent yield among women landowners was 1.64 tonnes per hectare, compared with 1.02 tonnes per hectare among women without ownership rights, a gap of 37.8 percent. The Cobb-Douglas model found land ownership status to be a statistically significant positive determinant of productivity (p<0.01) even after controlling for farm size, labour, fertilizer use, seed type, education, and extension contact, while the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition attributed 61.4 percent of the observed productivity gap to differences in input endowments, chiefly fertilizer application and access to credit, both of which were themselves strongly conditioned on ownership status, and 38.6 percent to differences in returns to those inputs, consistent with tenure-insecurity effects on investment incentive. Qualitative evidence from key informant interviews linked women's constrained land ownership to patrilineal inheritance custom, widowhood-related land dispossession, and the administrative cost of formalizing title. The study concludes that the productivity shortfall among women farmers in Nasarawa State is substantially a land rights and investment-incentive problem rather than a problem of inherent managerial inefficiency, and recommends targeted land tenure formalization, joint spousal titling, and genderresponsive credit and extension design.