The Difficulties and Possibilities of Getting Land to Women and Youth

This paper focuses on the challenges faced by women and youth in the Senegal River Valley in their quest to get access to land where they can control the production process and the product. It provides an introduction to one very promising Senegalese effort to meet these challenges by providing women and youth jobs on irrigated farms that are run as worker‐owned commercial enterprises. The paper builds on analyses of the traditional social and agricultural systems by prominent Senegalese sociologists (Yaya Wane 1969, Arame Top 2014, Aly Tandian 2013). It analyzes the transformation of the traditional forms of livelihood following the 1980s construction of two large dams on the Senegal River. RThe dams weakened the ability of customary landholders to provision their households because they badly damaged flood‐dependent food production, livestock rearing, and fishing. The state's attempts to replace traditional livelihood systems by providing pump irrigated plots for rice production was undercut by high costs. This made male youth migration increasingly important to households' ability to purchase inputs (Koopman 2009). In the current rural economy, both women and male youth are expected to provide substantial inputs to the family economy in the form of food, household goods, and money. These economic pressures have resulting in their increasing demands for land. The paper argues that it is important that the land reform commission take the social aspects of traditional systems of intra‐household land control into account so that the reforms will be able to facilitate community‐based development of equitable and sustainable ways of managing land in the post‐land reform period. Finding ways to get land to women and youth in a manner that is acceptable to both traditional landholders and government is a complex task. The paper discusses one experiment in which traditional village leaders give land for the establishment of an irrigated commercial farm, nominate the young men and women from their village who become worker‐members, and implicitly acknowledge that the incomes earned belong to these women and junior men. This experience is important because it seems to be succeeding in a way that attracts the support of both customary authorities and the state.