Land tenure system innovation and agricultural technology adoption in Burkina Faso: Comparing empirical evidence to the worsening situation of both rural people vulnerability and vulnerable groups’ access to land

Abstract

The crucial need for land ownership security to structurally transform the agricultural sector motivated Burkina Faso authorities to run a land reform programme in 2009, allowing producers to acquire formal land property rights. Our study aims to highlight how this institutional innovation may affect rural people’s livelihoods. In a first step, the paper uses an econometric approach to identify the effects of land property rights on producers’ decision to adopt soil fertility management technologies. In a second step, it shows how the new law is affecting both vulnerable groups’ access to land and the vulnerability of rural people by undertaking investigations on issues surrounding the implementation of the new law. The results show in the first step that unlike customary land rights, formal land rights lead to more technology adoption, implying that the new law may improve rural people’s livelihoods. However, this evidence mismatches the results in the second step which show a negative effect of the new land law implementation on rural people’s livelihoods. The paper concludes that whether or not formal land rights are needed in enhancing technology adoption, the new land law is likely to worsen rural people’s situation. Additional measures have to be undertaken to improve rural people’s livelihoods.