Securing Land Rights and Access to Credit by Women - Observations and Lessons from Rural Ghana

The challenges faced by women in acquiring land and accessing credit in Africa is now well documented. In many parts of rural Ghana, women continue to face peculiar challenges in their quest to access land not only for agriculture, but also for development and to formal sources of credit. This problem is partly due to the fact that in most developing economies like Ghana, land tends to be held largely by men or kingship groups controlled by men. In many places even today, women can only access land through a male relation usually the father or their male sons. In other places, a woman’s access to land and land use rights can also be decided by marriage arrangements of a particular community. Examples include through marrying a man from the land-owning clan which then gives her some restricted access or right to use of the land. This limited access to land may be curtailed with the breakdown of the marriage relationship. Like in many other places across the world, most banks and financial institutions tend to provide loans and credit to applicants who can provide some form of ownership to property mainly land. The Specific Objectives of the work therefore are as follows: Provide an explanation of the relationship between women, land ownership and their access to credit, Explain the extent to which land is used as collateral for credit in rural Ghana, Explain the requirements for accessing bank loans by women in rural Ghana and Make recommendations to improve access to credit by women in rural Ghana. Overall, the findings and results show that women in rural Ghana continue to face discriminatory practices in their effort to secure bank loans and facilities for their farming activities and trading businesses and that the formation of cooperative represent the best and surest way for women groups to access loans as it provides the banks and financial institutions some form of security. There is need for education of women to understand the benefits of joining cooperatives. There is also a need for the GCB Bank the most decentralised commercial bank in Ghana to create satellite offices to send their services even closer to the communities remote from the district capitals where bank branches exit.