The Government of Tanzania is committed to supporting women entrepreneurs with both policy and practical support. The Government of Tanzania has made impressive strides in supporting women entrepreneurs, and its policies reflect a commitment to advancing women. The Ministry of Industry, Trade, and Marketing, which commissioned this report, has established special initiatives to reach out to women, and government supported organizations such as the Small Industries Development Organization (SIDO) have been working to empower women entrepreneurs through training and access to credit.

This report is one of six gender and investment climate reform assessments undertaken in six Pacific nations including Tonga. The report analyzes gender-based investment climate barriers which constrain private sector development and identifies solutions to address them. Four key investment climate areas are considered: public private dialogue; starting and licensing a business; access to justice, the courts, and mediation; and access to and enforcement of rights over registered land.

This study presents an assessment of the role of gender in economic growth in Ghana with emphasis on constraints to enterprise operations, investment, and growth among women owned firms. Anecdotal evidence suggests that women own up to a third of businesses in Africa, and that this represents a significant source for scaling up economic growth in such countries. In Ghana, women make up about 50.1 percent of the entire labor force and are mostly involved in micro enterprises and the retail trade.

Since independence in 1991, the Government of Tajikistan has embarked on a land reform program, which includes extensive farm restructuring. Given the demography of rural households in Tajikistan where the phenomenon of female-headed households is quite significant, women ‘s access to land and credit assumes special importance. To date, however, no thorough gender analysis of access to land and finance in Tajikistan has been conducted. As a result, there is insufficient gender disaggregated data to inform policy.

This paper looks at a variety of technical issues, challenges, and problems that arise during systematic first registration programs, their causes and what can be done to deal with them. Its aim is to provide practical advice to those who are designing or engaged in first registration programs that use the systematic adjudication approach and also those who supervise such programs so that the issues covered in this paper can be eliminated or their negative impact reduced.

The primary purpose of this study was to profile residents and living conditions in novostroiki, or the rapidly growing areas of new self-built construction ringing Bishkek where more than one fourth of city residents now live, in order to identify the major problems and areas for potential future Bank and donor engagement. The study findings are based on analysis of results from a survey of 493 households in nine novostroiki established from 1989-1991, as well as focus group findings, a study of the institutional framework, and a study of sanitation.

The agricultural and food production sector plays a key role in fighting poverty and food insecurity in Moldova, but is facing critical challenges to modernize and integrate into the international market. This paper focuses on smallholder farms, which make up 95 percent of all farms, and explores their potential for growth and the poverty links. Findings reveal that structural change is slow and smallholder farm growth in Moldova is an exception, not the rule.

While scholars long recognized the importance of land markets as a key driver of rural non-farm development and transformation in rural areas, evidence on the extent of their operation and the nature of participants remains limited. We use household data from 6 countries to show that there is great potential for such markets to increase productivity and equalize factor ratios. While rental markets transfer land to land-poor and labor-rich producers, their operation and thus impact may be constrained by policy restrictions.

The reform of China's collectively owned forest land, began in 2008, is arguably the largest land-reform undertaking in modern times in terms of area and people affected. Under the reform, forest lands have been contracted to rural households, allowing them more independence in exercising their rights and interests in the forest lands, giving them more opportunities to improve family incomes, and creating incentives for them to cultivate, conserve, and manage forests. These lands are home to some 610 million people, many of them poor.

This paper provides a brief overview of the intersection of state and customary laws governing land in peri-urban settlements around Honiara, focusing on their impact upon landowners, particularly women landowners. It suggests that the intersection of customary and state legal systems allows a small number of individuals, predominantly men, to solidify their control over customary land. This has occurred to the detriment of many landowners, who have often found themselves excluded from both decision-making processes and the distribution of financial benefits from the use of land.

Land policies are of fundamental importance to sustainable growth, good governance, and the well-being of, and the economic opportunities open to, both rural and urban dwellers - particularly the poor. To this end, research on land policy, and analysis of interventions related to the subject, have long been of interest to the Bank's Research Department, and other academic, and civil society institutions.

The accumulation of decent housing matters both because of the difference it makes to living standards and because of its centrality to economic development. The consequences for living standards are far-reaching. In addition to directly conferring utility, decent housing improves health and enables children to do homework. It frees up women's time and enables them to participate in the labor market. More subtly, a home and its environs affect identity and self-respect.