Filling the legal void? Experimental evidence from a community-based legal aid program for gender-equal land rights in Tanzania
Valerie Mueller et al.
Community-based legal aid programs have been promoted as one way to expand access to justice for marginalized populations, through provision of free legal aid and education. Despite promising programmatic experiences, there have been few rigorous evaluations of their impacts in developing countries. We evaluate the effect of a one-year community-based legal aid program in the Kagera region of northwestern Tanzania using a randomized controlled trial design with specific attention to gender. We measure impacts of access to legal aid on a range of land-related knowledge, attitudes, and practice outcomes using individual questionnaires administered to male and female household members separately. Effects were limited in the short term to settings with minimal transaction costs to the paralegal. Treatment women in smaller villages attend legal seminars and are more knowledgeable and positive regarding their legal access to land. Cost-effectiveness analysis shows that the costs of bringing about these changes are moderate. The difference between the impact of the intervention on men and on women is narrowed when taking into account the gender-differentiated paralegal effort, and thus costs, allocated to women and men.
Event: Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty 2015
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