Got it: it was less than 30%.
So to us--we'd love to find other words for the words “property rights“, by the way, so we wouldn't fall into a Robert Reich versus Newt Gingrich kind of argument--property rights were, really simply, the right to control things and the right to control transactions. So we wanted to know why women only had a property right over about 30% of the land. We're talking about real estate.
Given our particular way of studying it, which is simply a question of who controls what—and we have different ways of finding that out—we found that one of the biggest problems was that the rights of women were clear provided that when a couple was formed they got married, and most Peruvians were not married. So we got into finding out what the obstacles to getting married were. We found out that on average—I'm trying to make it simple—a couple could take up to 150 days, working eight hours a day....
From the point of view of poor people, of course, who had never done the cost-benefit analysis we had, this actually meant that it was impossible. By the time they had finished 20 or 30 days or whatever, they just hadn't gotten to their objective. So we sorted that out by including the marriage procedures within property rights reform, as a result of which all of a sudden it was easy to get married, and therefore the rights of women were clearly established according to law.
Today the situation--can you remind me, Lucia?--is that 56% of the total population benefiting from nationwide property by the bill on joint title are women. Women are today the majority property owners in Peru, and 63% of female owners obtain credit worth $1,000 and more. They have more credit than men, and they are able to access more business.
We have just been hired by SEWA, the Self Employed Women's Association in India, to do a similar exercise: in other words, to try to find out why it is that they continually talk about not being able to access the greatest source of capital in their country, which is real estate. As a matter of fact, Dr. Camaiora, who's here with me, is going to head that project, for which there will be an all-women team from the ILD. From our preliminary investigations, we know it's same thing: they really have no rights that they can exercise vis-à-vis not only husbands, but brothers.
We've already identified the first places where those blockages are. Where those blockages occur has to do with very precise things. For example, women--at least the ones we're working with--are very much caught in the agricultural sector. They take care of the cottage industries, as you North Americans did back in the 19th century when somebody stayed behind to do the spinning or weaving. Of course, every time their land is expropriated or they're asked to move because an infrastructure problem comes along, the government compensates them for only the land; it doesn't compensate them for the extra legal industry that is within that cottage.
So what's happened in the west, from our point of view, is that as you've become specialized, all of a sudden you have people who know land tenure, but when it comes to industry that's another group, and when it comes to women's rights that's a third group. But in fact, I would say that our level of development, from India to Peru, in the poorer parts, is somewhere around that of the 19th century.
You can't break it up into that many little pieces. Rather, you have to ask yourself whether where those people work depends on land tenure, technology, or secure property rights. How does it tie into credit? Is there an industry? If I expropriate their land or I'm going to relocate them for whatever other reasons, what are the costs going to be? And not only by passing that for one piece of land.... I'm remembering a particular case of a woman in Calcutta, who said that she had a kite industry. The bamboo and the paper from which she made her kites came from the local vicinity and her market was just a mile across the way. She said, “If you relocate me, you'll completely destroy my market position”.
What we do is try to adapt the law to reality and avoid getting trapped in defining property rights as a land matter. We understand that in modern America, in the modern west, but property rights are all about independence and control in the 19th century.... It's really about making families, individuals, and tribes powerful in whatever way refers to the assets and transactions around them. It is not a land issue. This is not something that a mapper can solve.
So yes, we do look at women, but we try to look at them in the context of what they need to become independent.