Abstract: During the last decades, with the increase of demography, urbanization, globalization and general commodification, the land value has increased and some social strata such as young people, women and the disabled become vulnerable and their control land remains almost non-existent. This situation has led to gender inequality in farmland accessibility and increase unemployed young people. With the aim to improve conditions of access to farmland, this analysis to shed light on land tenure problematic and problems related to young people and women's access to farmland. A total of 70 papers from Africa, Asia, America and Europe have been considered. In Africa, 8.1 to 15% of papers have been produced by researchers from Benin Republic and Senegal, and 6.1 to 8% from Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger. 52.73% papers from international results, when 36.36% and 10.91% have respectively been collected form other national or local scales. The main research fields of these papers are rural land acquisition and accessibility, conflicts about land accessibility, land governance and institutions, and about actors and vulnerability. Inheritance was the most common regime of land tenure in the most of the countries in Africa while the smallest land tenure scheme was the borrowing regime with 23.67%. 85% of papers identified women as the most vulnerable actors in the acquisition and accessibility of rural lands. However, youth are almost excluded from access to land ownership. This study provides an analytical overview on the difficulties of women and young people to accede to farmland that are important to increase the agricultural productivity and to improve gender inequalities in rural land acquisition and accessibility.
Keywords Land governance, access to land, rural development, land conflict. West Africa
