South African women are gaining ground in property ownership, but the picture is more complicated than the headline numbers suggest. Analysis of more than 10 million property transfers shows women-only home purchases rising from about 29.5% in 1995 to roughly 38% today, overtaking men-only purchases around 2016.
Source: Supplied. Liza Nolte, new business development manager at AfriGIS.
Yet women hold just 13% of the country’s farmland by area and remain about half as likely as men to own an established business. These figures are not contradictory: they measure different dimensions of economic empowerment, revealing both progress and persistent gaps.
Liza Nolte, new business development manager at SA's geospatial data and location-intelligence company AfriGIS, has been working with the data behind all three numbers. Her view, grounded in an analysis of more than 10 million property transfers going back to 1995, is that the real story is not one of stagnation but of steady, measurable progress.
The flow and the stock are not the same number
The 13% farmland figure comes from the 2017 State Land Audit. It is a stock measure: ownership built up over generations, skewed towards large, historic, often corporately held parcels. The home-buying figure is a flow measure: who is transacting right now, at street level.
"A woman can be leading the flow of transactions while barely denting the stock of land by area, and both are true at once," says Nolte. "The deeper pattern only appears when you stop treating them as the same number and read them spatially, side by side."
AfriGIS's own deeds analysis tells a story a national headline can’t properly summarise. Female-only transfers, meaning properties registered in a woman's name alone and excluding joint ownership, have climbed from approximately 29.5% of all transfers in 1995 to around 38% today, tracking the wider economy closely.
The biggest gains are in smaller market provinces: Mpumalanga, the Free State, North West, and Limpopo. Gauteng leads by volume with approximately 1.3 million female-only transfers. That distribution only surfaces when you read the register at parcel level.
What the April 2025 reform changes
For most of the period AfriGIS has been studying, gender had to be inferred from names rather than captured directly. That changed on 5 April 2025, when it became required for every property transaction to explicitly capture gender data at the point of transfer.
"A captured field is still just a tick box until it is tied to an actual piece of ground and read across whole areas over time," says Nolte. "The value is capturing it consistently, linking it to the parcel on the map, and watching it move year by year and place by place. That is the difference between a compliance field and something with which you can actually govern."
The land that the map cannot yet reach
The gains in female ownership are strongest in smaller-market provinces – Mpumalanga, the Free State, North West and Limpopo – each up 11 to 13 percentage points since 1995. Limpopo is also home to a large share of South Africa's approximately 7.7 million hectares of communal land – concentrated there and in the Eastern Cape – that remains unregistered and untitled.
"The place where the gender gap is likely widest sits right next to where the formal gains are strongest, and we cannot see into that," says Nolte. "Bringing communal land in is possible, but it means mapping a different kind of right, and that takes the political will to recognise those rights formally."
AfriGIS is working with partners on an initiative to link individuals to communal land parcels so that residents can access financial products that would otherwise require a formal title as a prerequisite.
Homes, businesses, and the third axis
Business ownership is the third axis, and it tells yet another different story. Research from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) South Africa Women's Entrepreneurship Special Report 2023/2024 by Stellenbosch Business School found that men are approximately twice as likely as women to own an established business, at 7.9% versus 4.1%. The gap widens as businesses mature — women find it harder to sustain and scale a business than to start one.
"Put the property map and the business activity map side by side, and spatially you can see where women are gaining ground on homes but not yet on enterprise," says Nolte. "That is precisely what a bank or municipality planning SMME support actually wants to see."
Reading the map together
The communal land gap is real, the business ownership gap is real, and the stock of land held in female names will likely take generations more to shift. The trend, it seems, is finally improving, and the tools to measure, track and support it are also, for the first time, in place.
"Land, homes, and businesses each tell only a part of the story that women live," says Nolte. "When we read the maps together we can start to see where women are genuinely gaining ground – and where not (yet). Every home bought, piece of land acquired, and every directorship filed, is a woman planting a flag and worthy of celebration.
"But empowerment can only succeed if we can also see where flags aren’t being planted. When it comes to the empowerment of women, “no news” is never “good news”. Change begins in the blind spots.”
