Gender and the Everyday Politics of Informality in African Cities

Abstract

This paper explores how gender shapes the everyday politics of informality in African cities. It argues that informality is not a sign of disorder or economic failure but the central organizing logic of urban life, where survival, labor, and power are negotiated outside formal governance. Within this terrain, gender operates as a key determinant of access, visibility, and belonging. Women’s participation in informal economies through trading, domestic work, and neighborhood organization reveals how they sustain urban livelihoods while navigating moral regulation, spatial exclusion, and economic precarity. The paper conceptualizes these practices as a politics of survival: subtle, embodied acts through which women claim space, security, and recognition in contexts of structural inequality. Their informal labor functions as both social infrastructure and political expression, reconfiguring the meanings of citizenship beyond legality or formal rights. By examining informality through a gendered lens, the paper rethinks African urban politics as a field of everyday negotiation, where care, reciprocity, and endurance form the foundations of city life and governance.