ABSTRACT
This chapter examines urban women’s livelihoods in sub-Saharan Africa within the context of economic liberalization, the growing informalization of labour relations and an exponential growth of the informal economy. Economic liberalization discourses of the 1980s promoted the view that labour regulation distorted production costs and thereby threatened sustained economic growth. The informal economy within this new approach was considered critical for coping with growing urban unemployment and poverty. Urban agriculture, either on home gardens or in the urban peripheries, has been described as an increasingly important activity within the urban informal economy. Many women in the urban informal economy are working for others or have done so at some point in their lives. Processes such as industrial subcontracting, which have helped to create informal economy employment, have been significant in only a few sub Saharan African countries such as South Africa and Cote d’Ivoire mainly because of their history of industrialization.
