Urbanisation, Gender and the Informal Labour Sector in Africa Idongesit Eshiet Idongesit Eshiet is a doctoral student and Graduate Fellow with the Department of Sociology, University of Lagos, Lagos, Nigeria. Her doctoral thesis is on Gender and Development. She is at the verge of completion of the programme. Abstract Urbanisation as a strategy of development has a differential impact on men and women. These differences are particularly accentuated by the peripheral nature of African urbanisation. One of the regrettable impacts of contemporary urbanisation in Africa is its ability to undermine womens traditional spheres of power and influence, while at the same time creating new conditions for their further dependence. The informal sector as a social and economic category is one such condition. Limited by the stringent requirements and gender segregation current within the formal sector, women have turned to the informal sector, as a survival strategy within the urban socio-economic milieu. However, informal sector work offers only slight relief to women from their grinding poverty. Informal women workers are subject to double exploitation. First, as a proletarian group within the informal sector, which is characterised by low wages, low productivity and precarious working conditions. Second, as women, a gender that occupies a subordinate position in the gender order in society. For even within the informal sector, women are still discriminated against, in terms of wages and other facilities that would otherwise enhance their productivity and socio-economic status. This paper assesses womens activities in the urban informal sector and observes that the regulatory and policy environment has been hostile to these activities. Introduction Prior to the penetration of Africa by western capital, with its adjunct urbanisation, pre-colonial Africa had its own type of urbanisation. Urbanisation in this context was characterised by equality of access to the means of production. Hence, the size and composition of cities were determined by the surpluses generated from production and these surpluses were accessible to all the urban dwellers. 1 However, colonialism brought in its wake a different form of urbanisation, which has been growing at an acceler- ating rate ever since. Presently, Africas urban population is growing at the rate of 4.7 percent annually with an estimated 35 percent of the popula- tion residing in the urban areas. 2 This growth rate has been particularly accentuated by the continuing urban bias in the distribution of government and private investments. Part of the socio-economic mani- festations of contemporary urbanisation is an increase in produc- tivity per worker and levels of income in general, and a shift from subsis- tence and pre-capitalist production to commercialised, surplus production. This tends to create opportunities for employment and the achievement of the good life. A consequence of these actual or perceived opportunities is the excessive migration of people from rural to urban areas. However, the opportunities created by urbanisation are unequally shared amongst the various strata of the urban population. This is due to the nature of third world urban centres, which are often over- urbanised. 3 This acts as an impedi- ment to formal wage employment, thus resulting in surplus urban labour and a basic trait of this surplus labour is that it is largely unskilled and unemployable. From this perspective, urbanisation as a strategy of development, within peripheral capitalist states, generates and accentuates many of the contra- dictions it was supposed to solve, and women as producers and consumers both in the rural and urban areas have increasingly become victims of these contradictions. In fact, the inequities generated by urbanisation have a differential impact on both men and women as social categories. Women become the victims of urbanisation as their status declines with their dimin- ished productive role in the transition to an urban economy based on wage labour. However, women in the urban centres have refused to become passive recipients of change. Guided by decisions that are sometimes rational and sometimes irrational, they have made the most out of their underprivileged situations. Women have turned to the exploited and subordinated urban informal sector for employment as a survival strategy. This paper aims at analysing the economic survival strategies adopted by women in the urban socio-economic milieu and their role in enhancing or otherwise, womens socio-economic well being. The paper consists of five parts including the introduction. Part two deals with conceptual clarifications. While part three analyses womens income generating activities within the urban informal sector. Part four assesses the policy and regulatory environment and their impact on womens activities. Part five concludes the paper. Conceptual clarifications: Urbanisation Although the urban question consti- tutes one of the most persistent socio- economic and political problems of the third world, scholars and practitioners are yet to agree on a common defini- tion of the concept. There is a divergence of views with regards to its meaning. In the literature of third world urban studies, such concepts as urbanisation, urban-growth, urban processes, urbanism, are constantly 1 A. L. Mabogunje, Urbanisation in Nigeria, University Press, London, 1968. For example, the Yoruba cities of pre-colonial Africa, which were established based on trade, and all the city dwellers had access to the surpluses generated from trade. 2 S. O. Akinboye, The Socio-Political Implications of Urbanisation in M. A. Adejube (ed.), Industrialisation, Urbanisation and Development in Nigeria, 1950-1999, Concept Pub. Ltd., Lagos, 2004, p.154. 3 United Nations, World Population, Environment and Development, New York, 2001, p. 64. Also, the location of third world urban centers within third world economies, which are unstable due to their peripheral location in the global capitalist system has further affected their abilities to generate employment. Articles SEPHIS e-magazine 3, 2, January 2007 29