In the open marketplaces found in cities and villages throughout Africa, women traders usually predominate. This gives women considerable weight as economic actors, because these marketplace systems are the primary distributive networks in most parts of Africa. Although the vast majority of women traders live at or below the poverty line, some have risen to powerful positions that earn them the sobriquet of queen. Ideologies and arenas of practice such as Islam, Christianity, modernization, socialism, structural adjustment, and globalization likewise shape the constraints and opportunities facing women traders in any given situation.
Because these influences operate around the globe, though not uniformly, they to some extent create parallel or convergent trends in widely separated nations. Deepening economic pressures today push even more women and men into trading to support their families and sustain the hope of prosperity. Market women struggle individually and collectively to keep their communities going under difficult circumstances that make formal economic channels function poorly.
Their determined efforts give African economies more resilience as they respond to the challenges of war, political instability, and climate change. The open-air marketplace, bustling with women traders and their piles of goods, presents one of the most conspicuous visual images of African city and village life. The predominance of women in market trading at present is so widespread in Africa and indeed on many continents that it is easy to take for granted as a kind of biological mandate.
Global trends toward greater informalization of commercial and productive relationships perpetuate a central role for marketplace systems in most parts of Africa. They channel the largest proportion of economic activity and supply the great majority of consumer demand in most countries.
The income they can generate for women provides a vital bottom line for family and community survival while economic, political, and climate crises persist and multiply.
