Navigating Contested Spaces: Gendered Interactions in Everyday Entrepreneuring Among Jua Kali Women in Rural Kenya

Abstract

This paper examines the daily experiences of Jua Kali women entrepreneurs in Western Kenya, unpacking how gendered power relations are enacted within informal marketplaces and how women entrepreneurs mobilize agency within these structurally and institutionally constrained contexts. Drawing on thirty in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations, this study reveals that Jua Kali women experience gendered control of economic resources and marketplace space through financial exploitation and male dominance, embodied regulation and normalized gendered exclusion through pervasive gender-based violence, and extractive informal governance and gendered state control through harassment, corruption, and chaotic tax enforcement. Despite these structural and interactional constraints, women mobilize a repertoire of agentic responses, from collective solidarity networks and strategic acquiescence to tactful compliance and evasive resistance, to sustain livelihoods in precarious working environments. This study contributes to feminist and critical entrepreneurship scholarship by theorizing entrepreneurial agency as gendered, relational, and materially constrained and by advancing a spatially attentive understanding of entrepreneurship that foregrounds the visualization of spatial configurations and material conditions shaping women's everyday entrepreneurial participation in the informal economy. It also offers important policy implications, calling for gender-responsive, context-specific interventions that address institutional voids and safeguard women's economic participation in the Global South.