By Tracy Koske, Childcare Project Manager at WIEGO.
May 15, 2026-Every International Women’s Day, calls for women’s empowerment echo across the media, highlighting stories of women who have overcome barriers. Yet these narratives rarely interrogate a deeper question: what does empowerment actually mean in the daily realities of working women’s lives?
What Is Empowerment?
Scholars have long argued that the language of empowerment is increasingly reduced to stories of individual achievement. Women are celebrated for starting businesses or rising to leadership positions, while the structural conditions that constrain their choices remain largely unaddressed. In this framing, empowerment becomes something women must accomplish individually rather than something society must collectively support.
Gibson (1991) offers a more comprehensive definition: empowerment is a process that enables individuals to control issues that affect their lives. She argues that truly empowering women requires a broader transformation of the social structures and norms that limit their agency and decision-making power.
For many women in informal economies across the Global Majority, empowerment is not about motivation or personal ambition. These women are already entrepreneurs, negotiators, caregivers, problem-solvers, and community leaders. Women traders sustain local economies, supplying food, goods, and services to millions of urban residents. Yet they continue to face structural barriers that empowerment rhetoric alone cannot resolve. Many work long hours while shouldering the bulk of the household caregiving burden—a vivid reminder of how deeply intertwined these roles are and how heavily society relies on them remaining that way.
The Reality of Care and Work in Urban Markets
In markets across African cities, it is common to see women trading with young children beside them—babies sleeping under stalls, toddlers playing near busy trading spaces, and school-aged children waiting as their mothers serve customers. These everyday scenes highlight a fundamental tension: women’s economic empowerment is visible and essential, yet unsupported.
Although women drive market economies and sustain households, the lack of accessible, affordable care systems means their participation often comes at a high personal cost. Women are expected to generate income, manage homes, care for children, and nurture communities—often with little institutional support. Instead of reducing gender inequalities, these expectations can intensify women’s stress.
This reality challenges dominant narratives that equate women’s participation in economic activities with empowerment. Without addressing structural constraints, women’s economic participation risks becoming an additional burden rather than a meaningful pathway to empowerment. One area where these gaps become particularly visible is in the design of urban market spaces.
Urban market development frequently prioritizes infrastructure such as stalls, storage, and sanitation. While essential, these improvements often overlook the caregiving responsibilities that shape women’s ability to work effectively. As a result, women’s economic participation continues to depend on their ability to manage care work within already demanding environments. In addition, access to high-quality childcare services that offer a safe, stimulating environment for children to learn and play is beneficial to a child’s growth and development during the most important phase of their life.
Rethinking Women’s Economic Empowerment
If we are serious about advancing women’s economic empowerment, we must move beyond narratives that celebrate women’s resilience while ignoring the structural systems that constrain them. Empowerment cannot mean expecting women to do more with less. It must mean creating conditions that allow women to participate in economic life without compromising their well-being or that of their children.
This requires rethinking how urban spaces, labor policies, and social services are designed. Markets are not only economic hubs—they are also social spaces where families navigate daily life.
Integrating childcare services into market environments can significantly improve working conditions for women traders. One example is the “care crates” designed by Asiye eTafuleni and currently being used within the Early Morning Market and Brookstreet Market in Durban, South Africa. These crates have since been refined for use in home-based childcare settings. Their design acknowledges that space is a scarce and valuable resource in both market environments and informal settlements.
Accessible childcare allows women to focus on their businesses, increase productivity, and reduce the constant stress of balancing work with caregiving responsibilities. Evidence from WIEGO’s Childcare in Markets project illustrates this clearly. For instance, in Rwanda, traders reported that access to childcare enabled them to work longer hours with greater peace of mind, knowing their children were safe.
These initiatives show that investing in care infrastructure is not merely a social welfare issue—it is an economic strategy. Women traders already demonstrate ambition, resilience, and determination in their daily work. What they lack are support systems that allow them to meaningfully participate in the workforce.
A Call for Systemic Change
It is therefore urgent to reframe women’s economic empowerment and shift attention from individual women to the systems that shape their opportunities. This includes investing in supportive structures, addressing structural inequalities, and building systems that remove barriers to women’s full and fair participation in economic life. Women’s empowerment must be understood as a collective and political process, not simply a personal achievement.
Empowerment should never mean asking women to navigate or overcome systemic barriers alone. It must mean removing those barriers altogether.