Mary Njeri Kinyanjui, the author of Women and the Informal Economy in Urban Africa, was inspired to write the book by a mobile phone advertisement depicting a mama mboga (vegetable woman) hawking her fruit and vegetables in a gated community in Nairobi. As she tells the story in the introduction, two things struck her: the mama mboga was using a cell phone to contact potential buyers (and therefore did not need to scream herself hoarse in order to market her wares); and her business crossed class boundaries and included customers from both disadvantaged and well-to-do households in the city.

It is these migrations across class, space, and gender boundaries that Kinyanjui explores in her book. Using survey and qualitative data on Nairobi’s thriving markets, the author provides a portrait of women’s lives in the informal economy. The book highlights not only their struggles, but also their resilience and agency in a city where planning ideologies and policies all but ignore women’s economic role. Building on the work of scholars such as Luise White, Christine Obbo, Belinda Bozzoli, Rebekah Lee, and Kathleen Sheldon, Kinyanjui brings us closer to understanding the centrality of women in the process of urbanization in Africa.

The book’s introduction sets the scene, highlighting women’s systematic marginalization in the city and showing how their spatial, class, and political exclusion renders them invisible in urban planning and policy discourses. Where they are discussed, she shows, they are usually regarded as welfare subjects rather than as economic agents, a population that needs help rather than one that actively shapes the nature of the city. In the chapters that follow the author explains the macro-context of Nairobi and provides supporting empirical evidence, outlining how women navigate and overcome exclusionary structural political and economic forces. Chapters 1–4 outline the conceptual framework and the historical context of the informal economy in the city, policymakers’ attitudes toward this informality, and the extent of women’s participation.

Chapters 5–8 present Kinyanjui’s rich survey and interview data. In a city clogged with traffic and where public transport is unreliable and unsafe, the ways that women in the informal economy navigate the urban landscape is essential for understanding how they reach customers. Chapter 5 explains where respondents live, how they access capital, and how they get to work, and it concludes with the observation that women’s mobility is crucial to accessing markets beyond the limiting peri-urban locations. Chapter 6 shows how the lived experiences of women workers in the informal economy disrupt images of them as impoverished and subordinate, demonstrating that the informal economy transforms women’s social relationships, increases their autonomy, and allows their households to aspire for upward social mobility. The crux of the author’s argument appears in chapters 7 and 8, which show that women in Nairobi’s informal economy are not marginal workers, but in fact central in the city’s economy and geography. Supported by social networks and collective chamas (associations) that build on principles of agglomeration, savings, and the leveraging of capital and information, women’s informality belies an economic sophistication that is not often attributed to the informal sector.

While all of this data is very interesting, the book would have benefited from a more detailed discussion of the survey instrument and more interpretation of the data. For instance, it was unclear from the tables how many respondents participated in the survey or how many chamas the author studied, as different tables presented different numbers. In the chapter on women’s mobility, I would have liked to understand precisely how geographic location, transportation options, and access to capital intersect in determining women’s success or failure in the informal economy. Are there links between place of residence and access to capital? Do women who use matatus (minibus taxis) fair better than those that walk? Finally, the concept of the “African indigenous market,” which is referred to throughout as an inclusive and resilient form of economic activity, seemed unproblematized and somewhat romantic as a catch-all strategy for overcoming the exclusivity of modern capital. Given the author’s extensive data, the conclusion could have pushed the boundaries a little more—offering bolder recommendations and making a stronger theoretical contribution to the study of informality in Africa’s growing cities. Still, this is an important and essential book for scholars interested in urbanization in Africa.