Although not a new phenomenon on the world stage, globalization and its effects have become an increasingly important focus of study for social scientists over the past twenty-five years. While initially thought of in primarily economic terms as referring to the emergence of a worldwide capitalist economic system that integrated markets and encouraged the free movement of goods, services, and corporations around the globe, in recent years it has taken on broader meaning in studies of politics, culture, and gender. In its current iteration, globalization also refers to the movement of populations, organizations, and ideas across national boundaries, regions, and cultures.

Given the importance of globalization in overall processes of economic, political, and social transformation, social scientists have been particularly eager to chart the impact of such changes on national and transnational populations. In this regard, feminist scholars have sought to document the effects of globalization on women around the world, especially those whose lives are plagued by the intersection of race, class, and gender—women thus positioned at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchies in their nations. On the one hand, while feminist researchers such as Valentine Moghadam have demonstrated that globalization has increased women’s labor force participation rates in many nations, her work also indicates that most of this employment has been created in low-status, low-wage occupations, which in the global North has meant more jobs at the bottom of the tertiary sector of the economy. Other gender studies theorists have examined the impact of globalization on women’s work in such fields as child and elder care, factory assembly, and sex work. Most of this research has focused on these activities in the global North and such global South regions as Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia. While the microenterprise sector constitutes the second major area of income earning for sub-Saharan African women, most of the attention in this sector has focused on women’s work as market traders. Outside of the microenterprise sector, beyond market and long-distance trade, less attention has been given to the impact of globalization on women’s work in sub-Saharan Africa.

Based on intensive fieldwork conducted in Harare and Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, in the 1990s, this chapter intends to move beyond the field of trade in assessing the impact of globalization on women’s work in Africa.