Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on longitudinal data from two cities in Mozambique to explore the dynamics of women’s work and how they cope with on-going change. The findings, from interviews with the same women in 1996 and 2010/11, particularly illustrate the effects of aging and changing household composition.

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws on a longitudinal study of urban women's ways of making a living in Mozambique and aims to understand the dynamics of women's work to cope with change.

Everyday activities and strategies of women (and men) in particular places must be related to wider contexts of social and economic changes. In this article, a livelihoods framework is applied within a theoretical perspective of critical political geography combined with an actor-oriented gender approach: gendered agency informs and shapes the individual and collective strategies of everyday politics in particular places.

Inspired by Whitehead's article Tracking Livelihood Change, I have revisited women in the two largest cities in Mozambique, whom I had first interviewed in 1996. At the time of the first set of interviews the focus was on women's efforts of making a living in a post-conflict situation of economic crisis and political transformation. Since then, with policies of market liberalisation and privatisation in a context of relative political stability, Mozambique has experienced remarkable economic recovery; during this period of time the women have been struggling to cope with the effects of that recovery.

This longitudinal study enables an exploration of inter-generational aspects of livelihoods and the findings shed particular light on the role of ageing and changing household composition as determinants of how women cope with social and economic change.