Worldwide, African women form the backbone of economies. We work fields, take care of children that are not our own, clean homes we do not live in, sell produce in crowded marketplaces, care for entire communities and raise future generations in the centers of colonial oppression.
Our labor—whether paid, unpaid, or underpaid—has been systematically extracted to build the wealth of the colonizers and sustain the parasitic capitalist system.
The contributions of African women to the global economy are massive. In Africa, women are responsible for producing up to 70 percent of food and participating in 90 percent of the informal economy, a sector largely unregulated and hyper-exploited.
Yet, this labor, which holds up entire nations, remains largely uncounted in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) estimations—the total value of all final goods and services produced within a country’s borders during a specific period—because it exists beyond the reach of State and capitalist control.
Meanwhile, in the United States, African mothers represent the most exploited and lowest paid segment of working women, disproportionately concentrated in domestic work, health care assistance, retail and other undervalued service sectors. These are the same jobs that became “essential” during the COVID-19 pandemic, revealing how central our labor is.
A history of stolen labor
From the first attack on Africa, which resulted in the capture and enslavement of African people, to colonial regimes that coerced African women into cash crop economies, our labor has always been central to capitalist expansion.
The enslaved African woman’s reproductive capacity and agricultural knowledge were both commodified under slavery. She became both laborer and labor producer, bearing children who would be born into bondage, fueling future generations of capitalist profit.
After enslavement, colonial and neocolonial regimes continued this parasitic relationship. Structural Adjustment Programs, IMF austerity measures, and free trade zones have all targeted African women’s work as a site of extraction. From the fields of Africa to care work in Western Europe, African women’s labor begrudgingly powers the colonial mode of production.
Informal labor, communal power, and the threat to capital
In Africa, the majority of women work in the informal economy—markets, food vending, domestic work, tailoring, farming—lie largely outside the control of colonial State regulation.
While mainstream economists and development agencies portray this sector as chaotic and in need of reform, the reality is far more complex. While the informal economy is a site of exploitation, it is also a site of resistance and survival where African women exercise self-reliance, build collective networks and circulate money within our communities.
Unlike the formal sector, which is largely regulated by parasitic policies that offer few meaningful protections, the informal sector allows for a degree of direct ownership over production and trade.
It is in the informal sector that we find models of cooperative economics, which is precisely why the United Nations and IMF—colonial capitalist institutions—want to disrupt it to pull African women into the formal capitalist economy.
Through schemes like digital banking, microloans and mandatory business registration, they aim to dismantle the informal sector’s communal power, replacing it with systems of taxation and control that insert barriers between African women and the economic systems we built for ourselves.
Take African hair braiders in the U.S., for example, women who have long offered braiding services informally as a full-time livelihood or a “side hustle.” Many U.S. states require braiders to attend expensive cosmetology schools in order to open a business, even though these programs rarely teach how to care for African hair, let alone braid it.
Thousands of dollars are funneled into institutions that ignore the cultural and practical realities of African women, all to receive licenses from a state that uses African labor to fatten their coffers while stripping African women of self-determination.
Rather than being a problem to be fixed, the informal sector provides a blueprint for a worker-led state: one based on cooperation. It is a living example of African women’s leadership in building self-reliant economies and it holds lessons for building a truly liberated society.
The formal sector: structured exploitation in plain sight
While the informal economy is often portrayed as unstable or inefficient, the formal economy, held up as the ideal of development, is just as exploitative if not more so. In fact, it is within the formal sector that the theft of African labor is legalized under colonial capitalism.
Take cocoa farming in Ghana, for example. Ghana is the second largest producer of cocoa in the world. African women and men, including entire families, work long hours to harvest a commodity that generates billions of dollars annually on the global market.
Yet these farmers earn a fraction of the value they create. Their wages are not set by Ghanaian workers or even the Ghanaian State, but by U.S. and European dominated cocoa conglomerates—Nestlé, Mars, Ferrero—whose pricing systems are tied to the needs of the U.S. and European economy and their own profits, not Africa’s or Ghana’s economy.
These companies, and the trade institutions that back them, set the economic terms for a commodity they cannot live without, while keeping the people who produce it in poverty.
This is the formal economy in action: structured dependency dressed up as trade. International “partnerships” and commodity boards work hand-in-hand with global finance institutions to ensure African labor enriches European profit margins, not African families.
African women working in these industries are doubly exploited, as laborers producing value, and as caregivers managing the fallout of low wages, food insecurity, and community underdevelopment.
The formal sector doesn’t free us from the grip of capitalism. It simply puts a badge and price tag on the theft, making it appear legitimate.
African mothers in the U.S.: domestic labor in the colony
Inside the U.S., African people live under domestic colonialism. As part of the oppressed colonized nation, African women and mothers, particularly, are overworked, underpaid and criminalized. African mothers are raising families in food deserts, navigating low-wage jobs, fighting State violence and are often the primary or sole income earners in our households.
Black women in the U.S. make just 67 cents to every dollar paid to white men—but also make far less than white and Asian women, who earn closer to 80 and 90 cents respectively, and even less when they are mothers, heads of households, or caregivers.
This is a calculated extraction. This economy does not survive despite African women’s labor but depends on it, thrives from it and has structured itself around its theft.
Communal labor: a double-edged sword
This communal labor of African women is a powerful expression of African life. But under colonialism, it has also become a source of exploitation.
African women are often treated as liquid labor—workers who flow wherever needed, shifting between child rearing, farming, trade, caregiving, and household work with little rest or recognition. In some cases, women are even traded across households and regions through marriage arrangements that treat them as another pair of working hands.
In other cases, the marriage of African women represents a loving and painful loss to families who depend on them not just economically, but as emotional and social anchors.
While communal life has its strengths, colonialism has historically imposed external economic and cultural demands that trap women within old-fashioned roles. It has frozen organic African development, blocking the growth of infrastructure, technology, and leisure systems that could free up society from only doing the work required to maintain day-to-day survival.
In doing so, it has locked African women into roles that once reflected collective necessity, but now operate under conditions of crisis and compulsion. What was once balanced and reciprocal has been distorted into duty and debt.
Women must do it all, all the time.
True liberation requires reclaiming communalism. It means freeing women from the expectation of total sacrifice, and creating the conditions where all sectors of society, not just women, can participate in building, healing, imagining and thriving beyond survival.
Liberation and reparations, not inclusion or charity
The struggle is not for inclusion into or charity from the colonial economy. It is for the total transformation of it. African women must not be reduced to micro-enterprises and State-managed “empowerment.” We must fight to build independent, liberated economic systems controlled by African people, for African people.
Embedded in our struggle for freedom and self-determination is the demand for reparations for the historic and ongoing theft of Africa’s resources, which includes the labor and value thereof produced by African women globally.
Organizations like the African National Women’s Organization (ANWO) exist because we understand that true liberation comes through organized resistance and political power.
Our work to build economic institutions such as DeColonaise Hair and Body, One Africa! One Nation! Farmers Market in North St. Louis and participation in creating liberated territory with the ANWO Liberation Center, is an act of resistance, a rejection of colonial dependency, and a step toward economic self-reliance.
The colonial world has always feared the organized power of African women. That’s why our labor is controlled, surveilled, and exploited. But when we are organized, conscious, and united, we are unstoppable.
True transformation will not come from shifting African women from informal to formal work, but from dismantling the entire colonial economy that exploits us in all sectors.
There is no such thing as empowerment without power. And there is no power without organization.
Join the African National Women’s Organization at anwouhuru.org/join!
African Women Must Lead!
Reparations Now!
