Abstract
This paper examines the daily experiences of Jua Kali women entrepreneurs in Western Kenya, unpacking how gendered power relations are enacted in interactions within informal marketplaces, and in what ways women entrepreneurs mobilise agency within these structurally constrained contexts. Drawing on thirty in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations, the study reveals that, Jua Kali women face gendered control of economic resources and marketplace space, normalised gendered exclusion and gender-based violence, and extractive informal governance and harassment. Despite these structural and interactional constraints, women enact a range of responses, deployed individually and collectively, ranging from collective solidarity networks and strategic acquiescence, to tactful compliance and evasive resistance, as they navigate precarious structurally and institutionally constrained working environments. This study extends a processual understanding of everyday entrepreneurship conceptualising it as a gendered, embodied, and negotiated process of survival and restricted agency, shaped by the affective, spatial and institutional conditions of informal marketplaces in Global South contexts.