The labour-intensive activities in the livelihood strategies of the poor include unpaid family labour, piece-rate work and own-account work in a myriad of informal small-scale trade, services and manufacturing enterprises (Whitehead, 2005, Chen and others, 2005). While these activities provide a living for a major proportion of the world’s working poor, they are rarely visible in official statistics. Long-standing inequalities in the gender distribution of resources have placed women at a disadvantage relative to men in their capability to participate in and benefit from broader processes of development.