At five in the morning, before the village of Savalou, Benin is fully awake, Véronique is already outside. The air is still cool, and the smell of fermented cassava hangs faintly around the courtyard. She adjusts the trays on her solar dryer, checks the texture of the gari, and calculates quietly, mentally, how much she might earn today. No supervisor is watching her, no office schedule to follow. And yet, she is already working.
Véronique is a widow, a mother of four, and a cassava processor. In development language, she would be described as a “rural woman entrepreneur.” In reality, her business emerged less from ambition than from necessity. After her husband’s death, no inheritance was guaranteed to her. Land access became uncertain. What remained were her skills, learned from childhood, and the obligation to keep her household afloat.
Across rural Africa, stories like Véronique’s are often celebrated as evidence of women’s resilience. Reports regularly highlight that women make up the majority of the agricultural workforce, particularly in food processing and informal trade. But what these narratives sometimes fail to ask is a more uncomfortable question: what kind of freedom does entrepreneurship actually offer rural women and at what cost?
In Benin, women dominate cassava processing, one of the country’s most important food industries.
Gari, tapioca, and flour are processed daily by women whose labor sustains local markets and regional trade with Nigeria and Togo. NGOs and development agencies often frame these activities as empowerment success stories, echoing broader continental discourses promoted by institutions such as UN Women and the World Bank, which link women’s entrepreneurship to poverty reduction and economic growth.
Yet on the ground, the picture is more complex. For Véronique, entrepreneurship has brought income, but it has not reduced her workload. Processing cassava requires long hours, physical endurance, and constant reinvestment. At the same time, domestic responsibilities remain unchanged. Feminist scholars such as Amina Mama have long warned against equating economic participation with liberation, arguing that African women are often integrated into markets in ways that reproduce, rather than dismantle, structural inequalities.
This tension is visible in Véronique’s daily life. Her income allows her to pay her children’s school fees, a fact she speaks of with pride. “Without this work, I don’t know how we would survive,” she says. But the business also binds her more tightly to unpaid care labor, informal markets, and climate uncertainty. When rains come late, or cassava prices drop, the risk is hers alone to absorb. And yet, to frame women like Véronique only as victims would be another form of erasure.
What is happening in rural Benin is not simply survival; it is strategy and trade acumen that’s rarely acknowledged.
Women organize cooperatives not only to access markets, but also to negotiate power collectively. Savings groups function as alternative financial institutions in a system that largely excludes rural women from formal credit. Solar dryers and improved processing techniques are quietly reshaping production methods, challenging the assumption that rural work is inherently “traditional” or technologically stagnant.
This collective dimension matters. African feminist thinkers such as Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí have emphasized that African women’s agency often operates through communal structures rather than individualist models imported from Western liberal frameworks. In this sense, rural women’s entrepreneurship is not just an economic activity—it is a political practice rooted in solidarity.
Benin stands out precisely because these collective structures are relatively strong. Women-led cooperatives, supported by local associations and NGOs, have enabled rural entrepreneurs to move beyond isolated subsistence work.
This does not mean the system is equitable. Land ownership remains largely male-dominated, access to capital is limited, and intermediaries continue to capture disproportionate profits. But it does mean that rural women are actively shaping the terms of their participation, rather than passively enduring them.
The phenomenon unfolding in villages like Savalou forces us to rethink how we talk about empowerment. Entrepreneurship here is neither pure liberation nor simple exploitation. It is an ambiguous space where women negotiate survival, dignity, and authority within deeply unequal structures.
To tell these stories honestly is to resist romantic narratives of resilience while refusing narratives of helplessness. It is to recognize rural African women not as symbols, but as political actors whose labor sustains economies and whose strategies quietly redefine what African feminism looks like beyond urban centres.
As the sun rises higher, Véronique finishes arranging her trays. The day’s work has only begun. Her business will not make headlines. But it will feed her children, support her community, and continue to challenge simplistic ideas of what freedom, entrepreneurship, and feminism mean in rural Africa.
Rachelle Sokpegande is an independent journalist and SEO writer based in Benin. Her work focuses on African feminism, rural development, and women’s entrepreneurship, with a commitment to telling grounded, analytical, and human-centred stories from across the continent.