While acknowledging the organisational challenges faced and overcome, the essays in this important book mount a concerted challenge to the popular notion that certain kinds of informal workers are too isolated and invisible to be organised successfully. A must read for all looking to understand the organisational strategies which transform powerless labourers into worker citizens.

Dzodzi Tsikata, University of Ghana

Women are exerting themselves across the world in wonderful ways. This is about more than combating vulnerability and oppression, although that is important enough. It is also about forging ways of living in which the human condition is enhanced. Women's organisations are reviving a sense of solidarity and rescuing the meaning of equality, while giving new meaning to the ethos of freedom. This book speaks to that agenda, and should be widely read.

Guy Standing, SOAS

While many talk about women's empowerment, this book offers concrete and inspiring examples of how it is done! The lessons and insights from these cases are relevant to all of those concerned with how to build "people power" from the bottom-up in a global world.

John Gaventa, University of Sussex

This book gets to the heart of the development challenge: by focusing on women workers, the informal economy, and organizing. With an insightful overview by the editors, illustrative case studies from several countries and an inspiring endnote by Ela Bhatt, founder of the Self-Employed Women's Association, the largest organization of women workers in the informal economy, this book is a must for anyone interested in the power of organization and the intersection of employment, poverty, and gender.

Marty Chen, Harvard Kennedy School