This thesis explores how women in Kinshasa’s urban agriculture sector navigate structural
constraints, including land commodification, tenure insecurity, and socio-economic exclusion,
to sustain their roles as farmers, sellers, and intermediaries. Drawing on eight months of
ethnographic fieldwork conducted between October 2022 and May 2023 in the Ndjili Kilambu
district of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the study is based on 70 in-depth
interactions, including 37 recorded interviews with female farmers, sellers, and other key
stakeholders. It applies a decolonial lens to examine urban farming as a site of situated agency.
Rather than privileging land ownership as the primary indicator of agency, the thesis analyses
how women access land and produce through rental arrangements, kinship ties, labour
exchange, and informal brokerage. These relational and negotiated strategies challenge
dominant survivalist framings, revealing urban agriculture as a practice grounded in
intentionality, adaptability, and locally embedded knowledge.
Guided by structuration theory and nego-feminism, and grounded in a decolonial feminist
methodology, the thesis develops Toyokani, a Lingala term meaning “we agreed as such”, as a
localised analytical concept. Toyokani captures how women navigate exclusion through trust,
negotiation, and informal reciprocity embedded in social and, at times, spiritual norms. This
framework offers a nuanced reading of agency that emphasises adaptation over resistance or
formal participation. Using narrative inquiry, the thesis analyses life histories across the
agricultural value chain. The study contributes to feminist and development debates by
introducing Toyokani as a relational ethic of agency, foregrounding the transformative roles of
overlooked actors in Kinshasa’s urban farming system, and calling for a reframing of urban
farming as a space of intentional, skilled, and locally grounded practice.
