This chapter stresses the importance of two analytical considerations in understanding the relationship between gender and poverty in the Global South: first, the deep informality of the cities in spatial and economic terms, and second, the re-articulation of production-social reproduction relations for the development of cities in the context of global neoliberal capitalism. These two conditions, I argue, simultaneously intensify the burdens that urban development places on women and hence their greater poverty, and increase opportunities for active citizenship and collective action by poor women. Combined they place women’s grassroots activism at the centre of a gendered urban poverty analysis. To substantiate this argument I will reflect on experience of poor women in townships of post-apartheid South Africa, whose burden and responsibilities for social reproduction both at home for family and at neighbourhood for municipal services has expanded. But at the same time and most importantly through their community activism for shelter and against evictions and service cut-offs their arena of citizenship practice and collective action has expanded to achieve a more just city. Before I delve further into this discussion I need to make two clarifications: