Summaries Ideas about poverty and gender in Africa have been built in part on a conventional model of poverty and fertility, which implies that specific policy interventions such as female education will have synegistic impact. However, much recent anthropological work on reproduction in Africa challenges the simple, conventional model as being too deterministically demographic and ignoring the social construction of familial relationships as well as the possibility and importance of social marginalisation within families. This article describes the main findings of some of this research, and tries to draw out some policy implications for poverty and gender. It points particularly to the importance of seeing impoverishment or escape from poverty as gendered processes which can take place over long periods of a life‐cycle.