Rural Poverty in West Africa

Life in rural Burkina Faso, one of the poorest countries in Africa.

What evidence indicates low income and hunger in the photo below? What high-energy technology can you see?

What is women's work; what is men's work?

Answers:

• poverty: worn out clothing (not the absence of shoes, or children not wearing much clothing, or the abode-walled and thatched-roof house)    
• hunger: swollen bellies of the children  
• high-energy technology machinery: the small, yellow, steel plow in the background (received from a French international aid society)

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Optional:
1) Visit a village in Burkina Faso and "experience" the complexity of rural African and Islamic life. Type "African village" in the search box and then select the article "Ten years of change in an African village: New Internationalist Issue 268."

2) Poverty reflects disease which in turn creates more poverty. Look at a graph of the cost of malaria, by major countries.