Title: Sahel visions
First published: 1995
Description: When an international health initiative succeeded in wiping out onchocerciasis (river blindness) in Burkina Faso (previously Upper Volta), it allowed the settlement of the sparsely populated Volta Valley by the Mossi people - a development plan by which the Burkinabe government sought to relieve population pressure, establish communities, and increase cotton production.

Anthropologist Della McMillan followed this visionary plan over twelve years as people relocated communities, founded farms, dealt with officials, entered the market, and in some instances moved on.

Sahel Visions examines familiar themes of development - land tenure, technological change, government pricing - as issues that affected people's daily lives. Over the years, certain settler households became highly successful; others improved their living standards but lacked the management skills to excel; still others acquired an entrepreneurial motivation and relocated to a new area where there were better opportunities to develop trade and agricultural enterprises.

McMillan's longitudinal study examines the question of how development occurs or fails to occur, and it offers unusual insight into how visions of progress - held by developers, settlers, and even researchers - originate and are revised. As a case study, Sahel Visions synthesizes much other work on this well-known project and offers sensible recommendations to planners for diversified production systems of crops, livestock, and nonfarm employment.

In addition to providing a touchstone for similar endeavors, it brings the concepts of ecological anthropology to the study of economic development in the Third World.
Subjects: Autorité des aménagements des vallées des Volta, Economic conditions, Land settlement, Land use, Mossi (African people), Onchocerciasis Control Programme in the Volta River Basin Area, Planning, Rural development projects, Land use, asia, Colonisation intérieure, Projets de développement rural, Utilisation du Sol, Planification, Mossi (Peuple d'Afrique), Conditions économiques, Landnutzung, Onchozerkose, Colonization and settlement, Project appraisal, Développement rural, Utilisation agricole du Sol, Cécité, Prévention, Programme de lutte contre l'onchocercose en Afrique de l'Ouest, Onchocerciasis, Prevention & control, Rural Population, Rural Health, Blindness, Social Conditions, Developing Countries, Economics, Autorité des aménagements des vallées de Volta
Places: Burkina Faso
LC classification: HD1018.Z63 M33 1995