When travelling through rural Burkina Faso, you get the impression that not much has changed in the last 50 years. People do no longer wear traditional clothes, but in the villages life goes on as always. There is no electricity and water has still to be fetched from a well. And even the tin roofs that can be seen in other African states have not yet replaced the traditional straw roofs – not because the Burkinabé realized that the climate is better under a straw roof, but because the villagers are generally so poor that they cannot even afford a tin roof. (Burkina Faso has one of the lowest GDP per capita figures in the world.) Another thing that strikes the visitor is the fact that whenever you come into a compound or village, there are always lots of children who either accompany the visitor or work for their parents. But this means that they do not attend any school. The UN Development Program Report ranks Burkina Faso as the country with the lowest level of literacy in the world. Only 21.8% over 15 can read and write (male 29.4%, female 15.2%).
One further aspect to mention is that polygamy is still very popular in Burkina Faso. It is quite common that one man has got four or five wives and therefore sometimes more than twenty children.
I published two further photo galleries about Burkina Faso: “Healers, soothsayers and magic places in Burkina Faso” https://pbase.com/neuenhofer/healers_soothsayers_and_magic_places_in_burkina_faso (the same gallery in French: "Guérisseurs, devins et féticheurs et des places magiques ŕ Burkina Faso" https://pbase.com/neuenhofer/guerisseurs_devins_et_feticheur_burkina_faso ) and Gold Mining in Burkina Faso https://pbase.com/neuenhofer/gold_mining_in_burkina_faso

Have a preview of my complete book about Burkina Faso (172 pages with 300 photos). The texts in the book are in German. If you do not speak German, just enjoy the photos!