Empowerment of women the key to social and economic progress in developing countries

Caroline O’Doherty discovers how women in the west African country of Burkina Faso are working together to improve educational and economic opportunities for themselves and their communities

HE women of Burkina Faso represent a mass of contradictions.

Subjected to forced marriage and polygamy, excluded from education, denied personal income and property, bound tightly by grinding poverty and rigid traditions, and valued almost exclusively in terms of child production, they are the least powerful people in one of the world’s least developed countries.