Life expectancy at birth is 55 years, mean years of schooling for adults over 25 is…. 1.3 years. Yikes!  GNI per capita in PPP terms is $1,222. ( Digression: This is because you can have someone work for you all day for a dollar, so all the personal services provided in the economy are revalued by PPP; GNI at market exchange rate is far lower, so as any visitor to Burkina know, you can have someone work on your hair for hours, but not purchase a jar of jam).

Burkina’s trend HDI seems, from the HDI website, to be about the same as the rest of Africa.  The country started from a very low base.  A landlocked country in the Sahel with neighbors who are not up to much, except for Ghana which is anglophone and has few ties to Burkina, means growth will likely be slow.

Government official growth policy is known as SCADD, and seems to be a typical hodgepodge document without any clearly communicated emphases.  I think if you asked any ordinary Burkinabè what the development strategy of the regime was, they would be hard-pressed to answer.  That may not be a bad thing; no development economist worth talking to would say that “the strategy” is out there waiting to be implemented.  But the lack of clear vision for pro-poor growth means there is an appearance of little accountability, and so reinforces a pervasive attitude that among the upper-reaches of the regime it is business as usual with corruption everywhere, and this is not a good recipe for promoting legitimacy and eventual regime transition.