Rural development is still an important policy goal in most developing countries where a high proportion of the population lives and works in rural areas. This book provides in-depth empirical discussions of contemporary development issues of rural development in northern Ghana with wider applicability in terms of the processes, needs, strategies, and recommendations for policy for most of the savannah ecological zone of Africa. Although the rest of Ghana is developing much faster than northern Ghana, its people perceive substantial positive changes in their conditions of life as prosperity trickles, albeit slowly down and out to them. Environmental change and economic globalization is rendering ineffective the adaptive strategies of poor farmers in northern Ghana. This book is an important resource for students, researchers, policy makers and NGOs with interest in rural development, dry land areas, marginalized areas and general development. The descriptions and discussions of contemporary challenges of rural development issues using vivid case studies are of relevance for comparison to different and similar country situations.

Colonialism and Underdevelopment in Ghana (1978) examines Ghana’s integration into the world economic system, and the effects which such integration had on its development. The time period covered coincides both with the institution of formal political control in Ghana, and with the use of that control to promote Ghana’s development as a peripheral capitalist nation, as a supplier of primary agricultural and mineral products and as a buyer of manufactured goods. 1939 is taken as the cut-off for this book as it ends the classical colonial period.

“A call to arms in the class struggle for racial equity”—the hugely influential work of political theory and history, now powerfully introduced by Angela Davis (Los Angeles Review of Books). This legendary classic on European colonialism in Africa stands alongside C.L.R. James’ Black Jacobins, Eric Williams’ Capitalism & Slavery, and W.E.B. Dubois’ Black Reconstruction. In his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, South America, the African continent, and the Caribbean. In each locale, Rodney found himself a lightning rod for working class Black Power. His deportation catalyzed 20th century Jamaica's most significant rebellion, the 1968 Rodney riots, and his scholarship trained a generation how to think politics at an international scale. In 1980, shortly after founding of the Working People's Alliance in Guyana, the 38-year-old Rodney would be assassinated. In his magnum opus, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Rodney incisively argues that grasping "the great divergence" between the west and the rest can only be explained as the exploitation of the latter by the former. This meticulously researched analysis of the abiding repercussions of European colonialism on the continent of Africa has not only informed decades of scholarship and activism, it remains an indispensable study for grasping global inequality today.

Dissatisfied with the persistence in understanding development as that which is self-evident and needed by all poor societies no matter their peculiar needs, circumstances, and history, Botchway (African American studies, City U. of New York-College of Technology) examines the latest attempt at engineering development in Ghana's Northern Region Rural Integrated Program. He investigates what such so-called development does in practice, by probing the constitution of its objects and subjects, their relationships, and their intended and unintended effects in explaining social change. The study is revised from his doctoral dissertation in political and social science at the New School for Social Research, New York; some of the chapters have been published as separate articles. The text is doubled spaced. Annotation :2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

Langan reclaims neo-colonialism as an analytical force for making sense of the failure of ‘development’ strategies in many African states in an era of free market globalisation. Eschewing polemics and critically engaging the work of Ghana’s first President – Kwame Nkrumah – the book offers a rigorous assessment of the concept of neo-colonialism. It then demonstrates how neo-colonialism remains an impediment to genuine empirical sovereignty and poverty reduction in Africa today. It does this through examination of corporate interventions; Western aid-giving; the emergence of ‘new’ donors such as China; EU-Africa trade regimes; the securitisation of development; and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Throughout the chapters, it becomes clear that the current challenges of African development cannot be solely pinned on so-called neo-patrimonial elites. Instead it becomes imperative to fully acknowledge, and interrogate, corporate and donor interventions which lock many poorer countries into neo-colonial patterns of trade and production. The book provides an original contribution to studies of African political economy, demonstrating the on-going relevance of the concept of neo-colonialism, and reclaiming it for scholarly analysis in a global era.