Rural development in sub-Saharan Africa is a vast area of activity embracing one of the most intractable problems of the 20th – 21st centuries. Much has been done since the end of the colonial era in the 1960s and a great deal has been achieved and yet the problems remain endemic and a real blight on the progress of human achievement. In almost all countries there remains enormous challenges in all sectors – health, education, agriculture, housing, financial systems, human rights, and basic services such as energy, water supply, transport and communications. The great irony is that today – March 30, 2010 – whilst millions of people carried dirty water to impoverished homes all over Africa, scientists celebrated the first successful particle collision in the Large Hadron Collider in Cern, Switzerland in the biggest machine ever built costing untold billions of dollars. Continue reading “Dealing with demons – Part 1: Development work – the realities of the long haul.”