The Impact of Self-imposed Adjustment: The Case of Burkina Faso, 1983–9

Burkina Faso (‘the land of the incorruptible men’) is a landlocked, predominantly agricultural and densely populated country of 8 million people facing severe ecological constraints. These factors, along with colonial exploitation and neglect and subsequent political instability, have combined to make economic and social development a difficult objective. Nonetheless, Burkina Faso has not experienced the extreme balance-of-payments crises, debt problems and budget deficits that shook much of Africa throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Moreover, while it was not spared significant macroeconomic difficulties in the early 1980s, no full-fledged World Bank or IMF adjustment programme was implemented during the last decade. Instead, the government of Captain Sankara undertook in 1983 its own process of ‘self-adjustment’, which represents, to some extent, an alternative model to the programmes typically recommended by these two institutions for resource-poor and predominantly agricultural countries in Africa south of the Sahara.