Rural Households in Emerging Societies

The constantly changing circumstances of rural life in sub-Saharan Africa have brought with them both successes and failures. The essays in this volume examine the various pressures and inducements to changing resource-use patterns faced by rural households and explore the two-way causal relationship between technology and technological change on the one hand and other key elements of rural change - demographic environmental economic social and political - on the other. Contemporary approaches to the introduction of technical innovations are examined and new approaches are proposed. Through case studies of particular communities the wide-ranging impacts of past experiences are assessed and the causes and consequences of indigenous initiatives are explored.