Small town Africa : studies in rural-urban interaction

Abstract

Small towns have often been considered as unimportant and have been largely ignored by policy-makers and researchers. Instead, attention was focussed on the large city or on rural development and agricultural change without consideration of the positive contribution that small towns can make to rural transformation. But for the rural majority of Africa's population it is the small town with which they have the most intense contacts. Case studies are presented from Botswana, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mali, Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan, Zambia and Zimbabwe.