As the road heads towards Tamale, the main hub of northern Ghana, the land becomes flatter, the woodland thinner, the population more dispersed and the villages more dominated by thatched huts.

From Accra it is a 12-hour bus journey, give or take a blockage or two on the way. The Tarmac road is good, a token of progress in the country’s biggest reservoir of poverty. But, like the road, which continues on into Burkina Faso, progress has largely passed the region by.