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The north of the Fouta Jalon is one of the most deprived areas in the country. The land is rock covered with barely a centimetre of earth. The roads where they exist seem more like river beds, a piste of rocks and boulders. Unsurprisingly the Fouta has some of the highest rates of child malnutrition and among the lowest schooling rates in the country. I was there to follow up on UNICEF's Health, Nutrition and Education programmes, to see how we can improve our support. When we got to the health centres the shelves of the pharmacy where half empty. Not great if you have malaria and the nearest alternative is a days walk away. With the government we have an initiative to restock all the rural health centres in the country with essential drugs, but without a root branch reform of the health systems supply chain it is a stopgap solution. Koubia Prefecture is a hard place to move around in. To get to the health centre we were visiting we took about 2 hours to cover 60km, stopping to cross with a hand winched barge and having to take a motorcycle for the last kilometre when a truck, stuck in the mud, blocked the only passage way. In four days of driving i cannot have seen more than a dozen other vehicles and those the big trucks that carry goods and people from village to village. Given the isolation not surprisingly they don't get many people passing through; the children look out with a mixture of fear and curiosity not sure how to place themselves when confronted with a camera. In such a tough land, solidarity is more than a virtue it is a necessity. People get together to work each others fields on the big jobs, clearing the fields and hoeing the land. We stopped to chat to an old man, who had gathered his neighbours together to work the fields with foniou; later they would share a meal.