You know when you start watching a video of images of Burkina Faso and it starts off with pictures of the president followed by the by-line 'Land of Upright People' that you're not going to get a critically challenging review of the country, one of the poorest countries on the planet.

Yet this video, created to celebrate the fiftieth Burkina Faso's independence in 1960, still provides a useful insight into the country with a sequence of images depicting its people, towns, rural communities and countryside.

Burkina Faso is a country with a tropical climate with warm, dry winters and hot, wet summers. It is poor in natural resources; limited to manganese, limestone, marble, phosphates, pumice, salt with small deposits of gold. Burkina Faso, meaning 'the country of honourable people' is a neighbour to Mali to the north, Niger to the east, Benin to the south-east, Togo and Ghana to the south and Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) to the south-west.

Most of the population of 16.7 million live in poverty in rural communities, scratching out a living on land, of which less than 18% is arable, that is increasingly turning to desert and suffering from recurring droughts.

After you've watch these images why not take a virtual tour of the country using the interactive Google satellite map here?