Countries are sometimes compared using the measure of life expectancy. It is a telling measure but, after my recent trip to the West African country of Burkina Faso, I would add another criterion: "dress expectancy".

I travelled to the small, landlocked country at the end of October to participate in a regional conference.

The conference was organised by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and I was there as an MEP to make interventions on the need for West African countries to boost their economies. Many immigrants to Europe hail from this region; most are economic migrants.

A more stable economy in the region will have a direct effect on decreasing migration flows.

The usual criteria cited to describe a region like West Africa can be very eloquent.

For example, Burkina Faso has an adult literacy rate of 23.6 per cent. Its average life expectancy, at 48.9 years, is comparable to the European average 100 years ago.

But such statistics tell us where people are, not what they aspire to. The "dress expectancy" measure tells us something about the direction they wish their life to take.

In this respect, I was amused during the presentations made by African delegates (administrators, ministers, etc.) at the conference. Not by the presentations themselves, which were smart in content and delivery (in French). The joke lay in the difference between the way in which the African and European delegates were respectively dressed.

In weather of 40°C, most African delegates were impeccably dressed in western-style suits. On the other hand, many European delegates and staff were attired in traditional African shirts and tops.

Of course, this contrast says something about the European as much as the African participants. I will leave it up to readers to decide about the Europeans. Concerning the African colleagues however, I would hazard a guess that the choice of dress said three important things which were relevant to the conference theme.

Firstly, it seemed to represent the gap between lifestyles of the city and the countryside generally, not to mention between that of rulers and ruled.

Burkina Faso covers an area of 274,000 square kilometres. Its neighbours are Benin, Niger, Mali, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana and Togo. It has a population of 13,634,000. By African standards, the capital Ouagadougou is in a fairly good state.

The roads are wide and well lit. Some might judge the monuments (lions, birds, etc.) uninspired.

However, the administrative buildings of the court of justice and the ministries are substantially modern and impressive.

But the capital is not a mirror of the rest of the country. The urban population is 38 per cent of the total, making it the lowest in West Africa. The rest of the country is dependent on agriculture and still very economically primitive.

Farming is done by women with a hoe-like implement, meaning long, hard hours of work in a bent posture.

Although part of the western region, Burkina Faso is more like Africa's heartland.

However, despite this contrast, the second thing that the choice of western suits told me was that the aspirations across the country may have a lot in common. Indeed, I understood something more about the extensive migration in the region.

In Malta and Europe more generally, it is often assumed, quite wrongly, that African migration only travels northwards towards the Mediterranean and then across the sea.

However, migration is a very widespread problem in West Africa. In 2005, there were 7.5 million migrants in the region. Nearly half of all identified migrants in the continent are in West Africa.

Emigrants that remain within the region play a substantial role in its economic development. As a percentage of GDP, for example, Cape Verde takes 9.8 per cent and Burkina Faso, 5.8 per cent. This in a region where three-quarters of the countries have a lower GDP per capita than the average of sub-Saharan Africa.

Effective management of migration is therefore becoming a major issue with regard to the control of illegal migration and the fight against human trafficking.

Finally, the third message I got from the dress code concerned the role that Europe can play in the region's development.

In some ways, it could be negative if the European image of development distracted attention from great resources of traditional culture, which, to me, were exemplified by the bewitching life-size carvings, of wood and copper, of people, animals and deities.

However, Europe does have a constructive role to play in a region where the economic focus on staple commodities makes them vulnerable to the external market and reinforces the high level of poverty. It can also lend its expertise in governance to even out the region's wide variation, which ranges from instability to the consolidation of functional democracy.

A European-African partnership need not be a euphemism for a patronising teacher-pupil relationship. For all its difficulties, Burkina Faso is an exemplar of religious tolerance with both mosques and a cathedral present in the capital, while it has played host to a number of conflict resolution issues, the latest being the problems in Guinea.

Europe can help, through various initiatives, to support institutional capacity building and the democratisation process, particularly in the area of human rights. A lot depends on the quality of the aid we give, not just for Africa but for Europe's own prosperity and influence in a globalised world.

Dr Attard Montalto is a Labour member of the European Parliament.