Northern Ghana is often portrayed as being a poor, underdeveloped, food-insecure, riskprone and conflict-ridden area, especially when contrasted with southern Ghana. The authors of this chapter do not deny that the north is lagging behind the south in terms of economic development. Nor do they deny that the gap between the north and the south is widening, as is evidenced by Ghana’s Living Standard Surveys (GSS 2007). However, the findings presented in this chapter show that, in the eyes of northern Ghanaians, much has improved over the past twenty to thirty years. This chapter reports the findings of the Participatory Assessment of Development (PADev) project, which aimed to design a participatory and holistic method for evaluating development interventions. Northern Ghana and southern Burkina Faso were chosen as research areas because of the long tradition of foreign development cooperation there. Building on the first development activities of Catholic missionaries in the early 20th century, Christian NGOs have been active in northern Ghana for over half a century. In addition, donor money from foreign governments to Ghanaian state agencies has been used to promote development in the region, and secular (and some Islamic) NGOs as well as private business development-oriented initiatives have come on to the scene in the last two decades.