Every day before dawn on the far Western border of Uganda, hundreds of people begin their journey.

Peter Morgan: "Ghana's skyline bristles with new development"

But this is not another hopeless migration of hungry refugees of the kind you have seen so often on the television news.

These are the workers of the Bugambe tea estates, and picking starts before the heat of the day.

It is a quiet, picturesque sort of an industry, being developed in a region which, for almost 20 years, was simply so dangerous that the only living available here was the poorest kind of subsistence farming.

Uganda - emerging from misery

Uganda has had the misfortune of being ruled by some of the nastiest tyrants to terrorise Africa.

The economy has grown three times faster than Britain's in the last decade

During the long years of misery under Idi Amin and Milton Obote, these tea estates were abandoned.

But now a British company has judged the country safe enough to hack back the jungle, and re-cultivated these gentle hills, where every day now five tonnes of tea are picked by hand and exported for blends like PG Tips.

In Uganda, here in the very heart of Africa, years of despotism, starvation and misery are making way for a new age of peace, stability and even some kind of prosperity.

Taking on the corrupt and crooked

There are a number of conditions, which have to exist for any economy to prosper. Principal among them are peace and stability.

Roses bloom seven times a year in Uganda

Upon this essential foundation stone a government must establish the rule of law. It must embark upon economic policies, which will regulate prices, exchange rates and trade. It must take on the corrupt and the crooked.

Tragically, in Africa, there are still too many examples of countries where few or none of these conditions exist. But Uganda has taken tremendous strides in the right direction, and for the past 12 years President Yoweri Musevini has introduced peace to Uganda.

He has also moved closer to democratic government than Uganda has ever been, and he has followed the instructions of the IMF and the World Bank so assiduously that Uganda has become the first nation to be granted debt relief under a complex scheme whereby developing countries, which show sufficient determination to reform their economies, will be forgiven slices of their debt to the rich Western nations.

And go to Kampala to see the difference. The capital is buzzing with traders selling Walkmans and TVs, while the new emerging middle class are sporting their designer clothes and fashionable shades.

Growth in Ghana

And Uganda is not an isolated example of economic hope in sub-Saharan Africa.

Ghana: 70% economic growth in 10 years

Ghana is another African country with a hideously bloody history, followed by a recent spectacular recovery.

Ghana lies on what the early European explorers named the Gold Coast. Quite apart from its huge gold deposits, Ghana has diamonds and more than its fair share of many more of the world's most precious minerals.

So too has its near neighbour Sierra Leone. The difference between the two could not be more striking. While Sierra Leone stumbles from crisis to crisis, Ghana is achieving rates of growth that most European countries would envy.

The skyline of the capital Accra is bristling with new development. The President, Flight Lieutenant Gerry Rawlings, is seriously talking about eliminating absolute poverty in his country by the year 2020.

This has been made possible by the unique decision of Gerry Rawlings, who seized power in a military coup in 1981, to introduce a constitutional democracy some 12 years later.

His office is now legitimised by popular mandate, and at the end of his second term in the year 2000, the constitution decrees that he will have to stand down.

Problems remain

Sadly, it is still absurd to talk about an economic revival across sub-Saharan Africa, where many millions of people are still quite literally starving, where tyranny is still widespread, and where Aids continues to ravage the population.

Ghana's economic growth has been severely restricted this year by a power crisis, which has plunged large areas of the country into darkness for large portions of the day.

It is because the country has become totally reliant on the hydro-electric output of the Akosombo dam. When the rains fail, and the level of the River Volta falls (which has happened with a vengeance this year), it has left the whole of Ghana's economy looking shockingly vulnerable.

Ghana was not called the Gold Coast for nothing

Even so Sam Jonah, the Chief Executive of Ashanti Goldfields, the country's biggest private company, not only enthuses about the prospects for Ghana's economy. He is convinced that Ghana with its constitutional democracy and free trade polices is providing a blue print for the rest of Africa.

"A wind of change is blowing through this continent," he says, echoing the words of Harold Macmillan half a century ago.

Uganda and Ghana are not flawless examples of what free market democracies can achieve.