This paper is concerned with assessing the impact of roads on the rural poor in West Africa, with specific reference to two countries, Ghana and Nigeria. These countries provide very useful case studies because of their often contrasting economic histories over the last three decades. In looking to assess the impact of roads on the rural poor, I intend to focus particularly on women since, in West Africa, women generally experience much higher levels of poverty than men, as numerous studies attest. Despite the attention now paid to gender issues in development, gender has still not been fully mainstreamed into either the infrastructure debate or the debate on rural transport services (Fernando and Porter, in press). I also consider differences between roadside and off-road impact of road construction and maintenance projects. My approach is thus to focus on two gaps in the roads literature on Africa: the shortage of gender-disaggregated research on road impact and the tendency for impact studies to concentrate on the immediate roadside only.