Yacouba Sawadogo: The Farmer Who Grew a Forest in the Sahel

Yacouba Sawadogo was a Burkinabé farmer who spent four decades reviving one of the Sahel's oldest soil and water techniques, known as zaï, on his land near Gourga in northern Burkina Faso. Starting in the early 1980s during a period of severe drought, he dug and refined planting pits packed with manure and organic matter, letting termites and rainfall turn hard, barren earth back into productive farmland. His experimental plot grew into a roughly 40-hectare forest of more than 60 tree and bush species, and his modified zaï pits have since been adopted by farmers across a 6,000-kilometer stretch of the Sahel, in some cases lifting crop yields by up to 500%. Known as 'the man who stopped the desert,' Sawadogo won the Right Livelihood Award in 2018 and UNEP's Champions of the Earth award in 2020, before his death in December 2023.