(Fast Company) — THE LANDLOCKED West African country of Burkina Faso is one of the poorest places on the planet. Whipped by the winds of the Sahara and cursed with poor soil, it has an annual per capita GDP of just $1,200, earned mostly through subsistence farming. It doesn’t have diamonds. It doesn’t have oil. It doesn’t have any of the rare earth minerals that developed countries fight over. What it has is mud. And rarely, since God fashioned Adam, has that homely element been used to such remarkable effect. Diébédo Francis Kéré was born in a small village called Gando, about 125 miles southeast of the capital city of Ouagadougou. As the oldest son of the village’s chief, at age 5, he underwent a tribal ritual that scarred his face in a pattern of spokes, marking him as both a son and the sun. Two years later, he was sent off to the city to study — a rare privilege in his largely illiterate community. When he showed promise at school, he was awarded a scholarship to learn woodworking in Germany, an ironic prize for a student from Burkina Faso. “I was trained in carpentry for a country where there is no wood,” Kéré tells me, when I meet him in Cape Town at Design Indaba, Africa’s premier design conference. “We’re in the Sahara,” he says. “We have few trees.”
