In the early 1980s, as a severe drought gripped the Sahel region of West Africa, a farmer in northern Burkina Faso named Yacouba Sawadogo began quietly reviving an old, largely abandoned farming technique on land near his village that many considered too degraded to ever grow anything again. The technique, known locally as zai, involves digging small pits into hardened, barren soil and filling them with manure and organic matter to trap what little rainfall the region receives, concentrating both water and nutrients exactly where a seed or sapling needs them most. Over the following four decades, Sawadogo expanded and refined this method until it transformed a stretch of previously barren land near Ouahigouya into an actual forest, earning him the nickname the man who stopped the desert before his death in December 2023.
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