Francis Kéré was the first African architect to win the Pritzker prize when he scooped the “Nobel prize of architecture” in 2022. A native of Gando, a small village in Burkina Faso’s Central-East region, Kéré was once criticised by his neighbours for building a school for the village before constructing a house for his parents. But that project has led to commissions including the new parliament building in Benin, the Goethe Institute Dakar and the Las Vegas Museum of Art.
“I wanted to give something to my people, and that has given me an international career,” he says of his decision to build the school.
