After completing koranic school in Mali, Yacouba Sawadogo came back to his village in Burkina Faso and started trading. While he prospered in this business, he also noticed that the land was degraded where he lived, and people were moving to other regions as nothing was growing there anymore.

Yacouba began to experiment and adapt the ‘zaï’ method to recover degraded land and it worked. In 40 years, he has been able to transform some 40 hectares of previously bare land into a forest of 90 species of trees, many of which are used in traditional medicine.

“Land does not belong to one person, but to several generations. That's why we have to take care of it and not just think about ourselves individually. I urge you to take care of it, to preserve it, because the richness of a land is infinite,” says Yacouba.