Burkina Faso, North. Yacouba Sawadogo, a 60 year-old Burkinabe farmer who has led an economic and environmental transformation in his community’s corner of the Sahel by replanting his own forest and further innovating pits called the zai. He is known as “The Man Who Stopped the Desert”, as in the title of a 2011 documentary on his 38 years of recreating the forest.