The village of Gando is more than a three-hour drive from the capital of Burkina Faso, Ouagadougou, on occasionally unpaved roads that thread through a landscape of scorched orange dust and isolated trees buffeted by sub-Saharan winds. It's an unlikely place to launch a global design practice, but architect Diébédo Francis Kéré couldn't imagine doing this anywhere else. “In the beginning, I built in Gando because I had a duty to my family,” says Kéré, who grew up in the remote agricultural community of 6,000 people, left to go to study in Germany, and today runs a seven-person office in Berlin. “Now people everywhere know me through this work, so I am getting something back from it.”

His first project for his home village was a clay-brick primary school, which caught the attention of the humanitarian design world—winning the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2004—in part because it was built by local people from materials made mostly on-site. “Francis is a great example of someone who works with a community, bringing knowledge, adapting it to the local means, and exchanging it—not just doing charity architecture,” says Andres Lepik, current Loeb Fellow at Harvard's Graduate School of Design and incoming chair of architectural history and curatorial practice at the Technical University of Munich. Lepik featured Kéré's work in the 2010 exhibition Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement at New York's Museum of Modern Art. “He also designs beautiful projects, which is important because you're not only providing for a need but creating something of cultural value as well.”