Before 2007, people living in the rural Burera district of northern Rwanda had little access to a health-care facility or doctors.

Firms working everywhere from China to Saudi Arabia have to navigate the often grandiose ambitions of authoritarian regimes.

Red Location is the oldest surviving relocation site in Port Elizabeth, where thousands of native Africans were forced to settle by the colonial government in the early 1900s.

The late German film and theater director Christoph Schlingensief convinced Berlin-based architect and Burkina Faso native Di'b'do Francis K'r' to build the Opera House for Africa, a music-education complex, in the landlocked country known as a center of African film and music.

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.

In addition to designing the Girubuntu school, MASS Design Group founders Michael Murphy and Alan Ricks helped select its site, get approvals, and build the organizational infrastructure to support it.

In 2001, while still a student at Dano, Burkina Faso the Berlin Technical University, Diébédo Francis Kéré completed his first project: a small primary school in Gando, his native village in Burkina Faso.