Abraham McLaughlin | Dowa, Malawi | February 1

CSM - Imagine a modern-day Eden - tended by a cheerful garden gnome - sprouting in the Sahara Desert.

That's the feeling you get, walking onto a 50-acre farm bursting with rows of healthy corn, thick sugar-cane stalks, and plump mangoes - all at the epicenter of Africa's growing food crisis, with its 18 million hungry people.

It's tended by a sprightly grandfather named Glyvyns Chinkhuntha, a man with no formal agricultural training, but a spirit of innovation, and a reverence for Roman aqueducts. Using just hoes and shovels, he's built an elaborate gravity-driven irrigation system of earthen berms and inch-deep trenches. It's revolutionary in a country where just 2 percent of farmers' land is irrigated - despite the close proximity of a lake larger than Lake Erie in the US.