Koudougou's Central Market is both a working market and the city's strongest piece of architecture. Completed in 2005, it won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture for turning a basic commercial need into a civic project, using local labour and compressed earth blocks rather than defaulting to concrete.
Go in the morning, when produce, cloth, household goods, and small stalls are at their busiest. The appeal is not a polished craft market but the way the building handles daily trade: shaded alleys, regular grids, earth walls, and a scale that makes the market feel like part of the city rather than a shed dropped onto it.