Bridges to Prosperity

I am Avery Bang, President and Chief Executive Officer of Bridges to Prosperity (B2P), a social enterprise providing isolated communities with access to healthcare, education, and economic opportunities by supporting the construction of trailbridges over impassable rivers. Under my leadership, B2P has connected over one million people around the world. I was featured in the IMAX film Dream Big and have spoken on stages ranging from TED to the UN. I am a Distinguished Alumni of The University of Iowa, where I completed degrees in Studio Art and Civil Engineering, and The University of Colorado where I completed an MSc in Geotechnical Engineering. I earned an MBA from The University of Oxford and received an honorary doctorate degree from Clarkson University.

Globally, more than 900 million people travel by foot but lack access to pedestrian infrastructure that is passable during all seasons. Seasonal rains, and resultant flooding, effectively cuts off residents living in the rural last mile from the resources they need to thrive, including markets, employment, education, healthcare, and emergency services.

Bridges to Prosperity partners with local governments, global stakeholders, and communities to create sustainable pedestrian access to essential services through the construction of trailbridges. These trailbridges are relatively low-cost, designed to be built in remote environments, and utilize repurposed or locally-sourced materials. By providing a path for rural residents to reliably access opportunities, trailbridges play a foundational role in connecting a broad range of services to the populations that will most benefit from them, and have the power to improve the livelihoods and well-being of entire regions.

Analyzing geospatial and population data, we estimate that more than 250 million people are in need of a trailbridge globally. For last-mile communities that must cross rivers in their routes to roads and critical resources, heavy seasonal rains make the journey more dangerous. When rivers swell, reaching school, the doctor, work, or the market can become life-threatening without a bridge to cross. Studies from rural poor communities throughout the world have demonstrated that safe access provided by reliable pedestrian transportation infrastructure can have dramatic effects on the ability of residents to meet their own needs, care for their families, earn stable incomes, build resiliency, and weather crises (Roberts, KC, & Rastogi, 2006). When residents are not certain that they will be able to cross a river to reach markets, schools, or clinics, they are less likely to invest in farming more of their land, prioritizing school attendance for their children, or accessing preventative healthcare. They make decisions based on the risk of being cut off from resources and this perception of risk can cripple potential opportunities to improve key outcomes, locking rural residents in poverty (Lebo & Schilling, 2001).

We partner with local governments and communities in the world’s rural farmlands to construct trailbridges over impassable rivers and canyons. These bridges connect residents, previously isolated for weeks or months at a time during rainy seasons, with the services and resources they need to move themselves and their families out of poverty. A study by economists from the University of Notre Dame and Yale University (Brooks and Donovan, Econometrica, summer 2020) evaluated the impact of safe access provided by a B2P trailbridge. The study found that access has immediate influence on key economic indicators, such as farm profits, but also long-term impact on decision-making and risk-taking behavior. When communities are able to rely on a safe river crossing, they are more willing to take advantage of alternative labor-earning opportunities, which builds savings, makes it possible to sell crops that would previously have been stored for personal consumption, and reinvest in fertilizer or seed. As a result, communities receiving trailbridges (compared with a control group) saw not only a 30% increase in labor market income, but a 45% increase in investment in farm inputs, a 75% increase in farm profits, and a 59% increase in women entering the labor market.

54% of the population of frontier- and emerging-market countries live in rural areas where the primary modes of transportation are non-vehicular (World Bank, 2017), and a lack of access to vital resources severely impacts outcomes for residents living in the isolated last mile. This challenge is particularly acute for women, who bear a disproportionate share of the household transportation burden and who must overcome institutional and societal barriers to opportunities, as well as the elderly, those with physical disabilities, and small children (Roberts et al., 2006). For last mile residents, typically living on less than $1.90 USD a day, access is critical. 

The benefits of safe access extend to adjacent communities not directly or regularly affected by river flooding. Improvement of rural transport networks is shown to increase inter-district trade and general economic activity for entire regions, improve food security, and facilitate cross-community social engagement that promotes civic participation and well-being.

We at B2P believe that design and implementation of a rural connectivity strategy must be human-centric and inclusive. We have constructed our model around local government investment and ownership, elevating the voices of last-mile residents, and recruiting and training local talent, from program leadership to project foremen.

The focus of government investment in transportation infrastructure in frontier- and emerging-market countries is typically on vehicular roads that connect larger urban networks. Rural populations, who depend on pedestrian trails and moto transport, are often left out of national strategic plans for development, and this lack of investment locks them in generational cycles of poverty that are nearly impossible to escape from. Trailbridges provide these rural residents with a literal pathway out of poverty, and beyond that, government investment in connecting them to opportunity represents an acknowledgement of the invaluable contribution they make to the regional and national identity.

B2P was founded in 2001 by a construction industry veteran, after learning about the severe isolation of rural farming communities in Ethiopia through an article published in National Geographic magazine. Joined by family and friends, our founder would complete one or two new trailbridge projects a year, utilizing donated materials and labor and with the support of a few small funding partners. I joined B2P in 2006 as a volunteer and in 2008 as the organization’s first full-time employee. Over the last twelve years, I have built a global team committed to local engagement, efficiency, and impact, and together with local partners we have connected over 1 million people and are on track to double that impact in the next five years.

While volunteering with the Fijian Breast Cancer Foundation during my time studying abroad with the University of Iowa, I was exposed to the inequality caused by rural poverty, and saw that simple trailbridges were changing the entire healthcare system for a community, providing earlier diagnoses and more consistent access to care. The power of infrastructure captured me, and I returned to Iowa committed to build bridges to provide life-changing access. Initially, altruism drove my deep-seated desire to create change in the world, but I knew that to truly contribute to B2P’s work, I would need something more than passion. I chose to further my studies at the globally recognized Mortenson Center for Global Engineering at the University of Colorado, and my degree in Civil Engineering now informs B2P’s commitment to quality, my own understanding of responsible development models, and my passion for the power of the built environment to create inclusive opportunity. 

We are the only organization with global reach solely focused on connecting the rural last mile through bridge-building. Over the course of B2P’s history, I have led a high-performing team in refining designs and processes and developing systems and partnerships to scale. This track record of learning and growth uniquely positions us to solve the problem of rural isolation within our lifetime, providing a framework of:

• highly-skilled talent
• experts and advisors that elevate the organization’s capacity
• broad experience engaging with local governments
• and solutions to potential roadblocks

Designs and construction models have been standardized to be implementable in rural environments around the world, and we have to-date supported the construction of more than 330 trailbridges in 21 countries that serve more than 1.1 million people. Locally-hired teams in each country adapt designs to particular societal, political, and environmental conditions, and lead in partnering with governments to advocate for last-mile communities.

In 2019, we launched a first-of-its-kind partnership with the Government of Rwanda to connect the entire country’s last mile by 2024 through the construction of more than 250 trailbridges. We believe that this groundbreaking partnership will prove that national governments can prioritize, procure, and finance rural infrastructure at scale. The five-year program also aggregates a portfolio of projects large enough to randomize a controlled study of the impact of access on longer-term outcomes like education, health, and climate resiliency. We are excited to be partnering with a collaborative of researchers to create this invaluable evidence in advocacy of last-mile connectivity.

B2P, along with much of the world, paused operations in its program countries to abide by lockdown restrictions with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, East Africa, where our work is currently centered, was at the same time experiencing unprecedented flooding, making safe, reliable access more important than ever, especially considering the food security challenges many isolated communities were already facing amidst the lockdowns. We worked with government partners in both Rwanda and Uganda (current program countries) to develop a plan to resume construction of trailbridges but with strict safety protocols in place to ensure the health of our staff, local labor employed on bridge sites, and the members of communities surrounding the sites. These protocols included the provision of additional handwashing stations, posting of training images on COVID-19 prevention within and outside of all sites, thermal scanning and symptom survey of all workers before they entered site, distribution of a personal set of PPE for all workers (including face masks, gloves, safety glasses, and hard hats), and the enforcement of social distancing on site whenever possible. These provisions allowed us to return to the field and to continue to construct connection for communities in desperate need.

After leading B2P for nearly a decade, I understood that I was approaching the limits of what my intuition, training, and network could offer the organization. In 2017, I approached our Board of Directors with a unconventional but brave request: invest in my return to school to build my vocabulary and expertise in strategic business development and finance, or hire another leader with that experience, who I would support to lead the organization in a way I knew I at the time could not. The Board supported a year of sabbatical for me to complete an MBA at the University of Oxford, and when I returned to B2P, I led our pivot from a technologically-focused organization into a team of advocates, technical assistance players, and financially-literate partnership development professionals who are aiming to change the way that last-mile infrastructure is prioritized and financed around the world. I believe my ability to acknowledge my own shortcomings and to pursue continued learning, in and out of the classroom, are two of the characteristics that make me a powerful leader.

Poverty in frontier- and emerging-market countries is a culmination of many factors, including access to healthcare and education, farm productivity, and market return. Existing development interventions target these factors individually, with billions spent on services specific to education, health, or agriculture. This narrow focus limits impact in failing to address the expansive spectrum of influences affecting poverty for the bottom billion. Trailbridges are foundational to the successful delivery of a broad range of development initiatives, directly serving rural residents but also creating a network of connectivity that serves the entire last-mile development community.

B2P-designed trailbridges have a decades-long lifespan and require minimal maintenance. Considering the impact on incomes created by trailbridges, it is estimated that a trailbridge will pay for itself in economic gains alone in two years (dependent on population density). Other income-improving interventions targeting last-mile farmers require ongoing investment for increases in income to continue to be realized year-over-year, and other familiar development products, such as water pumps or solar grids, have short lifespans and demand significant maintenance. A B2P trailbridge, built to serve entire communities for generations, will generate 10 to 20 times the cost of the structure in additional farmer income over its lifespan.

Trailbridges provide safe, reliable access to critical resources that, if accessible, represent opportunities for rural populations experiencing acute poverty to improve both short- and long-term outcomes. We know, from catchment surveys taken at completed bridge sites, that members of last-mile communities utilize our bridges to access farms, jobs, schools, healthcare services and hospitals, religious facilities, and government services, and to visit friends and family. This connectivity is transformative – studies show that access to critical services like these improves health, livelihoods (through increased agricultural production, income, consumption, and economic resilience), academic performance for students, and civic engagement and collective efficacy at the community level (Brooks & Donovan, 2020; UNOPS, 2019; Roberts, KC, & Rastogi, 2006). Long-term, these outcomes compound to create improved well-being, poverty graduation, gender equity, and climate change resilience for entire communities, countries, and regions (ODI, 2010; UNECE, 2009).

The model outlined here has been foundational to our understanding of how an individual bridge addresses poverty for a community, but it does not take into account the complex network of gaps that exist between a community needing safe access and the completion of a new trailbridge. This is where our value as B2P is shifting.

We see our work in systems change taking three paths: building a global voice, proving model and impact, and providing technical assistance. In building a global voice, we seek to organize a coalition to strengthen the case for investment in rural access. In proving model and impact, we seek to deepen our collective understanding to better serve national policies and strategies for alleviating rural poverty. In providing technical assistance, we seek to remove barriers by creating a suite of tools and processes that could be used by governments or the private sector to create safe access at scale. We believe this work will create a global strategy for policy, financing, and implementation of last-mile connectivity programs and elevate trailbridges as a catalytic tool for alleviating poverty, all directly leading to the provision of safe access for a greater number of people and bringing the end of poverty caused by rural isolation into focus.

The 338 bridges completed over the course of B2P’s history currently serve an estimated 1,190,000 people around the world with safe access. Over the next year, we will partner to support the construction of another 31 trailbridges that will directly serve approximately 90,000 people, and over the next five years, we anticipate serving 7,500,000 rural residents through the completion of the national program in Rwanda and the launch of a similar program in Uganda.

Ultimately, we aim to solve the problem of rural isolation within our lifetime, with a specific aim of 2070. This will require a shift in the role that we play. Historically, the organization has been a leader in rural trailbridge construction, and has fundraised to co-finance bridge projects with local governments. To ensure that all 250 million people worldwide in need of safe access receive it, we will facilitate the development of a broad-reaching coalition of partners to fund, procure and deliver connectivity. B2P, while still an implementor, will more strongly participate as advocate, technical advisor, and innovator.

To position the organization for this pivot, we will focus on proving scalability, impact, and return on investment in East Africa first. 40% of the sites identified as in need of a trailbridge globally are in Africa, and more than half of the 82 million isolated people in Africa reside in East Africa. By targeting efforts here, we, in collaboration with local government and private sector partners, will connect 30 million isolated rural residents by 2030 and catalyze a global effort to solve the problem at scale.

We launched our targeted work in East Africa in Rwanda, through a five-year program started July 2019. In the 2020-2021 year, we will grow the Rwanda program’s annual bridge construction and address key organizational capacities to provide access for 1.1. million people by 2024 and build the case study of impact, scalability, and return on investment that will mobilize a global coalition of partners.

B2P continues to invest time and resource to build the capacity of the organization to grow and pivot for scale. We understand that the successful completion of the Rwanda program is critical both as a proof point for government partnership and to facilitate the large-scale research study on the impacts of last-mile transportation infrastructure that we believe will motivate governments and aid partners alike to invest in trailbridges as a catalytic development tool. B2P is responsible for raising more than $16 million in co-financing against the overall five-year Rwanda program cost of $28 million, a formidable goal.

There is a complexity to partnering with academics to launch a large-scale research program in parallel to the scaled bridge-building program in Rwanda. The research effort will provide valuable data beyond economic indicators and across geographic boundaries, but the structure of the study requires the research team to randomize against the order in which projects are built at the district level. This constraint on project scheduling inhibits B2P’s ability to operate with flexibility and efficiency.

Finally, programmatic activity scaled to a national level brings with it inherent procurement and staffing challenges. The Rwanda program requires us to source material, both donated and purchased, and qualified labor at a new level, and to coordinate with government partners who may be supplying and transporting materials to make sure they are delivered on-time and of the quality required.

We are cultivating a pool of potential philanthropic funders, exploring lines of credit, and pursuing opportunities in results-based financing to meet the fundraising challenge. 

To mitigate the constraints imposed by the research study structure, the B2P team is partnering with district representatives to determine project order earlier and has developed robust communication channels with the research team.

On the procurement front, we have added capacity to our procurement and staffing teams to cultivate partnerships with existing and potential suppliers and training programs to ensure that we are able to source materials, both locally and internationally, at the rate and quality required by the program, and to develop a pipeline of skilled talent as we grow our own in-country team and build the capacity of private sector partners and other potential implementers.

The national program to construct last-mile connectivity in Rwanda was organized in partnership with the Rwandan Ministries of Infrastructure, Finance and Economic Planning, and Local Government, as well as the Rwanda Transport Development Agency and the Local Administrative Entities Development Agency. The fabrication shop at the Integrated Polytechnic Regional College in Kigali produces the steel components for all bridges, and district partners secure materials, local labor, and land rights.

In Uganda, partnership extends from the Ministry of Works and Transport and the Uganda National Roads Authority to districts.

B2P, in partnership with geospatial data specialists, governments, and other last-mile service providers, is developing an analysis tool that utilizes geospatial datasets (roads, waterways, rural population distribution, administrative boundaries, etc.) and field-geolocated resources (markets, health centers, Community Health Worker routes, credit and savings institutions, schools, etc.) to create a digital landscape of services and routes available to the rural last mile. This new wealth of centralized data, contextualized in an interactive map, will help governments and implementors to better understand the barriers that residents in target communities face in accessing services and the potential for increased impact when those barriers are removed or overcome. Partners in this effort include the Tableau Foundation, Planet, EarthLab, Alteryx, and Datablick.

Finally, B2P has a long-standing relationship with Helvetas, a Swiss nonprofit organization with a trailbridge program focused primarily in Nepal and Ethiopia. We often share innovations and trainings between the two organizations, and are speaking with them now about participation in the last-mile access collaborative.

We work with local governments to map and scope the widespread and significant impact a last-mile pedestrian transport network could have for their constituencies, and provide a cost-efficient solution to connect isolated communities to services and opportunities. Our bridges are designed to be safely constructed in remote field environments with little to no access to modern power equipment. Excavations and foundations are completed by hand by community volunteers or workers employed by the local district, and rock, gravel, and sand are sourced directly from the river when environmentally and structurally appropriate. Each project utilizes repurposed cable and steel donated by ports and large construction sites for structurally-critical components.

Our program structure is designed to streamline growth and expansion within a country, creating efficiencies that allow us to serve more people with critical access through the construction of a greater number of trailbridges. The structure is based on a team model, where a “Build Team Lead” manages a group of specialists in procurement, community coordination, and engineering, with each Project Engineer managing a team of three Foremen. New Build Teams can be quickly hired, trained, and deployed as a self-contained unit, constructing, at capacity, 24 bridges a year each. These Build Teams are supported by a global “Advisory Services” team, which provides legal, procurement, training, finance, and policy support through global communications channels, an extensive network of expertise and counsel, in-person and distanced training platforms, and digital systems that allow for data aggregation, analysis, and delivery.

While we currently co-finance trailbridge projects with government partners, we believe that ultimately, transportation infrastructure is the responsibility of governments, and that the barriers that prevent these governments from providing rural citizens with critical access can be overcome with technical assistance and by raising the profile of last-mile connectivity as a catalytic development tool globally. As B2P demonstrates success contracting rural infrastructure projects at a national level and the Rwanda program demonstrates transformative impact, we believe that last-mile connectivity programs will launch across East Africa. By 2030, an expanded study on the impact of trailbridges on a broad range of outcomes will have been released, and this study, when paired with the proof point on program structure and cost-efficiency developed in East Africa, will motivate governments and aid institutions across the globe to prioritize last-mile connectivity programs to achieve key development outcomes. At that point, governments will procure their own infrastructure, and we will contract as an implementor and technical advisor.

In the interim, B2P funding currently partners local government support (typically covering the cost of locally-sourced materials and the wages of local labor) with philanthropic support. This support includes donated repurposed cable and steel, corporate sponsorships, foundation grants, and contributions from individuals, including major gifts and general annual campaign funds. The organization also employs concessional loans through financing partners to provide working capital for the purchase of materials in advance of trailbridge construction.

B2P government partners include the Rwandan Ministries of Infrastructure, Finance and Economic Planning, and Local Government. Budget for the Rwandan national last-mile connectivity program is allocated through district partners, and is primarily modelled as pay-for-performance contracting. In Uganda, government partners include the Ministry of Works and Transport and the Uganda National Roads Authority, which contract us as a trailbridge implementor.

Grant funding partners include a number of foundations that prefer anonymity, but current annual grant funding commitments total approximately $2.5 million USD.

Our Corporate Partnership Program has secured some of the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction industry’s most significant players as corporate sponsors, including Kiewit, Bechtel, and WSP. In exchange for a unique portfolio of benefits, companies underwrite the cost of a trailbridge project.

General annual campaign fundraising efforts typically secure approximately $500,000 annually from individual supporters giving primarily through an online donation platform and responding to our marketing communications.

Finally, working capital lines are provided by philanthropic investors and foundations with an interest in supporting our work in unique ways outside of traditional grant opportunities. The capital is typically concessional, and is repaid when our government partners reimburse on pay-for-performance structured contracts.

The successful completion of the Rwanda national program is critical, not only for the proof point it represents for the structuring of a country-wide program but to facilitate the large-scale research study being completed in parallel to the program. Together, these two case studies will raise the profile of last-mile transportation infrastructure as a catalytic development tool and motivate other governments and aid partners to include trailbridges in their own strategic planning. We are seeking philanthropic funding (grants and donations) in the amount of $10,700,500 to unlock the remaining $8,280,000 in government co-financing and carry the program through to completion by 2024.

2020 expenses reflect a temporary operational pause due to the restrictions put in place in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, and a corresponding slow in operational capacity as the team returns to the field but with safety protocols in place. Therefore, we anticipate 2020 expenses to be approximately $6,000,000.

While funding in support of national scale in Rwanda will be integral to the success of our program, we are most attracted to the Elevate Prize for the network, inspiration, and mentorship promised to award finalists. We are at a pivot point as an organization – we are transforming from an implementing organization focused on filling a technology gap to an advisory and advocacy organization that aims to catalyze a global movement for access. We are not the first to face the challenges associated with that pivot, and the opportunity to draw on the expertise and experience of the Elevate Prize and MIT Solve networks would be transformational for us.

We are looking for funding partners to help us unlock an additional $8,280,000 in funding from the Government of Rwanda through 2024. Beyond this, we are looking for expertise and support in a number of areas as we build capacity to scale last-mile connectivity significantly in the next ten years.

• Talent sourcing, training, and development, at the leadership level but also within country programs where hiring and onboarding is happening rapidly and tenures are timebound to program completion
• Large-scale material procurement
• Design of systems that make data collected on schedule, service delivery, health and safety, expenses, and impact informative, relevant, and actionable
• Design of an advocacy campaign around the efficiency of last-mile connectivity as a foundational tool to achieve a number of the SDGs, including support in packaging that campaign for conversations with federal-level governments and potential aid funding partners

In building a global voice for the importance of rural transportation infrastructure in development strategies, we would like to partner with other consortiums, research collaboratives, and policy-making organizations with shared objectives. These include the Sub-Saharan Africa Transport Policy Program (SSATP), the Partnership on Sustainable, Low Carbon Transport (SLOCAT), Sustainable Mobility for All (Sum4All), the Infrastructure Transitions Research Consortium (ITRC), and the Research for Community Access Partnership (ReCAP).

In building a coalition for connectivity, we are in conversation with or seeking introduction to a number of other international non-governmental organizations that serve last mile populations, including Helvetas, Catholic Relief Services, CARE International, and BRAC.

In driving funding and finance to rural transportation infrastructure, we are in conversation with or seeking introduction to the mission offices in Rwanda and Uganda of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the United Kingdom Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDA), the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ).

As we explore which implementers may be able to step in alongside of B2P to bid and execute on trailbridge tenders at scale, we look to partner with the United Nations Office for Project Services and the World Bank Transport and Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) Global Practice Group.