For 76-year-old Naomi Nibishaka, life divides into two chapters: before the bridge, and after.
For years, visiting her son and grandchildren across the Mukungwa River meant a three-hour hike to a narrower crossing, or trusting a raft of tied logs that washed out every rainy season. People drowned trying to cross. Parents pulled their children out of school rather than risk the journey.
In 2025, that changed. The Cyangoga Suspension Bridge, a 70-meter concrete and cable crossing, opened above the floodplain, one of 96 bridges Fika has built across Rwanda since 2020. This week, NPR’s Fatma Tanis told the story of that bridge, and of new research showing what it actually changed.
Led by Evan Thomas, an environmental engineering professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, the study surveyed tens of thousands of households across hundreds of Rwandan villages. The research question was simple: “What changes when you get a bridge?”
The results, released in July, are striking. Household income and consumption rose. Families cultivated more land and used more fertilizer. School enrollment climbed. Near the Cyangoga bridge specifically, banana wine producers more than tripled their output, the local health clinic saw a 40% jump in patient visits, and more than 130 students re-enrolled at the nearby primary school. The bridge paid for itself within a year, returning 120% on the initial investment.
None of this closes the gap on its own. Villagers told NPR what they still need: roads, electricity, clean water. A bridge is one piece of a much larger picture of rural access. But as UC Berkeley economist Edward Miguel notes in the piece, as foreign aid budgets shrink, evidence like this matters more, not less, for governments deciding where scarce infrastructure dollars go next.
Read the full story on NPR: The bridges of Rwanda open up new worlds.
