Twenty-Five Countries, One Bridge: What Africa’s Rural Access Future Looks Like
In 2024, a delegation from Tanzania visited a few trailbridges built under Fika’s program in partnership with the government of Rwanda. Last week, more than a hundred development leaders from 25 countries stood together on a suspension bridge in Gakenke, Rwanda, in an unprecedented moment of cross-jurisdictional learning and exchange.
For many, rural connectivity is often only discussed in terms of datasets, investment frameworks, or national infrastructure plans. But in that moment, the impact became physical and immediate: a simple trail bridge linking communities to markets, schools, and healthcare. A bridge transforming daily life for the very last mile.
That experience captured the spirit of the World Bank’s Planning Rural Connectivity for Africa Summit, held in Kigali from February 16-18, 2026. The convening brought together governments, development partners, engineers, and practitioners from across the continent to confront one shared challenge: how to close Africa’s rural transport infrastructure gap at scale.
The Room Where It Happened: Inside Africa’s Rural Connectivity Reckoning
The three-day summit brought together infrastructure and transport ministries, development agencies, financiers, and technical experts to align on practical strategies for rural connectivity as a driver of economic growth and job creation. Sessions explored topics ranging from food-supply transport corridors to systematic infrastructure planning, financing models, and resilient road management
Together, these conversations underscored that rural access is no longer seen as a peripheral issue. It is a critical foundation to agricultural productivity, trade, service delivery, and climate resilience.
The Signal in the Room: Four Themes That Defined the Conversation
Across sessions and discussions, several themes consistently emerged:
From the Room to the Road: The Gitenga Bridge Visit
The most powerful moment of the summit came not during a panel discussion, but during the field visit. Delegates traveled to rural Rwanda to see connectivity investments firsthand, including the World Bank feeder road program and a Fika-supported trail bridge, the Gitenga Suspension Bridge, serving communities in Gakenke.
This Is Exactly What We’ve Been Building Toward
The Kigali summit highlighted a broader shift underway in the rural transport sector. For Fika, this moment aligns directly with its strategic evolution from implementing individual infrastructure projects toward helping transform how rural connectivity is planned, prioritized, and delivered across entire systems. We deepened and diversified our government partnerships in Fika program countries, while forging new relationships with governments across the region.
Fika’s experience combining technical expertise, community engagement, and policy partnership positions it to help translate this momentum into real progress on the ground. Our solutions, along with other innovations for scaling rural access, are relevant and urgently needed far beyond our program countries (Ethiopia, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zambia). The World Bank Summit demonstrated that countries across West and Central Africa, all the way to our Indian Ocean nations, have the political will and readiness to address rural transport infrastructure in the most impactful ways.
The Bridge Is Built. Now Let’s Scale It.
The Kigali summit demonstrated that Africa’s rural connectivity challenge is not a question of whether solutions exist, but how quickly they can be scaled.
