Fri 19 Jun 2026 • Nick Kershaw
The bridge near Muganza: how one small crossing changes a village
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One crossing, one small fix, and what it quietly carries now. Why the most important infrastructure is the kind you stop noticing.
The best things we are involved in are the ones you would walk straight past…or, over, in this case.
A new sensory garden in a children’s physiotherapy centre - you notice. A race happening in a community that has never hosted an event like it before - you certainly notice. But the thing I keep thinking about is smaller and more boring than either, and that is exactly why it matters. It is a crossing. A way over a gap that used to be a problem and now is not, to the point where, within a year, nobody will remember it was ever a problem at all. That is the highest compliment infrastructure can be paid. It disappears.
The 2nd Rwanda Impact Marathon was an all new location, all new course, all new project. In the early days of building events, I moved from race to race, living out of two bags, and with no fixed home anywhere. I would live in each country for weeks, months often before the first event. But those days are limited now, a year ago, my daughter entered the world, and the playbook I’ve been preparing for this exact moment had to roll out. For all these years, I’ve quietly been building the infrastructure to move fast and create events with limited time…so I was ready with my mapping systems and route planning tools to build the race concept in Rwanda, send to the local team and adapt to their feedback. In all my planning, I had realised we needed a cut-through to get our race route the right length…and all the mapping in the world wasn’t showing me if this idea was possible. I worked out that the route descended into a valley and there appeared to be a way to cross the river before heading up the other side. I sent it to the team, and before long I was arriving in-country to explore the route. The entire race route depended on this cut-through working.
As we reached the turning point to head off the main trail, a lady nearby said “oh, no, there is no route through”. No! If this turned out to be true, we had no option but to tear up the entire route concept and start again. I stared quietly into the distance looking out over the plummeting valley below us, and the sheer climb on the other side…Rwanda, the land of a thousand hills…also has a whole lot of valleys to cross as well! As the chat continued and the team discussed the issues of alternative routes with the lady, a young man walked over to us…with a door on his head.
He said “yes, there is a route, let me show you.”
At this moment, my visions of running with the team through gorgeous trail now dissipated as I realised we would be hiking this one as the man, definitely had a door on his head. He was on the brink of marriage, but couldn’t tie the knot officially until he had finished building a marital home. The door felt like a reasonably pivotal element in this journey.
In addition to carrying a door for 5kilometres across the steep terrains of Southern Rwanda…the sight of an Arsenal shirt with #10 Modric on the back had me questioning if anything I knew in my life was actually real..
As we descended down into the valley below, following a technical trail that I knew the runners would enjoy, I looked up from my footwork to spot one of the most iconic sites I’d ever spotted on an Impact Race Route…the valley was forded, by a hanging bridge…Since year one of Nepal Impact Marathon where my original route had had some amazing suspension bridges that alas never made the cut…I’ve dreamt of a bridge on an Impact Marathon race route. And finally, we had it, and it was in the exact location we needed to make the entire event work. One small crossing, one small bridge, that makes everything else possible.
Small Step | Big Impact has been a core message for us, a pertinent reminder of why we do our events each and every year.
Big development announcements are easy to make and easy to mistrust, and they tend to be measured in the size of the gesture rather than the size of the difference. A crossing is the opposite. It is unglamorous, it is cheap relative to almost anything else, and it changes the actual daily geometry of people’s lives. What was a forty-minute detour becomes five minutes. In this case, the detour would be an entire day of walking! Cut down to 45 minutes. What was impossible in the rain becomes ordinary. What a child could not do alone, they can now do alone.
This is the whole philosophy of how we try to work, compressed into one object. We do not arrive with a flagship. We ask what is in the way, and then we help move it, and we let the credit belong to the people who will use it and maintain it long after we are gone. A crossing is not a monument to us. It is a thing the community wanted, resourced through the runners, built by local hands, and handed straight back.
There is an economic point hiding in here too. When you fix the right small thing, the benefit compounds. A reliable crossing means a trader can get goods to market on the bad-weather days as well as the good ones. It means a kid does not miss school every time the river is up. It means a parent can reach the clinic. None of that shows up in a dramatic before-and-after photo, which is precisely why this kind of work is chronically underfunded. It is too modest to make a good poster. It is also some of the most useful money anyone can spend.
I have come to think you can judge an organisation by whether it is willing to be invisible. Plenty of charities need to be seen helping. The better test is whether you are happy to build something that nobody will associate with your name in five years, because it has simply become part of how the place works. A crossing you stop noticing is the best work we do.
Impact Marathon did not build this bridge. Impact Marathon did not build the ASFA Physiotherapy Centre.
Impact Marathon did not invent running. Impact Marathon did not create trail racing as a concept. We pieced together the innovation of others, the dreams, the progressive concepts that already exist, to build a series of races that can themselves be considered innovative, life-changing, and deeply impactful.
We stand on the shoulders of all the change makers who have come before, and our prayer is that those who come after us, will clamber up onto our own shoulders to make impossible become possible once more.
We go back to Muganza in June 2027 to keep doing the small, unglamorous, compounding things. The waitlist is open and gets first pick of places.
You can be there with us too - just click this link to find out more.
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The Rwanda Impact Marathon is a week-long social impact marathon in Muganza, Nyaruguru District, Southern Province, run by Impact Marathon Series. The 2027 edition takes place in June 2027. Impact Marathon’s charitable work runs through the Impact Marathon Foundation (GivingWorks, registered charity no. 1078770).*
