Thu 18 Jun 2026 • Nick Kershaw
The week we built a garden in Muganza
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Inside the 2026 Rwanda Impact Marathon: a week in southern Rwanda, a sensory garden built with the ASFA Physiotherapy Centre and MAD4Africa, and a race through the hills to celebrate it.
Last week, a small group of runners spent a week in Muganza, in Rwanda’s green southern province, a long way from any tourist trail. Although they may have landed in country for a spectacular race, and a beautiful medal. What they took home was built in the week leading up to race day…and that is the whole point of Rwanda Impact Marathon.
That week was spent at the ASFA Physiotherapy Centre, working alongside local labourers, parents, staff, and a few local police, to build a sensory garden: a flat, safe space for movement, play and exploration. The race, a trail marathon through the hills, came at the end, as the celebration, we call it The Victory Lap.
ASFA cares for around twenty-five inpatient children with a wide range of disabilities. The team there does extraordinary, daily work, helping each child not only to move more freely but to master the everyday: brushing their teeth, eating, dressing. What they did not have was somewhere outside for the children to explore, move freely, learn, and to simply, be.
Here is why that matters. In Muganza the roads are dirt, steep and rough. Wheeled things do not work on them, so a child who cannot walk has almost nowhere to go and nowhere to explore. They cannot safely play out on the street. Out the front of the centre they are seen by the whole village, which can be kind, but can also be daunting when you are small. So a child stays inside, learning the rooms, the walls, the ceilings.
The garden changes that. On the last morning of the week, the children rolled themselves out from under those ceilings, onto the newly paved trail, to sit in the sun and talk among themselves. The ordinary, handed to children who had every reason to think it was out of reach. That is the whole point of what we do, in one scene.
This is what a social impact marathon is, and it is the opposite of a race with a charity bolted on. The community chooses the project, the local people lead and are paid for the skilled work. Our runners bring the funds that make it happen and a pair of hands for the week. We do not arrive with a solution or take the credit. We help a thing the community already wanted happen now, rather than someday. The garden was built by the local team, and the local team will run it long after the runners have flown home.
It started, as the best ideas often do, with one person. An Impact Runner, Toi, suggested the project. We took the risk of a small group to pilot an entirely new event in a corner of Rwanda few people reach. It worked. Eleven years of Impact Marathons, more than two million dollars driven into the communities we run through, and this week sits among the ones we are proudest of.
We are going back in June 2027 to build the next phase with ASFA, bigger than this one. There is a 10k, a half, a full and, for the first time, an ultramarathon, so you choose the distance that fits you. You live on-site, work alongside the community, and run through the hills at the end of the week.
The race was never the point. The week is.
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The 2027 waitlist is open now, and it gets first pick of places before registration opens. Join it at rwanda.impactmarathon.com.
The Rwanda Impact Marathon is a week-long social impact marathon in Muganza, Nyaruguru District, in Rwanda’s Southern Province, run by Impact Marathon Series. The 2027 edition takes place in June 2027, with 10k, 21k, 42k and ultramarathon distances, built around a community project with the ASFA Physiotherapy Centre and MAD4Africa.
Impact Marathon’s charitable work runs through the Impact Marathon Foundation (GivingWorks, registered charity no. 1078770).
