Empowering the Design and Construction of Rural Suspension Footbridges

In 2010, a group of young engineers from Arup began working with the charity Bridges to Prosperity (B2P) who provide isolated communities with access to essential services and facilities by building footbridges over impassable rivers.

This team of engineers have developed, on a pro-bono basis, a simple design tool to support the design and construction of suspension footbridges anywhere in the world. The “BridgeTOOL” is a design tool that allows suspension footbridges to be quickly designed, provides supporting construction documentation, and is a learning resource to educate and train engineers in rurally isolated communities throughout the world. As part of this, validation of the design methods required the physical construction of a bridge, which would also serve to provide feedback. The site chosen for the bridge was across the Muregeya River in western Rwanda which would benefit 10,000 locals by providing access to areas that during the wet seasons would otherwise be impassable, and has previously led to numerous fatalities.

The construction in itself was a feat of coordination and control over tough site constraints, a short 11-day program (for the superstructure alone), and the complexity of working in a developing country with limited access to tools and materials. Arup volunteers worked hand-in-hand with the local community, learning from their expertise in craftsmanship and expanding on their own practical construction knowledge. In line with B2P’s mission to empower local communities, Arup engineers will now focus on knowledge transfer and capacity building between Arup engineers and engineering students in Rwanda during the next stage of the collaboration.