 And good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on where you're joining us from today. Welcome to Engineering for Change, or E4C for short. Today we're pleased to bring you this month's installment of our E4C webinar series, focusing on how to measure the impact of rural infrastructure and emerging economies. My name is Yana Aranda, and I'm the president of Engineering for Change. And I'm thrilled to welcome to our webinar today, Abby Noriega, the vice president of evaluation at British Two Prosperity, along with her colleague Oliver Baguita, who is part of their Rwanda monitoring and evaluation team. And we will hear more about our speakers as we move forward. So the webinar you're participating in today will be archived on the E4C site, as well as on our YouTube channel, both of the URLs for those recordings are available on the slide that you are seeing right now. Information on upcoming webinars is also available on the E4C site. 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This is going to be Impact Engineering, which is going to be virtual for the first time this year, typically we hosted in New York City where we are headquartered, but now we are able to bring in all of you to join us at this event and networking experience on December 3rd and 4th. Registration is free, which is, I think, my favorite price. And we are going to be looking at three key pillars in our domain, including ecosystems for social impact and how we're going to deliver the United Nations 23 agenda in the time of crisis, understanding the role of enterprise in improving lives and livelihoods and our poll-to-poll innovation session, and then really taking a look at the role of engineering associations and academic institutions and driving sustainable development as part of our Engineering 2030 pillar. So now that we've shared some upcoming exciting events, we want to hear about you and give a test of our Zoom capabilities here today. We want to make sure that we know where you're from. So please, in the chat window, please type in your location. It should be located in the bottom right of your screen. If it's not open, please find the button with the slides. I'll include me. So we have Ohio in the UK, Sweden and Boston, Massachusetts. Welcome from South Carolina and London, Virginia, and New Brunswick, Canada, Denver, of course, and New York. We're so excited to have you from New Hampshire and Iowa, Nigeria. Welcome, South Africa. It looks like we have a great audience here today. Also, Spain, excellent. Keep the answers coming. Please be mindful of using the chat specifically for remarks during the webinar. And if you have any technical questions, feel free to set a private chat to the Engineering for Change admin. There we go. And then during the webinar, for any questions for our presenters, please kindly use the Q&A box. The Q&A icon is also in the bottom right of your screen. And then we will be able to aggregate all the questions and address them at the end. So welcome, everyone. We're so excited to have you from all around the world. It's a real thrill for us to have everyone from Rwanda to Colorado to Finland. So it's my pleasure now to introduce you to our first presenter. Oopsies. Sorry, just accidentally put my chat over this. Abby Noriega, who is the Vice President of Evaluation and leads the Monitoring and Evaluation Research for ArtBritish II Prosperity, including the Catchment Survey Program in Rwanda and External Research Partnerships. She works to understand the impacts that B2P-Pochilbuch projects have in communities around the world and to develop ways to collect, manage and use data to make informed decisions in every program in department. Over the last decade, her work has spanned operations, development, systems, advocacy, monitoring and evaluation and research with focuses in agriculture, marine resources, environmental policy, gender and poverty. She's currently completing a master's in civil engineering with a focus on geomatics at the University of Colorado, Denver, as if she doesn't seem busy enough to you all. And she's also joined today by Oliver Maglita, who is the Rwanda Monitoring and Evaluation Coordinator and coordinates all activities for B2P's monitoring programs in Rwanda, in addition to providing support for external research partnerships and liaising with government and community stakeholders. She graduated from Macarena University in Uganda in 2017 with a degree in population studies and completed an academic internship with Kiboga District Local Government where she supported the social assistance grants for empowerment by working with vulnerable people. Oliver returned to her home country, Rwanda, to work as a researcher assistant before joining iPar Rwanda and later B2P. So I'm going to stop sharing my screen, ladies, and turn over the screen to you. Welcome, Abby, welcome, Oliver. We're so excited to hear your insight. Thank you so much. What an intro. So hi, everyone. Thanks so much for being with us today and please excuse my voice this morning. I'm just getting over a cold. And like many of us, I have small children in the house. So if you hear bumps or screams or laughing, you know why. So I'm Abby. I lead monitoring and evaluation and research partnerships at Bridges to Prosperity, otherwise known as B2P. I'm joined today by Oliver Baguiza who coordinates our monitoring and evaluation in Rwanda. So we're going to talk with you today about a project we operated over the last year to investigate the reach of rural infrastructure. And to dig into not only what we learned, but how we operated, just in hopes that it might be useful or interesting to others that need to find cost effective and high value ways to understand the impact of community or regional level infrastructure. For us, this was a challenge. So it's important for us to share what we learned here. But before we get into that, I want to tell you a little bit about what Bridges to Prosperity does and why. All right, so millions of people around the world face barriers like this on their routes to critical destinations. So whether that's a school or a hospital, a job or a market, and we know that transportation barriers like flooded rivers can be devastating for rural communities. So if you are geographically isolated and have inadequate transportation access, you are much more likely to be very poor. In fact, a recent UN report noted that networked infrastructure is important for 72% of SDG targets. A study by our own research partners found that river flooding alone led to an 18% decrease in wage labor income for rural households. And in our own needs assessments, it's pretty unusual for communities to not report several recent injuries and at least one recent death that has resulted from people attempting to cross the river when it was flooded. Geographic isolation and lack of access is a big deal for rural communities. Our organization focuses on trail bridges because we believe they are the most efficient way to address rural isolation at scale. So we partner with national and local governments to build bridges like these. Our organization was founded on the idea that trail bridges are a simple solution to a big problem. But over the years we've learned through our own monitoring work and through external research efforts, the trail bridges are actually one of the best tools we have for alleviating rural poverty. So a randomized control trial in Nicaragua found that B2P trail bridges increased labor market incomes by 36% and a pilot study that we just wrapped up in Rwanda this year found similar results which are pretty interesting given Rwanda's high rural population density, the highest in sub-Saharan Africa. Those same researchers in Nicaragua also published some compelling findings about agricultural incomes, opportunities for women and the return on investment in just one year for projects that will serve communities for decades. So at this point we're pretty confident that bridges are a great choice if you want to invest in rural access. And so we have thrown it all in on that. To date we've worked with government partners to build 350 bridges in 21 countries. We just celebrated 350 last week. And we estimate that those bridges have created new safe access for more than a million people. So later on in this talk we'll talk more about how we get to that estimate because as we know that's not as simple as it might seem. We're very proud of that. Every bridge is a labor of love and an example of how public and private partnerships can work to create real impact in this global effort to end poverty. But the problem is still enormous. It's probably upwards of a billion people. And though we felt really good about building a few dozen foot bridges a year, that's nothing small, we knew we wanted to solve this problem in our lifetime. And so we needed to make a bigger dent and we needed a new strategy. So we did a little soul searching and a lot of research and strategizing around this question. What are the real barriers? Not just the barriers we want to solve but what are the real barriers to solving the problem of rural access and what is the most effective way we can play the most effective role we can play as an organization in addressing those barriers. So let's start with design. We know bridge design is a barrier and most governments in low and middle income countries don't have the capacity to design inexpensive durable structures for remote environments. But this actually turned out to be a pretty easy problem to solve. We talked some of the most talented bridge engineers in the world to come volunteer for us or come work for us. And we paired that knowledge with local expertise to create a standard set of designs that are durable and cost effective and frankly also beautiful because we believe that beauty in the built environment should be for everybody. We make those available and provide technical assistance as needed to nations where we don't operate program countries. So we feel like that's pretty well covered. We know construction can be a barrier but our big challenge here has just been to support local builders and safe construction practices that are tailored for a remote environment. We're heavy machinery often isn't an option in part because you just can't get it there. The skills and capacity are there. We just needed to provide some guidance. So we feel like that's covered as well. Funding, this is the most difficult and maybe the least fun problem to solve at least for a bunch of bridges engineers. The good news is that governments and aid organizations are already spending lots and lots of money on transportation infrastructure. It's just mostly going to vehicular infrastructure. So we felt like it's also up to us to help mobilize and direct some of that funding that's already being spent to where we believe it's most effective which is in rural transport that serves very low income people in a direct way rather than solely in vehicular transport in the hopes that those benefits trickle down to the people who are poorest in a particular region. And so there's a few ways to do that but one of the most important strategies and what falls on my team is evidence and building that body of evidence. And that's what we're here to talk about today. So here is our trail bridges theory of change. This looks complicated but I promise I'm going to break it down. If you're not familiar with the concept of a theory of change, it's basically a way to describe why you do what you do. So over here on the left, we build bridges and all the way over here on the right are the high level impacts we expect to see as a result and you can tie those to the sustainable development goals. But it's our job and my team's job in particular to prove all these bits in the middle. And so with our research partnerships we've been able to tackle those short to long-term outcomes all the ones in here over the last few years earlier I mentioned an RCT in Nicaragua in a matched cohort study in Rwanda and those tracked outcomes like improved health, school achievement and household income. And just this August, the Morton's and Center in Global Engineering at CU Boulder launched a longitudinal RCT in Rwanda with 200 sites and something like 20,000 households. And that is very exciting and important but this work still only looks at what's happening in the few communities nearby. It's just not practical or cost effective to conduct a study that rigorous without having a targeted population and you can't survey the entire country. So they're focusing on the population closest to the bridge. And we know that one of the most important metrics is just how many people are served by a single bridge. When it comes down to it most people just wanna know the impact in terms of the number of people. So how do we answer this question? It's not as simple of an answer as it may seem and it's a challenge that's not unique to us at Bridges to Prosperity. Really any organization or government that creates a community or regional level infrastructure is gonna struggle with how to quantify that benefit in simple terms. So there are some obvious approaches. Traffic counters like the ones that you see on roads or in parks are useful but they only get you traffic volume. You don't get a sense of unique users or where they're coming from. There have been some cool innovations and counting pedestrians in recent years. Push buttons at crosswalks are a favorite of mine but they don't work in a rural context and particularly not in Rwanda. In the future we may be able to use tools like WorldPop which estimates the population across spatial features but not without first understanding journey patterns and usage relative to that data. Focus groups are what we've done for most of our organization's history. In the project assessment phase when we're identifying sites where bridges may be needed we speak with local leaders and stakeholders and ask them what communities use the crossing to reach essential services. On average, this assessment turns up about three unique communities per bridge. So three unique communities per bridge meet that criteria for meeting that crossing to reach essential services like markets, employment opportunities, healthcare and schools. And with that you still don't have a sense of who is actually using the crossing or who might use the bridge once it's built. This is the best estimate of the people that know the location, the very best, right? So it's our assessors who work closely with those communities and the communities themselves. It's valuable, but it still doesn't tell the whole story. So our solution to this problem frankly wasn't very sophisticated but it also didn't cost much and it worked really well and it's a flexible enough methodology that we believe it's scalable for us. We can use this all across the country and in new geographies and probably useful well beyond our sector. So in short, we showed up at bridges and asked people where they lived, where they were going and what they were doing. It's basically a point of service survey with a spatial extent and that's what makes it really interesting. So now I'm going to turn it over to my colleague Oliver Boguiza to talk more about how we did it since she and her team did all the field work. Oliver? Yes, thank you so much Abby. Good morning, good afternoon and evening wherever you are. I hope you're having a good day. I am Oliver Boguiza, Monterey Land and Devaluation Coordinator, runner program, Bridges for our team. As Abby said, I want to share with you what we found out when we did the catchments as we are trying to understand the impact of our bridges where they've been built and we will see as we go ahead, building and combating rural isolation caused by impossible rivers. How we're going to help these communities that have been isolated because of the impossible rivers. So as Abby said, I'm going to talk about the catchment survey that has been happening in Rwanda since last year. Catchment service were launched in August 2019 after a few months of movement and testing. The primary purpose of the catchment was to understand the geographical area sub by a complete bridge and conducting surveys at the bridge to learn the origin, the destination of the people crossing or the people using the bridge. We also asked participants their purpose of the travel, both to be able to understand the results and to focus or to do focus group discussion as a result, to understand the same sites or understand how that specific sites impacted their lives and gain a better understanding of generally how people use this bridge. We knew it was very important to capture seasonal variations in the crossings. We based the number of the sites on the capacity of a small team and determined that if we wanted to capture for four full weeks at each site, one week per season, we could do six sites and this applied to the agricultural seasons, which is A, B and C. To break a little as this season's down, A, season A covers from the month of September to January, that falls in the following year. In season B, it goes from March to July. In season C, which is the shortest and where people concentrate on the irrigation goals for August and September, which as I said for seasons, it is also varied for dry season and wet season. We randomly selected three sites from the inventory of our sites that were completed prior to 2019 and three sites from the inventory of our sites that were completed in 2019 or within 2019 in order to send our catchment survey results to our search partners who were in two simultaneously collecting household surveys in those specific sites. In the testing phase of our catchments, we attempted to get 100% coverage of the survey. Everyone that crossed the bridge, but it turned out to be a bit hard or impossible. In most cases, due to the volume of traffic, that could be the number of people that were crossing at a time in groups. Instead, we decided to randomly select participants by inviting or talking to every fifth person crossing participants in the survey. If they agreed, we conducted a brief interview with them on behalf of the entire group that was crossing at that period of time. This varied because some people crossed in a big numbers and some were one or two, so which is manageable, but when it came to those groups, it was so hard to talk to everyone that was crossing, so that's why we opted for the fifth person. The survey included their destinations, the origin, their purpose of travel, and how much time they spent on their travel from their origin to destination, inclusive of the modes of transport that they used. So they might say or they could say 90 minutes and that may have meant 30 minutes walking and an hour on a motor or on a bus. To keep the survey short, as possible as we put, a range of some things we observed by our enumerators, gender, the cargo that was carried, the number of people crossing, the age groups, those were all captured or observed by the enumerator. An enumerator or the person who was conducting the interviews plus the person who was firing had to be on site between eight to 12 hours every day in order to capture the highest volume of data or to be there to get all the information for all the time they could. Consistent field training was important since enumerators were charged with conducting the surveys which was firing or counting of the people that crossing. As I said in the previous paragraph, we were tiring as someone else was doing the interviews because tiring captured the traffic. Every person that crossed was counted but not everyone that crossed was interviewed or was talked to, that is why I included the tiring. Conducting the surveys and taking notes of people's thoughts and concerns about the bridge. It was also important to provide time off because of the long working hours as field work for this project was physically demanding, so much demanding and very, very time-consuming. Going to sites more often made troubling by cars, then motos and then walking. As you've seen some of our photos or pictures of the fields or the bridges that are built, they're not built up very close to the sewed roads so you'll have to take a motor and then sometimes walk for an hour or two or less than an hour depending on where the site is located. The remaining sites, you had to remain on the sites the entire day regardless of the weather. That means with a forecast that was predicted you had to prepare for your day when you're heading out in the site. If it rains, you have your raincoats, everything covered. Even the past testing period, it was important to maintain consistent communication and the opportunity for feedback among all staff on this project as it wasn't uncommon to run into new circumstances or common responses that required updates to the survey. For our approach in conducting survey in the new districts where it was very important to establish trust with the local leaders, how we did this, we tried to take to the local leaders before we went out of the field and we made sure they were always informed when we head out and when we need the sites. We began the data collection at the end of the month of August, 2019 and continue through the month of March when COVID forced us to cut short our operations in the field. Still, we were able to collect 3,111 surveys and recorded 17,019 crossings as the six sites selected. Four sites had been visited thrice. Remember, as I said in the beginning that the target was four times for every site. So the four sites had covered three times. So we're left with only one, one time to complete the survey on those four sites. And then two more sites had only been visited twice. So we had only covered half of the assignment we had. So putting it together, we had covered 70% of the surveys that were to be done on the sixth site and we had 30% because our target was to complete it in August this month and we had to cut it short in the month of March. I'll hand it over to Abhi to continue with some of the findings and I'll complete it with our way forward. Thank you so much. Thanks so much, Oliver. So that is a huge amount of data. That's a lot of data. And it was collected by a very small team of people. And I say that just to illustrate how scalable this is and how I think it's a cost effective way to gather such a rich data set. It really paid off because we learned a lot. As it turns out, the geographic area served by one trail bridge is massive. On average, 33 unique destinations and origins were reported for each site. So here you can see the catchment area for a single bridge. The bridge is right here. And each of those blue blobs represents the boundaries of a village that was reported as an origin or a destination or both by one person crossing or by at least one person crossing. Sometimes many people crossing. So the zoom extent on this map is the entire southern province of Rwanda. And almost all of the people crossing were doing a significant portion if not all of their journey on foot. So just to get a sense, this is two or three weeks of surveys and that area served is pretty significant, particularly for people that are just walking. So on average, 26 of those 33 villages were origin villages, meaning places where people lived. As you might expect, the most frequently reported origin villages were closer to the bridge. So here's a map that indicates all reported origin villages for one bridge. The bridge is right down here. And these are shaded according to the proportion of surveys. So the bridge is right here in kind of the middle of these two darker shaded polygons. And the darker purple areas indicate villages with the most surveys. But the total number of villages reported as origins is significantly more than we expected to find. And it was frankly an order of magnitude greater than what we found in our initial project assessments, the assessments that we've been using for years and years to understand who would be served by a bridge. On average, 17 of those 33 villages were origin villages from which people were traveling in service of livelihoods, healthcare, and education. In other words, when we applied the same criteria we used in our project assessments to our catchment surveys, the number of villages from which people were traveling across the bridge for essential services jumped from three to 17. So this has significant implications for how we think about our work and how we think about future research. We hope this will also help governments understand the potential returns for investing more in trail infrastructure. So all of our noted that we also looked at purpose of travel. So here we see a tree map that breaks down the purpose of travel reported by all people at all crossings. So it was interesting though not a shock that livelihood which includes buying or selling goods at market, collecting firewood, grazing animals, going to work is the biggest reason that people cross. So that aligns with work our research partners have done that indicate that new bridges have big effects on economic outcomes. What was something of a surprise to us was how often people crossed for social reasons. Up here you see visiting friends and family at 16% and worship at 13%. So this includes weddings and funerals and the births of new babies and obviously worship in all forms. Social connection isn't one of our organization's target outcomes, but resilience is particularly in the face of external pressures like natural disasters or health and economic disasters such as we're all experiencing right now with COVID. Of course climate change, social connection is also important to that. So strong family and community connections are critical to resilient communities, particularly when they are under resourced. So this was heartening to see. Education and healthcare rated significantly and about the same though I expect that if we had been able to finish out the year of surveys and the pandemic hadn't hit, we would have seen more in education just because we would have captured more of the school year. Healthcare included nutrition support and also vaccines for young children, which explains that high frequency relative to education. Government services and civic engagement came in at 3% and financial services at 2%. So those were cool surprises for us that they rated it highly enough to be categorized here. The other category there included reasons for crossing that didn't quite fit squarely into any other category, including things like people getting their hair cut or charging their phones. So because livelihood was the biggest category, we broke that down. So of the livelihood surveys, buying or selling goods were way up there along with farming crops or animals and then followed by wage labor, which in most cases was going to work on someone else's farm. Firewood collection was also up there at 9%. So we also looked at purposes of travel by gender and saw some variation there, though frankly not as much as we expected. There's plenty of evidence that in rural economies, travel and service of households falls disproportionately to women as a significant responsibility. Rwanda has been celebrated in recent years as a pioneer in gender equity in sub-Saharan Africa. And I think that we see that reflected here. So while we see that men travel a little more and frequently in service of livelihood, women traveled more frequently in service of healthcare and while slightly more men and boys were traveling in service of education overall, among school-aged kids, slightly more girls were traveling to school than school-aged boys. So we also asked about travel time. Asking people to estimate trips is tough, but this is all relative. So we thought it was valuable and interesting to illustrate here. So we hear we see the average reported travel time in minutes for a one-way trip, broken down by purpose of travel. While this was inclusive of all modes of transport, somebody might take on their journey. Keep in mind that most people are walking. You can see that visiting friends and family resulted in the longest trips, upwards of two hours each way. I think we're all familiar with how willing we are to travel to see friends and family, especially right now. But at first, I wasn't surprised to see government and civic activities so high. Those are also about two hours for a one-way trip. Government offices are generally in a central, more urban location. It makes sense that people would have to go from further away. But a good portion of those trips were actually meetings, which means that people are willing to go a long way, not just to participate or access government services, but also to engage in civic life, to have a say in how their government is run. The average trip for healthcare was close to two hours and the average trip to school was just over an hour. All the way at the end, they're on the right. We have recreation because you can make a soccer field just about anywhere, so people won't travel very far for that. And finally here, we have travel time broken out by range of minutes and the proportion of trips falling in each range. So you can see that the largest number of trips fell in that 31 to 60-minute range. Which is significant. Overall, the average reported time for a one-way trip was about 90 minutes. So to us, this filled out the importance of trail bridges in removing barriers along journeys that are already long and tiresome. Because essentially this means that post-bridge, this is how long people are traveling. You can imagine if this crossing wasn't here, if a safe passage wasn't available at that point, how much longer it might take people to do this work and to make these trips. This also highlighted some gaps in our current survey programs which I'll have all of our talk about just a little bit more. There was frankly a very simple survey that took less than two minutes per person to conduct. There was a lot more data. There's a lot more to dig into but I'm going to leave it here for now just because I don't want to keep you all day. And I'm going to kick it back to Oliver to talk to you about how we plan to build on this work. Thank you, Abby. As Abby said, I will forward like I promised to. One of the lessons we learned, we thought it would be very good and important for us to understand how these communities lived before we used these bridges. So as she raised a point of understanding the communities and how addressing the challenges they've been facing so we can measure vividly the impact that was caused by the bridge we plan to do pre-construction surveys or this can be put under the baseline. We want to understand how these communities were living before the bridge. Some of the challenges that these bridges can address, some of the challenges the bridge can address or and those that it cannot address because it's not only about the bridge because we have cases of flooding. Some of the bridges are addressed, I mean, some of the bridge really address that challenge but some depending on the area or the environment or how the land is, it won't be solved but at least people have a safe crossing to access the services they need. The other thing, as we are working with our partner that are doing the research to help us understand better how can we do this better or how can we give better services to these communities after building this bridge? Have we addressed all the challenges? Is the, like she spoke about the designs and all that, is it suitable for the population that we are serving? So we are working with the research team to involve all the domains, gender, a bit of access to the services they've been looking for. We are trying to work with our research partners to advance and have a better understanding of what we're doing and measure the changes that have been happening since we joined those communities to the day we hand over a bridge or a safe crossing to this community. I'm open to questions. Thank you. Thank you so much. There we go. Thank you so much, Abby. And thank you so much, Oliver, for your presentation. If you don't mind allowing me to share my screen when you can. So we've come to our Q&A period and I wanna thank everybody for sharing their insights. I see that we have questions that have already come in and I'm going to go ahead and kick over those questions because I do wanna make sure that everybody hears the questions and the answers. So one of the questions that came in during the presentation was specifically regarding the bridge design. One of our listeners wants to know if the bridges are designed for pedestrian traffic only or if they can support modos. So Oliver, I saw that you did answer this. So I'm gonna see if you can just give your answer live. Thank you. Yeah, so I was trying to answer that question. Yes, they are used by pedestrians. They are used by bicycles, motors. Because in most cases, these motors and bicycles are carrying cargo that people cannot carry on their head. As we are talking about isolation, these are local or we do not have the same roads. As we are trying to build a bridge, we are trying to connect communities. We are trying to connect people. So most of the times these bicycles, the motors are carrying stuff or cargo that they cannot carry on their heads. So yes, pedestrians use the bridge motors and bicycles and animals, yes, animals that are not scary for people to run away. And they are specifically designed for light vehicles like maybe carts or modos and specifically designed to not accommodate cars, which is the width of the deck. Because especially in Latin America, we find that if people can drive across something, they will. And so we specifically designed to make sure that that's not possible. And it's really kind of a, it's an ROI question. It's much, much more cost effective to build a bridge that serves pedestrians and modos than it is to build one that serves just a small percentage of people that would be able to cross. Fantastic. Thank you so much for that insight. So questions are coming in. So I'm gonna start kind of unpacking a few of these. So a lot of interest regarding the maintenance surrounding the bridges as well. So two questions have come in, but who is responsible for the maintenance of the constructed bridges and are you building capacity in the communities for repair and maintenance? Yeah, that's a great question when we get a lot, not surprisingly, because maintenance for any kind of infrastructure in the developing world is a big problem and a big question. So it first starts with design. So our bridges are designed to be very low maintenance and to use locally available materials. So the durability on a bridge minimum is about 30 years and that expectation is really limited by the steel that either goes into the towers or the cables. We haven't been around long enough to test that, but that's our conservative estimate based on our designs. And so the items that would need to be maintained on somewhat of a regular basis would be the deck, although we have recently transitioned to a steel deck that likely will not need to be replaced over the life of the bridge. And on our bridges that still have wooden decks, it's about a five to eight year lifespan on those and they're designed to be easily replaced. We conduct both community trainings and then work with local government to make sure they have the capacity to do that. The other element there is the fencing. So the fencing you'll see is, on any photo of our bridge, you can see it's just wire mesh fencing available anywhere in the world, really cheap and really easy to put on. When we first, we do transportation infrastructure. And so when we, there's no way we can do this without working hand in hand with government. On our projects, the average government contribution is about 40% of project directs. And we work with them to select the sites and then also to build the projects. They ultimately own it. So it's as if we're a construction company working with the owner. And so it's ultimately their responsibility to conduct those repairs because in a new program, they may not have that capacity built yet. When we are operating a program in country, we work with them to provide training on inspections and sometimes provide inspection services on our own and then work with them to build the capacity they need to conduct any repair or maintenance that may need to happen as a result of that. But it's tricky for sure. Certainly I can imagine. So pivoting a bit from the construction and maintenance aspects of the bridges, a question came in that I was also very curious about which is you've invested substantial resources and time in doing the assessment, right? And doing particularly the surveying and understanding the catchment area for the bridges. I wanted to see if with that work, what improvements based on your experiences, you are considering for the future? One of our listeners asked is it practical to continue doing these surveys or do you plan to supplement this with less hands-on methods like remote sensing population estimates that you mentioned? I am so glad you asked about that because when Oliver was talking about the future of this program and what our ideas are, I first want to note that honestly I assumed that doing something like direct surveys would be really time-consuming and expensive. Relative to what it takes to run other monitoring efforts, it really wasn't. That was really the surprise here is the rich amount of data and the quality of data that you can gather with relatively low investment of resources. That said, if we're going to do this on a large scale, we need to be able to model it in some way. And so we're really lucky right now because of our scaling in Rwanda right now. We're building a few hundred bridges over a five-year period in partnership with the government of Rwanda. So that gave us the opportunity to do this large-scale RCT with our research partners at the Mortensen Center at CU and what that will allow us to do. As Oliver mentioned, we selected three of these sites that we used for this. We're also part of their initial pilot study in Rwanda. And so what we were able to do is send them the results of this. They were able to see what that looked like, kind of run in parallel analysis with the household surveys and determined that it was worthwhile now to expand the scope of that study to include some catchment so that we can also compare that to existing data and do some geospatial modeling to say, is there something, you know, whether it is population, geography, population density, how can we model this to see, to both get more predictive about this in the future, about how many people on bridge might serve? And then also be able to understand not just how many people are served by a bridge in a geographic area, but the degree to which those people are served, right? We wouldn't expect people who live 20 kilometers away necessarily to be getting the same benefits as people that live right next to the bridge, but we don't know that. There's some assumptions there. So that's the plan in the future is to build on this and hopefully get to a point where we can model it with some significant level of confidence. That's so exciting to hear about those plans. One, as an aside, kind of a personal question that I have, I spoke recently to a civil engineer who trained in Kenya and she shared another story of a colleague who had lived in a rural setting and when he went to university in a major city was shocked to see that all of the examples in his textbooks and his classrooms in his engineering program were actually examples from the United States and other developed countries. What you have here is very pertinent information. A case study, if you will, that's very relevant for Rwandan engineers and East African engineers. I'm curious if there's plans to share this beyond, of course, C4C and we're happy, of course, to promote and amplify these studies, but is there plans to link this to engineering programs and have them include these as case studies within civil engineering classrooms so that local engineers can also benefit from these insights because they are absolutely essential to helping engineers understand the impacts of their work? I have not thought yet about specifically targeting civil engineering students, but that's a great idea. So we'll take that away for sure. We do plan to publish this work and something that Oliver and I have been working on over the past few weeks is how we're going to share this with communities and local governments. It's important for us that our work not purely be extractive. People saw our enumerators on site for weeks at a time. We would like to be able to deliver these results back to the communities and back to the districts to have them and the district engineers as well understand just what's happening with bridges in their constituent communities. We do have a partnership with the IPRC Technical College in Rwanda and have done some, basically put together a curriculum for trail bridges there. So there may be an opportunity to offer this work as well as part of that. So we'll take that into consideration for sure. Oliver, do you have any additional thoughts or comments? I think that's a good idea that we didn't think about. It's a very good one and I think it would be good if they went or we shared with them the insights and they went ahead to learn what is really happening. Yeah. Lovely, we have a few more questions coming in. So I want to make sure we try to tackle as many of these as we can. One of our listeners said, sometimes it can be difficult to assess whether social change is a result of an infrastructure project versus the results of a host of community changes. For example, social programs, economic, climate, political involvement, election year, et cetera. Did your team also assess what other change had happened in the community that might be influencing bridge usage patterns? Yeah, that's a great question, not yet. And so that's part of why we were, we're essentially torturing our operations team with a device control trial is because attribution is really important, especially with infrastructure, right? And so the RCT is looking at controls and obviously we are randomizing the order in which bridges are built, which is a huge pain for both our operations team and frankly, the government of Rwanda, acquiescing to building bridges in a random order and not according to what they think is most important. That's a huge deal. And we're doing that so that we can look at outcomes in health and education and income and see is this a result of other programs happening? There's a huge co-op system in Rwanda. How can we need to make sure that what we're seeing in agricultural outcomes are really attributed to the bridge and not attributed to maybe agricultural programs that are happening at the same time or new schools in place. All of those are incorporated in the RCT and they're why. We are also dovetailing the catchment work with the RCT work so that we can really look at attribution in a more sophisticated way. The other piece there is this project was really to understand, okay, our bridges are there, who's using them and why? So it's a pretty simple question. And now that we know that this works, we can start to build on that. What I can add on that is also why we are considering the preconstruction surveys is to eliminate that question because we already know there are many programs that are running in these communities. So why we are trying to understand or what we are trying to understand here is everything that is happening, a result of a bridge. For example, if I may say there is a project that they are doing agriculture training and there is so much yield, there could be so much yield but it's not reaching the market. So this is where B2P comes in to build a bridge and all the youth will reach the market. And maybe there are other services that are given to the families that are in these communities for them to posit their economic status. How can we attach the improvement in livelihood to the bridge is after we've understood that the community A has been living this life before they got a bridge. For example, they did not access the market, kids were dropping out of school, they could not access healthcare. And after five to seven months when they received a bridge, their lives had changed, it is easy to associate that impact to that change to the bridge because they had the access. Services were there but they couldn't reach them. And now that they have access to reach those services that has changed their lives. So we can attribute to that impact to the change in their livelihood to the bridge. Thank you so much for that. So on the heels of that, there is interest from our listeners to actually have access to the report on the randomized control trials and the catchment studies. So I do believe that I think on E4C we share the catchment and of course information here through the webinar. Is there additional, where can people go for additional information? Yeah, that's a great question. We have a draft of the manuscript and as soon as we're just polishing it that up now, as soon as it's submitted, we'll make it available and we can even make that available through E4C. Of course you have the brief but we have the full manuscript with all the data attached. It's all end endomized. So we're very happy for other people to dig into the data on their own as well. If you find anything we didn't, please shoot me an email. And the pilot study in Rwanda is, that is on the verge of publication. So once that's out, we can make it available to everybody on the Spailing List or through our website. The full scale RCT just launched in August. So it'll probably be a bit before we see a paper there. And then the Nicaragua RCT is available both through our website and through Yale's website and the paper author, Kevin Donovan's website. So I'm happy to just provide a whole smattering of links. Yeah, we'll definitely make sure to get those from you Abby and include them with this recording as well as on our site. And it gives you meaning to the phrase, it takes a village. In the sense it takes a village I suppose to make sure that this data is meaningful and to see if there's any gaps and any opportunities. I'm gonna ask the last question, which is unfortunately not related to this effort in understanding the catchment. But there is a question here regarding addressing professional liability of the projects. Do you find that there are any requirements for designs similar to professional engineering requirements in the U.S. with the bridges that you construct? Right, so because it varies so much country to country, we essentially apply the same standards in the U.S. to what we do in country. And so all of our designs are initially, well we have standard designs as I mentioned, right? So we're not doing a custom fit for every single one, right? We have some simple standard designs that we make some modifications to in terms of number of tier, height of tower, span of bridge. Those are designed by our engineers in country. And then they are checked by our senior engineer who's a PE who ultimately puts the stamp on it. If there are design defects or construction defects as we're usually leading construction, that's ultimately our responsibility as well. Thank you for that. So thank you, Abby and Oliver, for these tremendous insights for taking the time out of your busy days to share with us what you've learned so far. And it's truly encouraging to see the connection between infrastructure and the improvement in quality of life. I find it deeply fascinating to see where folks are going on your bridges. It's really interesting stuff and we're looking forward to additional insights and those layers of data with a large RCT. So there are some references that Oliver and Abby included as part of their presentation. Of course, we're going to follow up with additional insights on our website. And with that, I'd like to wrap up this webinar and invite you all to also consider joining our academic seminar series. Our next one is gonna be on November 11th, focusing on biomedical engineering and in particular, introduction to UBORA platform for the co-design of open source medical devices. If you're interested in taking a change of pace from infrastructure and wanna learn a little bit more about the health sector. With that, I'd like to thank all of our attendees and of course, again, thank you to our presenters. We're so grateful for your time. If you have questions that didn't get tackled today, please feel free to email us at webinarsandengineeringforchange.org and don't forget to become an E4C member to get more information on our upcoming webinars and seminars and of course, join us at Impact Engineering. With that, I wish you all a good morning, good evening, good afternoon. Enjoy the rest of your week and thank you everyone. Please stay safe. Take care. Thank you so much. Thank you.