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Avery Bang leads the social entrepreneur fellowship program at the Mulago Foundation, which funds organizations that tackle the basic needs of the very poor. Prior to that, she was the CEO of Bridges to Prosperity, which built trail bridges that connected over 1.4 million people to essential health care, education, and economic opportunities. With an MBA from the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford, an M.S. in geotechnical engineering from the University of Colorado Boulder, and a B.S. in civil engineering and studio art from the University of Iowa, Bang has been combining her technical and entrepreneurial skills to find and build solutions to poverty worldwide. She is also an active public speaker and was featured in the IMAX film, Dream Big.
STRUCTURE: While your career has taken a different path overall, you started out in a traditional civil engineering program. What inspired you to study/pursue engineering in the first place?
Avery Bang: I was inspired to study engineering because my dad is a civil engineer, and we would visit public works projects for holidays. It was less the destination and more about the journey. Some of my biggest heroes are folks who had the creative mind to imagine a bridge or building that didn’t exist yet. It was quite a natural choice for me to study civil engineering.
STRUCTURE: What inspired you to start Bridges to Prosperity? What was it like getting started? Can you tell us about your first projects/challenges bringing the organization to life?
Bang: I was living in Fiji when I was 20 years old in a study abroad program and was really confronted with what life is like for people without access.
Specifically, when I was volunteering with organizations going outside of the city, we always would end up walking, and often we’d eventually hit a river that we could or could not pass just based on the river height that day. So, experiencing firsthand what it was like to be isolated, to not be able to get to where I wanted to go, made it simple and clear to me that there was a need for trail bridges that didn’t exist. And, being an engineering student, I was not so intimidated by the fact that just because something like a bridge doesn’t exist doesn’t mean it can’t be built.
I started Google searching, “Who designs and builds pedestrian trail bridges and specifically in low-income countries?” I found this amazing organization in Switzerland called Helvetas, who had built 10,000 trail bridges in Nepal with the government and helped build the local private sector around this need. I’m on the Board of Directors now.
For my honors project for my undergraduate engineering program, which became my master’s thesis in geotechnical engineering, I looked at how could you standardize trail bridge design with a very low cost?
This became a passion project that turned into a career for me. Ultimately it led me to Bridges to Prosperity.
In many countries, we’ve become a R&D support system for their Department of Transportation around the world by saying “Hey, let’s standardize trail bridge design, let’s standardize construction methodologies, let’s standardize our quality processes for procurement and also for construction, etc. And let’s make it so this is so easy.”
STRUCTURE: How did you earn and foster cooperation from governmental groups and the local populations?
Bang: Good technical projects are not just a “drop in and do something” type of venture. We had to have the patience and the right team in place to sit in partnership and in collaboration with countries around the world and say, “What are your asset needs? Where do you want people to be going? How would you prioritize access? Will you put money in?”
It became a very core part of what we do, which is government has to be at the table from day one picking where, deciding what because they will be providing much of the funding.
We bring in a lot of people from around the world to make the system work, but local engineers have to be able to design the bridges and local contractors have to be able to build it with local materials. We are strengthening and training a system which is meant to exist without foreigners.
STRUCTURE: Of all the projects you have worked on, would you describe the one or two that you are most proud of and why?
Bang: My most proud project was probably my first ever bridge in the Andean Mountains of Peru in a town called Yavina. It gave me a deep sense of purpose. I had the vision, but this was the first time it became real. When I arrived, the local population could not get across the water safely. And when I left, kids were going to and from school daily using the bridge. That sense of satisfaction and life purpose has remained for every project after and has continued to strengthen my belief that it is a human right to be able to move to where you need and want to go.
Before, the people in Yavina would take these braided vines they found on the hillside, and they would make these really long ropes. For the dry season, you could anchor one side of this braided vine under big boulders and then have kind of a swinging bridge that you’d walk across like a tight rope. But during the rainy season, those braided vines get washed away. For 40% of the population—for over half of the year—they weren’t in school, they weren’t going to the market if they’re a farmer, they were not able to get seeds. They weren’t able to sell. It was just a very different quality of life.
To get there, our group had to fly into Cusco, drive five hours into the mountains, and then walk three hours in. For every piece of timber, bag of cement, piece of rebar that got dropped off, it was a three-hour hike by this chain of local guys willing to do it because they knew it was going to change life for their kids.
As a bridge engineer, I recognize it may be an unimpressive structure, but the impact to life is wildly impressive.
A second project which is visually more interesting is over the Blue Nile in Ethiopia, and this was the project that I wrote my master’s thesis on.
The structure is about 100 meters in length and connects 10,000 people between the regions of Gondar and Gujarat, Ethiopia.
The project came together for me as someone who finds a lot of joy in the built environment. It’s a cable suspended structure on the hillsides of this cavernous ravine. Seeing people and cows and motorcycles and everything going across this bridge in Ethiopia a couple years later was also a pretty big career highlight for me.
STRUCTURE: Talk a bit about your experience appearing in the film Dream Big. How has this unique platform changed your path or approach to outreach? What went into the decision to be in the film?
Bang: When I first got the phone call from the producers and they talked about a film that would be in every IMAX theater around the world and targeted at getting young people into STEM careers, I immediately said yes.
We decided to go to Haiti to film, but there’s no electricity in this part of the world where we were going to be working and these guys have these cameras and tons of battery packs. And there’s eleven people.
It was a harrowing experience to make sure that we had all the bits and pieces lined up and on schedule because you can’t really back out when there is a crew coming who are using plane, trains, and automobiles to get to this rural site in Haiti.
We wanted them to see the important parts, like how do you get cable across the river when the cable itself weighs more than a car and you only have people?
How do you erect a 50-foot steel tower without heavy machinery?
How do you lift the cables up and over those towers?
How do you tension that and get that perfect little chamber?
We are world class at helping local folks build these things, but we felt a lot of pressure knowing the film budget for that segment was more than the actual cost of building the bridge.
But it was a total joy to be involved and to get to know some of the other folks in the film when we toured across the country as the film opened.
It was an opportunity to be part of something that has a legacy well beyond certainly anything I will ever do.
STRUCTURE: In your current position with the Mulago Foundation, how does your engineering background influence and help the work that you’re doing now?
Bang: The reason I joined the Mulago Foundation is many people around the world have big ideas, but they need help with their strategy and with financing and many of those big ideas circle around something technological, whether it’s electric micro grids in Nigeria and figuring out a way to engineer off-grid community solar or whether it’s a water organization in Rwanda thinking about how to unlock a public water utility.
I’m constantly intersecting and interacting with engineers and people who, even if they are not technically engineers, they are designing and building organizations that rely on engineering solutions. The Mulago Foundation’s finding those people, accelerating them, and helping them go big.
Bridges to Prosperity was part of the Mulago Foundation Fellowship. I was a fellow at Mulago, which was the organization that helped make it clear to go big with this idea. Mulago helped us understand we have to get governments involved because they are the owners and the managers of assets, and contractors in a local context because they are the ones that are really going to be able to build tens of thousands of bridges.
Mulago is a great home for me and something I’m really excited about helping other engineers and technical people around the world bring their ideas to their full potential.
STRUCTURE: What advice would you give to someone looking to break out of the traditional engineering path while still utilizing those skills and background?
Bang: Stay in the profession. I think we lose too many great people. And the reason we lose so many great people is that we are trained not only to identify problems, but to solve them. Having a technical engineering background is the world’s biggest door opener. You can do anything. You can go into tech, or you can totally pivot and be in business. Engineering is just a really important precursor to interacting with the world at large, with a lot of transferable skills.
Despite the pull of other career paths, I wish people would stay in engineering more.
STRUCTURE: In terms of your legacy, what do you think you will be remembered for?
Bang: I’ll probably always be remembered as ‘the bridge girl.’ But what I’d like to be remembered for is influencing the next generation to be in technical creative careers. I hope to be remembered as one of the women who stood on the shoulder of other giants before me and helped the next generation see what they could be. I think you can’t be what you can’t see.
And if there’s more people that looked like me when I was looking up, I think I would have had an easier time. And I think that the folks that come behind me and other women in the field are going to have an easier time.
I just hope to be one of the many women that help inspire the next generation to take this profession seriously and be excited about it.
STRUCTURE: We all have mentors and people who helped us be successful. In closing, who would you like to thank and why?
Bang: I’ve got a bunch of them, but Elie Homsi is on my short list. He was an executive at Flatiron Construction. When I first walked into his office at age 22 and told him I thought that contractors here in America should help poor people in Nicaragua, he took a meeting with me.
He became not only my board chair for Bridges to Prosperity, but also my biggest champion. Elie helped me believe that anything was possible and if I had the confidence and backing of good, smart people, that would keep me out of trouble and we really could move mountains together.
Another person who comes to mind is Scott McNary, of McNary Bergeron, which is an important bridge construction engineering outfit out of Colorado. When I walked into Scott’s office, also around the same time, he told me, you’re going to need to be surrounded by professionals. He gave me office space and let me and my small engineering team come to them with any and all questions. That support was remarkable. Jeremy Johanneson, who is a partner at McNary Bergeron, also was helpful by diving into the details. Scott and Jeremy are world class bridge engineers, and working with them built my confidence that I can bring really smart people together to build something great. ■