Bridges to Prosperity
Published: 2020-11-19 22:27:04

Bridges to Prosperity envisions a world where poverty caused by rural isolation no longer exists. Rural isolation is a root cause of poverty, and we believe that connection is the foundation of opportunity. We work with local communities, partners, and foundations, to build footbridges that connect residents to education, health care, and economic opportunity. With a sophisticated data collection and evaluation program, we’re able to prove that the value and impact of our work are sustained long after the opening celebration.

In March 2001, Bridges to Prosperity (B2P) founder Ken Frantz saw a photo in National Geographic Magazine that moved him to action.
The image showed men dangling precariously, using ropes to pull each other across a wide, high, and broken bridge span over a portion of the Blue Nile River in Ethiopia. Ken soon discovered that his brother, Forrest Frantz, had seen the photo and had the same thought: “I want to repair that bridge.”
Within three months, Ken, who owned a construction company, donated time, money, and materials and enlisted eager family members, friends, and his Rotary club to support the inaugural B2P project. This first project, Sebara Dildi, repaired the bridge crossing along the Blue Nile in Ethiopia and represents a vision that continues to inspire our team today.

There are two problems my team and I had to solve for this project. The first problem was to improve the map visualization with Mapbox and the second problem was to show a better understanding of the impact that placing a bridge would have on a community visually. 
One of the biggest challenges was understanding how to use Mapbox, learning how certain components were implemented inside the project, how to seamlessly edit chunks of code and moving functions around without breaking the code, and have the search bar zoom in on a bridge once inputted.

Worked with a team to enhance the map visualization with Mapbox. It was a bit tough since my team wasn’t used to working with Mapbox API but I was lucky that I had a hardworking team willing to hop in a zoom when needed any help. I was worried that data science was not going to be able to predict new bridges to build with the lack of data they got from the organization but that will definitely be something to implement for the future teams in charge of this project.

We had two weeks mainly to break down this project and deliver a version of this product that we could be proud of. There are 3 web developers in my team and 3 data science engineers. We split up 1 engineer for the frontend for the map visualization and 2 for backend setup and deployment. I worked on the map visualization and changed some of the overall features that users would mainly use like the filter system, search bridges system, added a sidebar to effortlessly keep all these helpful systems on one side of the screen.

In the future of this project, I would like to see a better search bar system, filter system, and a complete admin panel that allows you to edit bridges and interchange certain information when needed. The data science team will need to create a model that predicts where the best places to build bridges are and that will happen with time as we receive more data from our stakeholders. 

With this team and project, I overcame my pride and started relying more on my team, asking more questions especially when I was stuck, and contributing to the conversation in our meetings. My peer, Jonathan gave me positive feedback: David explains what needs to be done in a professional manner and explains the code that's needed to be implemented in a clear and concise way. My peer Dominique helped me remember important aspects of React and helped me implement my sidebar effectively without breaking the other features in this stacked project. This project has gotten me fired up on building some of my personal side projects for one of the e-commerce sites that I have been working on to slap on my portfolio.