By Valerie Chatindo
In southern Zimbabwe, a collapsed bridge has turned a six-hour school journey into a trip that can take up to four days.
The Chilonga Bridge in Chiredzi South, a key link between rural communities and the schools that serve them, collapsed in early March 2025. Since then, learners and teachers have relied on long, hazardous detours or makeshift crossings to reach the classroom.
For Megi Chetemu, a teacher at Malipati Government Secondary School, the disruption is part of daily life.
“Under normal conditions, it takes around six hours to reach the school. But when the rains hit, what should be a six-hour trip can stretch into two days of travel,” she says.
Transport options are limited. One bus services the area, along with a few kombis. When rain washes out sections of the road, the alternative route doubles the distance and forces travellers onto narrow, flood-prone bridges.
“If the rains are heavy, I sometimes must opt for yet another route via Rutenga, which can take up to four days,” Chetemu explains.
The costs rise too. A journey that normally costs around $10 can climb to $25 during the rainy season, placing additional strain on already-stretched rural educators.
The consequences extend beyond inconvenience. Teachers arrive late or miss days entirely. Learners face disrupted schedules and unreliable access to teaching materials. The collapse has compounded existing challenges in rural education, where infrastructure gaps already affect attendance and continuity of learning.
Chetemu’s experience is not isolated. Across sub-Saharan Africa, climate hazards such as floods and storms regularly damage schools and transport networks, and millions of children miss school each year as a result. In Zimbabwe alone, at least 92 schools were damaged during the 2024 to 2025 rainfall season.
These figures are often presented as statistics. In Chiredzi South, they are lived realities. A washed-out road becomes a four-day commute. A collapsed bridge becomes a barrier to a child’s right to learn.
The Chilonga Bridge highlights how fragile access to education becomes when infrastructure fails. For rural communities, distance, weather and limited transport combine to create barriers that directly determine whether learners reach classrooms at all. Sustained progress will depend on investment in roads, bridges and transport networks that recognise rural schools as part of the country’s critical infrastructure — not its periphery.
Until reliable routes are restored, teachers like Chetemu continue to navigate long, uncertain journeys, where simply getting to school remains the biggest obstacle to learning.
Investing in the journey is, ultimately, investing in the classroom.