Growing up, Ivan Munyengango’s dream was to be a professional footballer, playing for a big football club in Europe, or elsewhere, and living off the crafty skills of his feet.

But like many young footballers on the continent, that dream vanished into thin air. The chances of breaking into professional ranks were slim—nearly impossible.

Today, the 36-year-old father of one stands out as Rwanda’s biggest fitness entrepreneur. His story is that of a frustrated aspiring footballer who went into fitness to remain in shape—but in the gym, he found his passion.

Munyengango owns Cali Fitness, located in Nyarutarama (mu Kabuga), and the popular Waka, with two fitness and wellness facilities in Kimihurura and town, which he recently acquired through his company, FitPipo Ltd, to grow his portfolio.

Munyengango’s growth and expansion earned him the moniker ‘fitness entrepreneur’, but it is a world he stumbled into, developed a passion for, and in his eighth year of doing it consistently, turned it into a business.

"If you asked 16-year-old me, there’s no way I would have known that I would end up on the gym floor as much as I’ve been,” he said, adding that his love for fitness developed over the years, mainly due to his desire to be fit and to excel at football.

Like many young aspiring African footballers, Munyengango dedicated his early years to football with the hope that he could play it at a professional level.

"As I hit 18, it became a bit not interesting. I started playing less and less. My hopes for professional clubs were also becoming thinner,” he recalled.

"I was convinced that I would play football for a living,” he added, saying that his hopes of becoming a professional footballer were crushed further by injuries.

That is when he completely switched to fitness, starting with weightlifting and participating in long-distance running.

"I fell in love with endurance sports, including cycling and running. Preparations to be good in any particular sport happen on a gym floor. It led me to where I am now,” he said.

"It’s about eight years ago that I became an investor in the fitness industry. But many years before then, I was on the floor as a personal trainer,” he told The New Times.

At the time when gyms would open and close, Munyengango found a formula that has since paid off, but it is also something he partly attributes to luck, given the many challenges he has faced along the way but managed to overcome, the most difficult being the Covid-19 pandemic.

"The outbreak caused the industry to shut down, all over the world, not just in Rwanda,” he said, observing, however, that in Rwanda particularly it took a while to adapt to new innovative ways to cope.

Today, without a doubt, he knows he is where he is supposed to be, having managed to overcome all these challenges and even expand. He attributes the success to the fact they have created a community of people with a culture of working out.

Munyengango said more people are going to the gym for the health benefits, compared to years ago when the industry was almost nonexistent.

"You would only find gyms in hotels,” he said, noting that even those in hotels were not built for the purpose, but rather to complement other services offered to guests, such as bed and breakfast.

Some hotels also would offer subscriptions, and that was all. The workout culture was not there. Not many people consider subscribing to a gym in a hotel.

"A hotel, in its nature, kind of pushes people away. So, if you’re not sleeping there, you don’t feel like you’re welcome to go there to have a drink or a meal,” Munyengango said.

Today, there are many independent gyms, and people no longer rely on hotels anymore.

Also, there have been a lot of lifestyle change campaigns on the government’s side, and also in the private sector, to get people to exercise.

Moving towards a healthy Rwanda

Munyengango said that as an investor in fitness, he must contribute towards building a healthy Rwanda, which is why they participate in different public health initiatives.

He explained what they do with an illness-wellness continuum, a visual tool that is used to help people make healthy choices in their lives—at one end of the continuum is premature death, while optimal health lies at the other end.

On the spectrum, between illness and wellness, there is a whole range of wellness activities, and then there is fitness at the end. Everybody is somewhere on that curve and the choice depends on an individual.

"The government does its job by opening hospitals, and making sure we have enough personnel like doctors and nurses, equipment and facilities, and then ours is to make sure that Rwandans don’t ever need that,” he said.

He said they work hand-in-hand with the government to promote healthy lifestyles, and they have so far built a community of Rwandans who have decided to really engage in fitness on a day-to-day basis.

He says the majority of people who work out will never need a hospital, and it reduces the disease burden on the country.

Pushing for a mind-set change

Munyengango said they are working with the government to drive the country into a healthy future. This mainly has to do with pushing for a mind-set change so that people understand the importance of exercising.

ALSO READ: Age-defying fitness: Meet the Grandma’s club

He further said it is sad that most people know the benefits but do not have the zeal to start. As such, people end up leading sedentary lifestyles, characterised by busy schedules.

"People will always find excuses like ‘I am busy’, ‘I am a mother with kids to take care of’, ‘I am a CEO’ and more, but whatever it is, people need to understand that they can do what they do only if they are healthy.

"This notion of being busy sometimes bugs me because I don’t understand it. You do everything you do because you are there,” he said, referring to the ancient philosopher Sartre, who said that existence precedes essence.

"So, basically, we need to be, in order to do. Whatever we do, we need to exist and the quality of our health matters a lot,” he said, reiterating his point with Oscar Wilde’s assertion that most people exist but very few people live.

He argues that if heads of state and top CEOs can find time to exercise in their very busy schedules, then a person who works a 9 to 5 job, which involves sitting a lot, has no excuse.

"I think it’s a matter of understanding the urgency here, and also bringing it down to individual goals. Try to set up something for yourself and build a community around you,” he cautioned.

He said it is often tricky to set out alone but it becomes easier if done as a group, with each member having a sense of responsibility and accountability.

Inspiring others, making a difference

Munyengango mentioned that nowadays, 18-year-olds can approach their parents expressing their desire to pursue a career as a personal trainer, and this is acceptable since parents have witnessed successful personal trainers like him. This was previously unheard of.

Today, Munyengango is looking to pivot and scale while at the same time contributing to driving policy reforms and participating in behavioural change campaigns and collaborations aimed at building a healthy Rwanda.

"You see how there are people busy making Rwandans secure, busy making deals here and there for Rwanda’s economy, or busy making sure we have hospitals that are functioning so that Rwandans can be cured of illnesses, we want to establish ourselves as the solution in terms of preventive care that Rwanda has. We want to drive Rwandans into a very healthy future. Why not Kigali being labelled the healthiest city in the world?

"We are known for being a Green City – we are known for security, we could also be known for fitness. That is one of my biggest visions,” Munyengango pointed out.

"For the company, the mission is to stay alive and to scale. For the community, we want to create a healthy Rwanda. We want to on-board as many people as possible, and we want to be as inclusive as we can possibly be,” he added.

By inclusivity, he said, he means affordable and most importantly considering all people, including persons with disability.

He also runs a non-profit called Rwanda Fitness Culture, which seeks to create an early awareness drive towards fitness.

"One of the challenges we face now in one-on-one training is that Rwandans start training late,” he said, adding that they immediately want to start with the hard part, which is almost impossible. The initiative will take fitness into schools so that children get to know the importance of being fit early on.

"We are going to launch it soon. We’re now looking for fitness ambassadors in schools across the country, and these people will be trained to train other students.

"The programme is there not to eliminate the physical education programmes that already exist, but to assist them, so that every day there is something that a student has done.”

He said they are currently working on a project with Harvard Business School students who are in Rwanda for their international exchange programmes.

"As soon as they are done, which is by May this year, we are starting the training of Fitness Ambassadors, starting with university students,” Munyengango said.

They have tailored packages, including for people with certain medical conditions, who need specialised and customised training in line with their condition, using the scaling and adapting method. Adapting has to do with taking individual differences into account to create something that has not existed before.

An example he gives is someone who comes in a wheelchair but wants to train the back. In that case, "they might attach an elastic band to the wall and then I ask the person to pull it, which is something specific to one’s condition.”

We are what we eat

Fitness goes hand-in-hand with what we eat. Munyengango said most people want to work out but do not pay attention to the amount of food they eat and its nutritional value. Most people do not understand the metabolic outputs of the body in terms of what the body needs versus what we eat.

"People find themselves eating way more than what they actually need and then what that creates is a storage of excess food,” he said, adding that the body creates room to accommodate spillover food.

Nutrition makes up the bigger part of healthy living and also complements physical exercise. For Munyengango, the fitness train is a fast-moving one heading towards a healthier Rwanda.

"What I can tell Rwandans is that the time is now. We have way more than enough data to explain the dangers of inactivity. If you don’t move, if you wake up and go work and live just like that for one year, or two years eventually, that body is going to give up.

Fat or skinny, it doesn’t matter. Everybody needs to work out because even people who don’t work out because they are thin are exposed to inner organ fat and cholesterol resulting from inactivity.

It also goes down to the groups you keep, a partner or spouse. If they are healthy and work out, they will encourage you to exercise.

More than just a gym

For Munyengango, it starts with a whole mind-set change, which is why they are going to schools because it is possible to inculcate this culture early, starting with students who can learn how to train themselves using the facilities they have, including playing fields.

"We are more than just a gym because of how we approach the situation, individual cases and because of how we think about moving the community.

"One of the things that make us unique is that we are the only fitness organisation that is doing more than just fitness. We have community fitness initiatives, and we also have the non-profits, the Rwanda Fitness Culture,” he added.