Building Rural Sanitation Markets in Rwanda: Lessons from the Isoko y’Ubuzima Project

This learning paper from the Isoko y’Ubuzima consortium, led by Water For People and CARE in Rwanda, documents five years of testing a Market-Based Sanitation approach across ten rural districts and what the team learned when their assumptions were wrong. The central finding is that sanitation uptake is a systems problem: households already understood the importance of improved sanitation, but investment only followed when demand activation, supply chains, financing, and government engagement operated together, and the project’s most consequential lesson came from recognizing mid-implementation that a large network of community volunteers could not drive sales, leading to a shift toward 150 professionalized sales agents that produced roughly tenfold results.