Summary:
- Kigali’s cleanliness is the product of a system, not a one-time effort: Government regulation, private waste operators, household payments, and community participation work together to make cleanliness a sustainable capability.
- Sustainable outcomes depend on a value network where everyone benefits: Households, businesses, government, and communities each receive enough value to keep participating.
- Persistent problems aren’t necessarily inevitable: Kigali shows that entrenched challenges like poor sanitation can be approached differently by examining what sustains the current outcome and designing systems capable of delivering a better one at scale.
Somewhere between my hotel and my destination in Kigali, I found myself looking out of the taxi window for litter.
I knew Kigali had a reputation as a clean city. But knowing that and experiencing it are different things.
Living in Lagos had made me accustomed to the familiar signs of a busy African street: plastic bottles blocking drains, food wrappers pressed against the curb, small piles of scrap that gradually become part of the landscape. My instincts had me scanning for them, and I could hardly find any.
What struck me wasn’t simply that Kigali was clean. It was that the city looked maintained, and that distinction matters, because cleaning a street is an event, but keeping it clean is a capability.
What keeps a city clean?
That made me curious about what was happening behind the scenes. Culture is an easy explanation for Rwanda’s cleanliness. So is government enforcement. Both matter, but people produce waste every day. Keeping it off the streets requires a system that can collect, move, and dispose of it every day too.
What makes Kigali interesting is how the city has put that system together.
Kigali organizes household waste collection across the city’s 35 sector-based service areas, with one licensed private operator responsible for each. Households receive weekly door-to-door collection and pay according to their ability, while the poorest can receive the service for free. Licensed private operators also collect waste daily from markets and commercial areas, where it accumulates faster.
The government regulates providers, organizes where they can operate, supports disposal infrastructure and enforces sanitation rules. And community practices such as Umuganda reinforce a shared responsibility for public spaces, with residents contributing a morning of unpaid work each month.
The system holds together because each participant gets value from playing its part. Households get waste collected at a price they can afford, bundled with a security patrol they want, helping the system achieve a roughly 95% fee-collection rate. Private operators get an exclusive service area with a customer base that can sustain the business. The city gets clean streets without footing the whole bill, while residents benefit from the public spaces their collective efforts help maintain.
Sanitation needs an arrangement like this because no one participant can do it alone. Collecting my waste benefits me, but a cleaner street also benefits my neighbors and people who may never pay for the service. Some households can’t afford waste collection. Public spaces have no obvious individual customer. A private provider, on its own, therefore can’t capture all the value that cleanliness creates.
Kigali hasn’t made those challenges disappear. It has built around them, combining household payments, private provision, public support and community participation in ways that help sustain the outcome.
The value network behind the outcome
The same principle matters in market creation. Market-creating innovations make products and services that were previously too expensive, complicated or inaccessible available to many more people. Doing so often requires more than redesigning the product or service. It requires building a different value network capable of reaching and serving nonconsumers sustainably.
That network can include more than businesses. Distribution, financing, infrastructure and government can all become important components when they help the model reach nonconsumers. However, for the network to be sustainable, each participant must also receive enough value to keep playing its role.
Zipline’s drone deliveries work on similar terms in the same country, helping sustain timely access to critical medical supplies. Each participant gets something they value: regulators get proof the drones are safe before letting them fly countrywide, health workers get supplies within the hour, and Zipline gets paid for each successful delivery to a health facility.
Questioning what feels inevitable
Kigali’s clean streets were striking, but the system sustaining them was even more fascinating and instructive.
Across many emerging economies, a familiar problem like poor sanitation can seem so intractable that people learn to live around it. In cities like Lagos, what persists can begin to feel like a feature of the city itself. Kigali doesn’t offer a model Lagos can easily copy. But it demonstrates something important: a very different outcome is possible.
That possibility invites a different way of approaching the problem.
Instead of accepting problems such as poor sanitation as part of life in many low-income cities, we can ask what keeps producing the outcome we see, and what would need to change for a better solution to reach many more people and endure? A poor outcome that persists gives us something to investigate, rather than simply something to accommodate. Some problems persist because they’re difficult, but Kigali’s streets are a reminder that difficulty is not the same as inevitability, and that outcomes we have learned to live with are not outcomes we have to accept.
