Rwanda · People
Prevention Through Economic Ownership
Not For Sale’s people work in Rwanda focuses on building the economic resilience that prevents trafficking before it begins. In a country still rebuilding from the 1994 genocide, vulnerability to trafficking is driven by poverty, displacement, and the absence of viable livelihoods, particularly for women, youth, and rural communities. The people work here is directly connected to the social innovation work below, because every cooperative that succeeds is a community that becomes structurally harder to exploit.
What We Found
Rwanda has made remarkable progress since 1994, but trafficking remains a reality, particularly in domestic servitude, commercial sexual exploitation, and cross-border labor trafficking. Women and girls in rural areas are disproportionately affected. Without stable income, families are vulnerable to the false promises of recruiters who offer jobs that turn into forced labor.
What We Set Out to Do
Build self-sustaining cooperatives that provide dignified income, financial literacy, and market access, so that communities have an economic foundation strong enough to resist trafficking at its source.
What We Have Built
Agricultural cooperatives: Not For Sale supports four cooperatives in the Ruhango and Kamonyi districts with 128 members. These cooperatives have expanded pineapple and cassava production, increased household savings, and improved financial literacy and operational capacity through training and seed funding.
The Entrepreneurship Challenge: Not For Sale runs its Entrepreneurship Challenge model in Rwanda alongside Uganda, identifying young entrepreneurs, training them, and seed-funding their business ideas. The format mirrors the Uganda program: intensive training, pitch competition, seed funding for every participant, and ongoing mentorship.
Community resilience: Each cooperative functions as both an economic unit and a social safety net. Members pool resources, share risk, and build the collective leverage that individual families lack.
Read the social innovation section below, because in Rwanda, the cooperatives are both the people program and the enterprise.
Rwanda · Social Innovation
Cooperatives as the Enterprise
Not For Sale’s social innovation work in Rwanda demonstrates that the Impact Stack does not always require building a new company. Sometimes the enterprise is the cooperative itself, a community-owned economic unit that generates income, builds resilience, and reduces trafficking vulnerability without external revenue.
The Model
In Rwanda, the cooperatives are the innovation. Not For Sale provides seed funding, training, and market access support. The cooperatives do the rest: they farm, they save, they reinvest, they grow. The Entrepreneurship Challenge adds a second layer, identifying individual entrepreneurs within these communities and accelerating their ideas with capital and mentorship.
This is the Impact Stack adapted to a post-genocide context: direct service (training, support), root cause research (identifying economic vulnerability drivers), and scalable enterprise (cooperatives and seed-funded businesses that sustain themselves).
