"NGO products" do not scale in consumer markets

Tuesday, a day before the main event starts, at the Young Water Solutions hackathon. Student teams are working on a challenge: how to reach new customer segments for a water filter product. Initially, the teams focus on function and price. But gradually, a more interesting question comes up. How do you make a water filter something people want, not just something they need? The same question will surface again a day later in discussions about reusable menstrual health products.

This is one of the most underappreciated barriers in the sector. Products that were developed in an NGO context, designed for durability and affordability, often carry an aesthetic and brand identity that signals aid rather than aspiration. In consumer markets, perception ("Emotional Value") matters as much as performance. Customers who can afford to choose will choose products that feel modern, desirable, and aligned with their identity. Scaling WASH products into mainstream markets requires investment in branding, packaging, and marketing, areas that many impact funders still consider overhead rather than strategy, and where we at Cewas encounter capacity gaps in entrepreneurs over and over again.

The problem is not missing solutions

Wednesday, early morning, just after 8am. A session room is filling up, mostly with women working in menstrual health and hygiene. What stands out is the energy. These are organizations that could view each other as competitors, yet the conversation is open, collaborative and honest. There is deep shared understanding of the problem, the customer, and the barriers.

A dominant narrative in WASH still tends to frame the challenge as a supply problem: not enough innovation, not enough entrepreneurs, not enough solutions. That framing is outdated, at least in East Africa. Solutions exist. Demand exists. Entrepreneurs understand their markets. The real bottleneck is not invention. It is the inability to move proven solutions from pilot to scale. And that bottleneck is primarily financial and structural, not technical.

Distribution fails where financing structures are missing

Right after the session, a conversation with an experienced funder confirms what many in the room already sense. She understands the structural disadvantages that female hygiene products face compared to other segments of the WASH market. The unit economics are difficult. Margins are thin and customers are very price sensitive. And unlike other sectors, there is no widely adopted financing mechanism to bridge the gap.

In solar energy, pay as you go models unlocked mass distribution. In clean cooking, carbon credits created a revenue layer that made cook stove business models viable. In menstrual health, no equivalent mechanism exists. The result is a painful paradox: customers want the product and are willing to pay for it, but it is simply not available to them. Enterprises are left to solve last mile distribution and working capital simultaneously, often with grant funding that was never designed for commercial operations. Scaling through supermarkets and other distribution partners only adds to the pressure, as these channels demand payment terms and volumes that require working capital most enterprises cannot access. Until the sector develops or adapts financing structures that match its specific dynamics, distribution will remain the real problem.

Who gets to be seen as "investment-ready"?

Later the same morning, entrepreneurs are setting up their booths in the "Majimarket" area. Some are already preparing to pitch at 10am, pacing through their talking points one last time. Nearby, one participant is visibly frustrated. He wants to pitch but has not been selected to do so.

It is a small moment, but it points to something larger. Access to investors is not open. It is curated. Ecosystems, accelerators, and event organizers act as filters, deciding who is "ready" to be seen. That filtering serves a purpose: it protects investor time and raises the average quality of what gets presented. But it also means that readiness is defined by intermediaries rather than by the market itself. Entrepreneurs who do not fit the mold, whether because of geography, sector, or stage, can remain invisible regardless of the strength of their enterprise. If the ecosystem determines who gets a seat at the table, it also determines, often unconsciously, who does not.

Entrepreneurs pitch funding, not returns

After the investor pitch session, a colleague reflects on what she observed. Many entrepreneurs asked for money. Fewer articulated what investors would get in return. The asks were framed as needs ("we need $200,000 to expand to three new counties") rather than as propositions ("here is the return profile, the timeline, and the risk").

This is not only a skills gap. Entrepreneurs who have been shaped by the grant economy naturally frame their value in terms of impact delivered, not capital returned. Meanwhile, investors expect financial clarity but often do not communicate what "investment readiness" actually requires. The result is a conversation in which both sides are speaking, but not in the same language. Closing this gap is not about better pitch coaching. It requires building a shared vocabulary around value, one that integrates impact and return rather than treating them as separate conversations.

A maturing sector facing uncomfortable next steps

Evening, Day two, at the Majipreneurs cocktail, someone makes a half joking comment to a pair of entrepreneurs working in the same industry: "You should just merge." It gets a laugh. But the idea lingers.

The WASH entrepreneurship ecosystem in East Africa has grown significantly. There are more enterprises, more accelerators, more funders paying attention. But growth has also brought fragmentation. Multiple small organizations serve overlapping markets with similar products, each individually too small to attract institutional capital. Consolidation is rarely a comfortable conversation in impact sectors, where every organization carries a mission and a founder story. But the question is real. Could fewer, stronger entities achieve more than a scattered landscape of underfunded ones? At the same time, on the capital side, a growing number of investors face pressure to green their portfolios and deploy big tickets. Many are actively looking for climate and development aligned opportunities but they need structured, investable vehicles, not a long list of small, early stage enterprises requiring bespoke due diligence.

A sector in transition

The Majipreneurs Summit did not reveal a sector in crisis. It revealed a sector in transition. The entrepreneurial talent is there. The market understanding is there. The urgency, from both the demand side and the capital side, is there.

What is still missing is the connective infrastructure: the financing mechanisms tailored to WASH economics, the shared language between entrepreneurs and investors, the brand strategies that move products from aid to aspiration, and the willingness to pursue consolidation where fragmentation holds the sector back.

The next phase of WASH entrepreneurship will not be defined by better products or bolder founders. The sector has enough of both. It will be defined by the work that rarely makes it onto a stage: standardized investment vehicles that let capital flow faster and in higher amounts, working capital facilities designed for the realities of last mile distribution, and consolidated entities large enough to absorb institutional investment. This is structural, unglamorous work (not that WASH was ever particularly glamorous) but it is the work that leads to scale. And the hundreds of millions of people still lacking access to safe water, sanitation, and hygiene do not need more promising pilots. They need scale.

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