This policy note summarizes lessons from a workshop on incremental housing held in Kigali in 2016 and led by Laura Sara Wainer and Bill Ndeneyingoma from MIT’s Resilient Cities Housing Initiative. The workshop was hosted by the Rwanda Housing Authority (RHA) and International Growth Centre (IGC). We review here key design principles for a successful pilot incremental housing project, regarding land management, housing architecture, building materials, and infrastructure, drawing on lessons from international experience and context-specific challenges and opportunities. The urbanization of the Global South between 1950 and 2020 has taken place at an unprecedented speed, more than double the speed of urbanization in the Global North. Furthermore, while urbanization has been accompanied by strong economic and employment growth in East Asia, migration to cities in Sub-Saharan Africa has also occurred for reasons other than the lure of plentiful urban job opportunities. This rapid, low-income, urbanization has led to shortfalls in many ingredients that are key to urban success- infrastructure, education, financial access, and often most visibly, housing. A common response to mass housing shortages- from the USA in the mid-19th century, to developing countries like Mexico and Angola in the last decade- has been government-financed, industrial production of houses on previously undeveloped sites. However, these projects often suffer three important mistakes.