Disease-specific guidelines provide robust recommendations to create laboratory networks, but may not always include guidance on how to organize, mobilize and integrate the essential resources, procedures, and policies for creating and maintaining a laboratory network within a national public health surveillance system [8, 9] . Thus we wanted to examine Rwanda's eight-year (from 2000 to 2007) experience with IDSR to see how the country developed a public health laboratory network through coordination of multiple resources and technical support in order to meet national priorities and partner interests.