Botswana

National jurisdiction · as of 2026-09-04

Botswana has not enacted an adult-content age-verification, social-media minor-access, app-store age-verification, or age-appropriate design code statute.

The Children's Act, 2009 (Act No. 8 of 2009) defines a child as any person below the age of eighteen years and bars exposing a child to pornographic material, making such material available to a child, or involving a child in the making of such material (section 58), and separately bars storing, keeping, or distributing an indecent image depicting illegal sexual activity against a child (section 58(2)); these are content and offender-focused criminal offences rather than an age-verification or age-gating duty imposed on an online service, and none of them requires a service to verify a user's age before granting access.

The Cybercrime and Computer Related Crimes Act, 2018 separately criminalizes publishing, producing, possessing, or accessing child pornography or obscene material relating to children through a computer or computer system, and communicating with a person under eighteen for the purpose of facilitating a child-pornography, prostitution, rape, or indecent-assault offence, or with a person under sixteen for the purpose of facilitating abduction, kidnapping, or a sexual offence (section 19); these too are content and offender-focused criminal offences, not an age-verification duty.

Separately, the Data Protection Act, 2024 requires a child's own consent from age sixteen, or otherwise a parent's or guardian's consent, before processing the child's personal data in connection with an information-society service offered directly to them (section 29), but that is a data-protection consent safeguard the Data Protection Act creates, rather than an age-verification duty on a service.

No numbered bill, Government Gazette citation, or public draft text proposing an age-verification, social-media minor-access, app-store age-verification, or age-appropriate design regime is cited here.