Malawi

National jurisdiction · as of 2026-09-05

Malawi has no adult-content age-verification law, social-media minor-access restriction, app-store age-verification requirement, or age-appropriate design code.

The Electronic Transactions and Cyber Security Act, 2016 prohibits child pornography in electronic form and criminalizes producing, reproducing, offering, distributing, or possessing it, or exposing a child to pornographic material through an information system, but the duty its filtering provision imposes runs to an establishment or place open to the public that provides internet access, which must use pornography-filtering software, not to an online service provider or app that publishes or hosts content; the Act therefore imposes no age-verification or age-gating duty of the kind this topic tracks.

The Child Care, Protection and Justice Act, 2010, which consolidates Malawi's child care, protection and child-justice law and defines a child by reference to the sexual and other abuse a child may suffer, was checked and contains no reference to the internet, an online service, or an electronic communication.