Rwanda

National jurisdiction · as of 2026-09-05

Rwanda has no adult-content age-verification statute, no social-media minor-access restriction, and no app-store age-verification requirement, but it does have an age-appropriate design duty. The Ministry of Information, Communication, Technology and Innovation issued Ministerial Instructions N° 001/MINICT/2024 of 22/01/2024 on Child Online Protection, in force since their publication in the Official Gazette on 23 January 2024.

The instructions bind any person or organisation that broadcasts or provides content online or provides access to online content, a scope reaching general-purpose digital content providers and internet service providers rather than only services aimed at children, and require them to put in place a mechanism to prevent children from accessing age-inappropriate content, sites, products, or interactive services, and to label content for suitability for children.

Separately, Law N° 71/2018 of 31/08/2018 relating to the Protection of the Child criminalises showing a child pornographic images or sounds, recording a child's pornographic picture or voice, and advertising children's pornographic images, but those provisions bind the person who commits those acts rather than imposing an age-verification or age-gating duty on a service.

In April 2026 the Minister of ICT and Innovation said a draft law under review would bar children under sixteen from major social media and video-sharing platforms and would draw on Rwanda's national digital identity system for age verification; as of this review no such bill had been published in the Official Gazette or otherwise located as an official text, so it does not appear as an instrument here.

01

Instruments on record

Ministerial Instructions on Child Online Protection

In force

Ministerial Instructions N° 001/MINICT/2024 of 22/01/2024 on Child Online Protection

Effective 2024-01-23 · Applies to both

Article 3 applies these instructions to any person or organisation that broadcasts or provides content online or provides access to online content, a scope not confined to services aimed at children or to social media platforms.

Article 4 requires digital content providers and retailers to make available digital content filtering tools, maintain plans to manage harmful online content, provide a reporting function for users, give a clear external label describing whether platform content is suitable for children, and put in place a mechanism to prevent children from accessing age-inappropriate content, sites, products, or interactive services.

Article 5 requires internet service providers to inform subscribers of risks to children, support reporting of child abuse, block access to child-abuse material once identified, and make parental-control tools available where applicable. Article 6 requires cybercafes and public Wi-Fi providers in public places to proactively block access to sites known for hosting content harmful to children.

Article 7 requires broadcasters and television service providers to indicate the suitability of content for various age categories. It also requires them to implement technical barriers, including parental controls and age-verification tools, so that children are not exposed to harmful content.

Article 8 requires social media users to self-regulate by refraining from creating or publishing videos of child actors in age-inappropriate roles, and from creating or publishing children's images or videos for entertainment or commercial purposes without the consent of a holder of parental responsibility.

The instructions themselves do not define the term child; they are issued pursuant to Law N° 71/2018 relating to the Protection of the Child, which defines a child as any person under eighteen years of age.

Age threshold18
Enforcement bodythe organ in charge of cybersecurity in Rwanda (the competent authority named in the instructions)

Source: Full text of law