Welcome to Sobanukirwa, an access to information website in Rwanda

Welcome to sobanukirwa.rw, a new access to information website in Rwanda.

Sobanukirwa is designed to make it easy for anyone to find or request information from public and private organisations in Rwanda for free.

This is possible thanks to the 2013 access to information law passed by the Rwandan government to “enable the public and journalists to access information possessed by public organs and some private bodies”.

We have built sobanukirwa.rw so that you can request information from hundreds of organisations without needing to know the details of the person to contact at that authority and without having to move from remote locations to central offices or Kigali. These authorities include Rwanda’s ministries, provinces and districts as well as every sector office in the country.

All you need to do to submit a request is give us your email address (which we’ll keep private) along with a username that can be your real name or a pseudonym. Then you write your request and Sobanukirwa will do all the work of sending it to the right place as well as alerting you by email as soon as you receive a response.

To ensure that everyone benefits from the release of public information, sobanukirwa.rw makes all information requests and replies available on the web so that they can be found using search engines and on our website. But we take careful steps to protect the identities and contact details of our users so that you can use the site without revealing personal information if you choose not to.

The website has also been translated into the three national languages of Rwanda – English, Kinyarwanda and French – so that all citizens can use it, no matter which language they speak.

sobanukirwa.rw has been co-created by Tumenye, a civic technology company based in Kigali, and the Open Democracy and Sustainable Development Initiative (ODESUDI). We have also worked with the Office of the Ombudsman, who are tasked with monitoring the use of Rwanda’s access to information law.

If you have any questions about using Sobanukirwa, please read our help section or contact our team via the website, Twitter or Facebook. We hope you find the site useful.