Rwanda's National Open Data Portal — Turning the 2017 Data Revolution Policy Into a Shared Government Platform

Rwanda passed an Access to Information law in 2013 and commissioned an Open Data Readiness Assessment the same year. In 2017 the government adopted a National Data Revolution Policy that told ministries to stop keeping data in departmental silos and instead feed one centralised, publicly accessible portal.

The Ministry of ICT and Innovation (MINICT), the National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda (NISR) and the Rwanda Information Society Authority (RISA) led the build. MINICT and RISA ran a web-development competition to get local technologists building the platform's data-collection tooling, covering everything from weather and prices to taxation, investment, education, culture and the efficiency of public services. NISR separately runs an annual data-journalism competition built around the datasets it already publishes.

On independent measures, Rwanda placed among the highest-scoring countries in the 2020 Open Data Inventory (ODIN) — behind top performer Mexico and alongside Mongolia and Moldova, according to a World Bank Data Blog analysis of that round. But an independent review by the development-practice site DevelopLocal found real gaps behind that ranking: publishing has stayed supply-side, without matching citizen demand; governance leadership is uneven department by department; and practice on the ground does not always match what the 2017 policy requires. Rwanda's case is a genuine, still-unfinished attempt at joined-up government data, not a finished success story.

Read the full analysis: https://www.minict.gov.rw/open-data-portal