Online safety & content laws in Côte d'Ivoire (2026)

The Council of Ministers adopted Decree No. 2024-958 creating the Agence Nationale de la Sécurité des Systèmes d'Information (ANSSI-CI), centralising all cybersecurity and cybercrime-fighting functions previously distributed across ARTCI, the DITT, and CI-CERT into a single authority supervised jointly by the Minister of Digital Transition and the Minister of Security. ANSSI absorbed CI-CERT on 30 April 2025 and is now developing a successor Cybersecurity Strategy 2026-2030.

A decree of 16 August 2024 required all data controllers to designate and formally register a Data Protection Officer in ARTCI's national DPO registry, operationalising the accountability provisions of the 2013 personal-data protection law. ARTCI launched a compliance seminar in April 2026 in Yamoussoukro to help operators align with both this decree and Law No. 2024-352.

This landmark statute modernised the entire electronic communications framework, introducing updated licensing regimes, mandatory user-protection obligations, and network-resilience requirements for internet access providers and operators. It replaced the previous sector law and became the primary statute governing online service delivery and ARTCI's regulatory authority.

Amending six articles of the 2013 Cybercrime Law, this law doubled maximum prison sentences for ICT-facilitated violations of human dignity, honour, and intellectual property, raised fines for child pornography possession (up to 40 million CFA francs), and explicitly criminalised the distribution of racist or xenophobic content via information systems (up to 20 years imprisonment). It marked a significant toughening of online content regulation.

Côte d'Ivoire's ratification was one of the 15 required to bring the African Union's Convention on Cyber Security and Personal Data Protection into force, which occurred on 8 June 2023. The convention sets binding continental standards on e-transactions, personal data processing, cybersecurity, and cybercrime, complementing Côte d'Ivoire's domestic framework.

The Ministry of Digital Economy published Côte d'Ivoire's five-year cybersecurity strategy, budgeted at 18 billion CFA francs (~USD 31 million), comprising 21 projects across three axes: improving incident detection and response, building online trust for users and businesses, and strengthening international cooperation. It mandated the creation of a National Cybersecurity Agency and a national Security Operations Centre (SOC).

This decree created the national Computer Emergency Response Team (CI-CERT) under ARTCI and imposed a mandatory incident-reporting obligation on all public and private network and information-system operators to notify CI-CERT of any attack, intrusion, or disruption. It established the first legally grounded national incident-response structure and remained operative until ANSSI absorbed CI-CERT in April 2025.

ARTCI Decision No. 2015-0074 established the Comité Consultatif pour la Confiance Numérique (CCCN), giving technical experts and civil-society representatives a formal advisory role on network security, cybercrime, and electronic-transaction safety issues. It was the first institutionalised multi-stakeholder body in Côte d'Ivoire's digital-safety governance.

The Plateforme de Lutte Contre la Cybercriminalité (PLCC) was created as a joint operational unit between the National Police and ARTCI, becoming the frontline enforcement body against online crime. Processing 4,500–12,000 complaints annually by 2024 (including fraud, digital identity theft, and non-consensual intimate image sharing), it was the primary enforcement mechanism predating ANSSI.