Burundi: Digital justice stumbles in a country with 11% connectivity
The Burundian justice system wants to go digital: dematerialized archives, online complaint filing, and electronic tracking of criminal cases. The "E-Justice" project has already digitized 15,000 files and installed 16 virtual law libraries during its pilot phase, reports Afrique IT News on October 6, 2026. However, its expansion across the country is blocked by a very material obstacle: the network.
At the end of 2025, the internet penetration rate in Burundi stood at 11.1%, according to data cited by Afrique IT News. In other words, nearly nine out of ten Burundians remain offline. 4G coverage reaches 32.2% of the territory, and one gigabyte of data costs the equivalent of 10.4% of the gross national income per capita.
When the pipe is missing, the reform stops
This last figure is the most telling. In a country where connecting just once with one gigabyte represents a tenth of the average annual income, asking a litigant to file their complaint online is equivalent to closing the door on them. The observation also holds true inside the courts: Afrique IT News notes that magistrates do not have enough personal computers to operate the system.
The project is not a bad idea, however. The digitization of judicial archives is, everywhere on the continent, a weapon against slowness, disappearing files, and arrangements that thrive in the opacity of court registries. The 15,000 files already processed and the virtual law libraries give judges access to texts that many rural jurisdictions had never had.
The order of priorities
The Burundian case illustrates a lesson that African administrations know well: a platform is only as good as the infrastructure that supports it. Donors willingly fund applications, but more rarely the towers, fiber optics, and electricity that make them usable, nor the reduction in data prices which depends on regulators and operators.
Access to justice is a right, and today it is played out as much in courtrooms as it is on network coverage maps. For "E-Justice" to benefit the farmer in Cibitoke as much as the merchant in Bujumbura, it is the cost of the megabyte that will need to be brought down.
This article was written in French with the help of artificial intelligence from the sources cited below, then translated from French automatically. Read the original.
