Rwanda (RW) — internal licensing notes

Source research, 2026-09-17 — structural fit check, not primarily a licensing question

Confirmed: Rwanda has no operational postal-code system. Addressing relies on the administrative hierarchy (province, district, sector, cell) plus, in Kigali, a street-coding scheme (KG/KK/KN prefixes for Gasabo/Kicukiro/Nyarugenge + avenue/street numbers) — not postcodes.

Current repo state (verified, not assumed)

• datasets/rw/datapackage.yml: data_available: false — accurate.
• R2/datahub placeholder https://postal.datahub.io/rw/rw.csv: fetched 2026-09-17, returns exactly the 13-column header row, 158 bytes (matches the datapackage's declared bytes: 158) — confirms this is genuinely an empty placeholder, not a stale-but-real file.
• datasets/rw/README.md already states plainly there is no data yet and invites a data request — consistent with the above.
• No .licensing-notes.md existed for rw before this pass.

What was checked

• Wikipedia, "List of postal codes" (2026-09-17): Rwanda's row reads format = "no codes", no further note (unlike Libya's 2019-project note or Syria's "4-digit system announced" note — Rwanda's entry is a plain, unqualified "no codes").
• National Post Office (Iposita / i-posita.rw), Rwanda's postal operator: its Wikipedia article makes no mention of postal or ZIP codes at all — only organisational/monopoly/financial matters. The live site itself (i-posita.rw) is not usably reachable: HTTPS fails with an expired certificate, and even bypassing cert validation (curl -k) gets a 403 (Cloudflare/WAF-style block, not a postal-code page). No evidence anywhere of a bulk postcode list, lookup API, or pilot dataset from the postal authority.
• Rwanda's "digital addressing" push — checked, and it is NOT a postal code system, confirming the task's suspicion:
  • ePoBox (epobox.app), built on MPost — described as "Rwanda's national digital addressing & logistics platform" — issues a digital address linked to GPS / Plus Codes / nearest Post Office per individual/business account, not a public list of area codes. This is an address-point/PO-box product (closer to a private what3words/ Plus-Codes wrapper), not a postal-code scheme, and there is no bulk public dataset to fetch even if it were in scope.
  • Rwanda's other prominent "digital ID" initiatives found in this pass (Single Digital ID / biometric national ID, 2024–2026) are person- identity systems, unrelated to postal/address geocoding.
  • Rwanda's own National Numbering Plan (RURA, June 2023) — checked as a possible official-numbering candidate — is a telecom numbering plan (phone number allocation), not a postal/address code system.
  • Conclusion: no official, semi-official, or private Rwandan system found assigns area-level postal codes. The "digital address" layer that does exist is point-level (GPS/Plus Codes per address/PO Box), not the area-level postal_code field this schema needs, and it is privately operated (MPost/ePoBox), not an open bulk source in any case.

GeoNames

• Postal export: https://download.geonames.org/export/zip/RW.zip → plain 404 (confirmed 2026-09-17). Consistent with there being no postal-code system to export — same signature as Libya/Syria/Zimbabwe.
• Main gazetteer dump: https://download.geonames.org/export/dump/RW.zip → 200 OK, 487,346 bytes, extracts to RW.txt (21,013 total rows). This is a real, fetchable candidate for a future free locality-only build, same product used for Bolivia/Ethiopia/Uganda/Libya/Zimbabwe/ Syria in this catalogue.
  • Feature class P (populated places): 10,260 rows.
  • admin1 (province) coverage among P rows, by GeoNames numeric code: 15 (Southern) 3,252 · 14 (Western) 2,523 · 13 (Northern) 2,255 · 11 (Eastern) 1,825 · 12 (Kigali) 404 · 1 row with a blank admin1 code (would ship with blank admin_name1/admin_code1, left blank rather than guessed, per the Libya/Zimbabwe/Syria precedent).
  • GeoNames' admin1CodesASCII.txt lists all 5 RW buckets by name: RW.11 Eastern Province, RW.12 Kigali, RW.13 Northern Province, RW.14 Western Province, RW.15 Southern Province — 5/5, matching Rwanda's real administrative structure (4 provinces + the City of Kigali, which holds equal provincial status).

ISO 3166-2:RW crosswalk (needed for any future build)

Confirmed via Wikipedia's ISO_3166-2:RW page (2026-09-17) — 5 units, all with real alpha-numeric ISO codes (result of the 2006 administrative reform that reduced 12 prefectures to 1 city + 4 provinces):

The GeoNames↔ISO crosswalk is clean — all 5 GeoNames numeric buckets map one-to-one to all 5 current ISO codes by name, no reform-era mismatches (same clean shape as Libya/Syria, unlike Ethiopia's 2 unmapped post-reform regions). Note the GeoNames↔ISO numbering is NOT sequential/parallel (GeoNames' .11–.15 vs ISO's 01–05 in a different order) — a build must join by name, never assume position/order.

Verdict

Same class as Libya/Syria pre-build: no operational postal-code system, and unlike Libya/Syria there isn't even an announced/in-progress rollout — Rwanda's Wikipedia entry is a plain "no codes" with no qualifying note, and the "digital addressing" activity found (ePoBox/MPost) is a private point-level address product, not a postal-code project working toward public codes. This looks closer to a permanent-shape no-postal-code country than a "revisit later" one, though it hasn't been checked across multiple research passes the way Libya/Syria have — treat as provisionally closed on the postal-code question, re-check if a future pass turns up an official rollout.

Free-locality-directory candidate: YES, same shape as Bolivia/Ethiopia/Uganda/Libya/Zimbabwe/Syria. GeoNames' main gazetteer dump is live, returns 10,260 populated places, covers all 5 administrative units with a clean ISO 3166-2:RW crosswalk already verified, and is licensed CC BY 4.0 — the same terms already used for the equivalent builds elsewhere in this catalogue. No incompatible-licence signal found (GeoNames CC BY 4.0 throughout; no OSM/ODbL involvement in this candidate source; MPost/ePoBox's data was not used and is not open in any case).

No licence_status block is added here — there is no data shipped yet to gate. data_available is left unchanged (false) since this is a research-only pass; datapackage.yml was not modified, and nothing was built, uploaded, or committed, per the research-only scope of this task.

Recommended next step: if/when a build pass is picked up for RW, follow the Libya/Zimbabwe/Syria build_postal_codes_product.py pattern — GeoNames main dump, feature class P, postal_code left empty on every row, ISO crosswalk by name as tabulated above (watch the non-parallel GeoNames↔ISO numbering noted above). Before that build, re-check i-posita.rw reachability (currently cert-expired + 403-blocked — may just be a transient ops issue at the postal authority, worth a fresh check rather than assuming the block is permanent) and re-search for any official government (not MPost/ePoBox) digital-addressing rollout, in case it has moved from point-level GPS/Plus-Codes toward a public area-code scheme in the interim.

Build, 2026-09-17 — free locality-directory product shipped (LOCAL ONLY)

Followed the Libya/Syria pattern exactly, per the research pass above. Built locally in this repo; not uploaded to R2, not committed, not pushed, and neither _meta/catalog.json nor datapackage.yml were touched — those remain the next (separate) step.

• Source: https://download.geonames.org/export/dump/RW.zip, fetched fresh 2026-09-17 into datasets/rw/sources/RW.zip (487,346 bytes, matches the research-pass fetch exactly) → RW.txt, 21,013 total rows.
• Row count: filtered to feature class P → 10,260 rows, matching the research pass exactly.
• ISO province coverage: 5/5. All 5 GeoNames RW admin1 buckets (RW.11 Eastern, RW.12 Kigali, RW.13 Northern, RW.14 Western, RW.15 Southern) resolved by name to all 5 ISO 3166-2:RW codes (RW-01 City of Kigali, RW-02 Eastern, RW-03 Northern, RW-04 Western, RW-05 Southern) — no unmapped bucket; admin-left completeness check passes in the build script.
• Blank-admin1 rows: 1 (of 10,260) — the same single row flagged in the research pass (Rutagara, geonameid 7320007, blank admin1 field in the raw GeoNames source). Ships with blank admin_name1/ admin_code1 rather than guessed, disclosed in ATTRIBUTION.txt and the field description in datapackage.json — same precedent as Libya (22 rows) and Zimbabwe (2 rows).
• postal_code: empty on every one of the 10,260 rows — structural fact, not a defect, per the research verdict above (no operational postal-code system and no in-progress rollout found).
• Output: datasets/rw/data/rw.csv, datapackage.json, README.md, ATTRIBUTION.txt, rw.zip (bundles all four). licence_status.decision is compatible (CC BY 4.0, GeoNames, channel: postal-codes-r2) — built via the shared datapackage pattern, no per-country licenses: hand-rolling.
• Validation: python3 -m frictionless validate datapackage.json, run from inside datasets/rw/data/ (the delivered artifact, not the working copy) → VALID. Declared rows: 10260 and bytes: 602908 in datapackage.json both match the actual written rw.csv exactly; all 4 files the datapackage/zip reference were verified present.
• Build script: datasets/rw/scripts/build_postal_codes_product.py (csv module only, no pandas — same LY/SY template). Reproducible: run from that directory after RW.zip and geonames_admin1CodesASCII.txt are present under datasets/rw/sources/.

Scope of this pass was strictly the build — no catalog registration, no pricing-tier assignment, no R2 publish, no git commit. Those remain open follow-up steps.