The global media meltdown intensified after January 2025 with a freeze on all US foreign aid government funding affecting thousands of media organisations globally.
Alongside this, we have a limited understanding of both existing challenges facing grassroots media in Africa, and how this funding freeze compounds their already precarious survival.
African media industry bodies have partnered with Code for Africa’s (CfA) media research unit, CivicSignal, to survey how community media and small independent publishers are navigating economic challenges. In order to understand the landscape, we are asking grassroots and independent media organisations to participate in our survey.
This is part of the #MediaMeltdown research coalition of industry bodies to analyse how the disruption is transforming the continent’s media, to better understand the scale, pace, and impact of market consolidation and the resulting changes in the sector.
[If you’re interested in participating in our survey, please follow the link here.]
Plummeting print runs
This unpredictability of economic circumstances, both local and global, compounds pre-existing pressures faced by community media. For context, in southern Africa, the Association of Independent Publishers (AIP) reports that they have lost almost 13% of their members since 2016, with monthly print runs plummeting from 7.5 million to 2.5 million.
Another recent study of South African community media found that 90% of the target audiences for small newspapers could not afford to buy a copy. Community media are also largely dependent on advertising income – accounting for 84% of their income – but struggle to attract sufficient revenue from this source.
Closures or reduced coverage leave communities with fewer sources of locally relevant news and critical information to inform daily decisions, particularly where internet penetration is low.
Planned surveys
Against this backdrop, CfA, in partnership with Africa Media Hub at Strathmore University in Kenya, the Association of Independent Publishers in South Africa, Media Rights Agenda (MRA) in Nigeria, Namibia Media Trust (NMT), the National Community Radio Forum (NCRF) in South Africa, is launching the second in a series of planned surveys to gather data on community media challenges and emerging models in the African media sector.
[If you’re interested in participating as a collaborator on this project, please follow the link here.]
“Community media drives inclusive development by sharing vital information on health, education, governance, and the environment,” says Zoe Titus, director of the Namibia Media Trust. “We saw these benefits firsthand during Namibia’s 2024 general elections, where community media conversations bridged the gap between national policies and local realities.”
While community media creates space for linguistic, cultural and technological accessibility, they face a persistent challenge: strong community engagement and quality local language content, while socially vital, doesn’t automatically translate to financial sustainability.
“By mapping both mainstream media job losses and now community media adaptations, we’re building a comprehensive picture of Africa’s changing media landscape. The insights from the survey will be shared in a public report and intends to help industry bodies and funders better understand the African landscape, and inform strategies to support these vital grassroots information providers,” says Amanda Strydom, senior programme manager of CivicSignal.
Protecting diverse voices
“This Media Meltdown initiative isn’t just about saving individual media organisations – it’s about protecting the diverse voices that keep our communities informed,” Strydom adds.
CivicSignal is CfA’s in-house media monitoring and analysis unit that uses AI and other machine-learning approaches to map the information ecosystems across 27 African countries so that stakeholders, including development agencies, better understand the local media economies and media ownership.
The full community/grassroots media survey can be found here.
If you are not part of community media, but have been impacted by US government funding freezes, please share your experiences here.
Join the #MediaMeltdown coalition, a network of editor/journalist associations and media organisations assisting to map the changes in the media sector here.
