Map, track and analyze Africa's evolving media landscape.

Africa's information ecosystem is moving faster than any one-time map can capture.

This is what the world's largest annual study of news consumption found this year. Code for Africa is a named sponsor of the Reuters Institute's Digital News Report 2026.

Legacy and online media is our foundation layer. We are adding an emerging media layer.

MediaData and MediaCloud, above, map and monitor Africa's established news industry — licensed outlets, broadcasters, news agencies. But a growing share of African news and commentary now happens outside that industry entirely: independent digital-native publishers, individual creator-journalists, and newsletters, Telegram channels and fediverse accounts that never touch a crawlable website. Three source types, unified into one live view.

Close to 1,600 of these publishers were mapped and of these, over a 1,000 are actively tracked — live in Wavelength.

Research built with the people who map, fund and study this ecosystem alongside us.

CivicSignal's own infrastructure is only half the picture — the mapping it draws on, and the questions it's been used to answer, come out of standing research partnerships.

Infrastructure partner

MEAG

The Media Ecosystems Analysis Group maintains Media Cloud, the open-source ingestion infrastructure behind CivicSignal — originally developed at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center and incubated at the MIT Media Lab.

Visit MEAG Sponsor & co-author

Reuters Institute

Code for Africa has been a co-sponsor and co-author of the Digital News Report from 2020 through 2026 — including South Africa and Nigeria editions, with CfA co-authoring the South Africa chapter — the world's largest annual study of news consumption.

Read the report Research partnership

SembraMedia

~1,100 digital-native media organisations identified, 763 profiled, across seven African countries — the largest systematic map of its kind.

See the findings Creator research

CNTI

With the Center for News, Technology and Innovation and ProjectC: a survey of 42 South African creator-journalists — who they are, how they work, and how unevenly they get paid for it.

See the survey Disinformation research

GDI

The Global Disinformation Index rates the disinformation risk of news sites and traces how that content gets monetised — an evidence base CivicSignal's own market analysis draws on.

Visit GDI Creator research

Project C

The research hub and strategic home for 200+ independent journalists building sustainable, audience-driven media ventures outside traditional institutions — a partner on CivicSignal's creator-journalist survey.

Visit Project C

Research built on CivicSignal's infrastructure.

The same monitoring capability behind Wavelength also powers investigative research — identifying outlets, tracking their publication patterns over time, and cross-referencing coverage against known actors and narratives.