Most Africans support a free press and want media to hold governments to account, yet fewer than half believe their country’s media actually operates without censorship, according to new survey data released by Afrobarometer to mark World Press Freedom Day.
The findings, drawn from 45,600 face-to-face interviews across 38 African countries conducted in 2024 and 2025, reveal a continent where public values and lived realities around press freedom do not fully align.
Seventy-two percent of respondents said the media should constantly investigate and report on government mistakes and corruption, with support for that watchdog role forming a majority in every surveyed country. Ghana ranked among the strongest, with 82 percent of Ghanaians endorsing the investigative role of media, placing the country alongside Nigeria (83%), Uganda (82%), Mauritius (86%), and Congo-Brazzaville (81%) at the top of that measure.
Support for media freedom, defined as the right of the press to publish without government control, stood at 65 percent across the 38 countries, with clear majorities in all surveyed nations except Tanzania, where opinion was split at 49 percent, and Mali, where only 27 percent favoured an independent press. Ghana recorded 71 percent support for media freedom.
Despite this broad public backing, assessments of actual press conditions were far more cautious. Only 53 percent of respondents said the media in their country was largely free, while 43 percent described it as subject to censorship or government interference. Ghana’s figure on perceived media freedom stood at 67 percent, though this represented a 6-point decline from the 2019 to 2021 survey period, a slide broadly consistent with the overall continental trend.
Across the 30 countries tracked in both 2019 to 2021 and 2024 to 2025, the perception that media is free fell by an average of four percentage points. The steepest declines were in Guinea, where perceived press freedom fell by 34 points, followed by Lesotho and Nigeria, each down 22 points, and Botswana, down 20 points. In contrast, Liberia recorded a dramatic 58-point increase, moving from the lowest-ranked country on perceived press freedom to the second-highest. Gabon gained 24 points and Zambia 22 points over the same period.
The report also flagged an unusual ambivalence in the data: citizens who described their media as free were slightly less likely to support press freedom than those who saw it as constrained, at 63 percent versus 69 percent. Afrobarometer researchers described this as suggesting that perceived availability of press freedom may reduce its perceived urgency.
Afrobarometer is a pan-African, nonpartisan survey research network headquartered in Accra and funded by a range of international development partners. Its Round 10 surveys covered 38 countries with margins of error of plus or minus two to three percentage points at a 95 percent confidence level.
