European news service Euronews has announced its plan to launch Africanews, a pan-African news service based in the Republic of Congo providing a multilingual news platform for people across the continent.
The news channel is set to launch in the summer of 2015, seeking to provide Africans with African news, steering away from Eurocentric editorial policies.
“Our strategic and highly ambitious project will not be a mere African ‘window’ made by Euronews, as most international news channels do, but rather a full-fledged pan-African network, with editorial choices made by Africans for an African audience,” the company said in a statement.
The company hopes the offering, which will initially be broadcast in French and English, will gain continent-wide viewership by expanding its language base to speakers of Arabic, Portuguese and Swahili.
“The goal is to then expand to include the other widely-spoken languages in Africa making it accessible to the largest number of African viewers.”
The initiative hopes to provide an African news platform that has the ability to compete in an international market.
“Africanews is different from existing channels because it aims to give Africa its rightful place in the world of news and to give the world the latest news from the continent which is itself a news market, in the same way and at the same level as other regions of the world,” said the company.
