The report maps the capacity and potential for excellence of almost one hundred journalism schools across Africa, highlighting the development challenges and opportunities of African journalism institutions and identifying specific areas for support from development partners.

Within the framework of UNESCO’s Programme in Communication and Information, and particularly in view of the action “building professional and institutional capacity for media training”, this report documents the process and results of a project to set up criteria and indicators to assess quality (‘excellence’) of media training institutions, and to map African journalism schools on the African continent, focusing analysis on the quality of the top institutions deemed to be centres of excellence.

Criteria and indicators were defined using the input of seven journalistic experts, including consultants from Theophraste, Orbicom and Journet, global networks of journalism and media schools. Eleven media development agencies and nineteen African journalism schools also provided contributions to the project. Of the ninety-six institutions that were targeted to map Africa’s journalism schools, a total of thirty submitted in-depth information regarding the proposed criteria and indicators. Where the institutions concerned have agreed to make this information public, it can be found under their entries in the online database.

The researchers also visited thirty-four institutions. As a result of the report, twelve candidate institutions were identified as potential Centres of Excellence, and a further nine institutions noted as potential Centres of Reference.