In a new report, Care International says events in Africa are being underreported in the media as global attention shifts to conflicts in Europe and the Middle East.

Care International’s research singled out 10 African countries — including Zimbabwe, Uganda, Burundi, Zambia, and Senegal — that are suffering crises such as climate change, conflict, poverty, hunger, violence and political instability but are getting little news coverage.

It said more than 77,000 articles were published last year about these countries — while the iPhone 15 generated more than 273,000 stories.

The report, released last week, took the unusual approach of aggregating online articles in Arabic, English, French, German and Spanish. It found there were more than 215,000 articles last year about Prince Harry’s book “Spare,” but only 11,000 about the deadly violence and displacement in Burkina Faso.

There were more than 273,000 articles about the “Barbie” film, but only about 1,000 about the floods, drought and hunger in Angola that affected some 7 million people.

The report, titled Breaking the Silence, mentions many other African crises that are getting little to no media attention.

Stefan Brand, who works with Care Germany, explained why the continent’s humanitarian crisis is underreported.
“The crises, the conflicts such as the war in Ukraine and now in the Middle East are receiving the most coverage by the international journalists in every country or in most of the countries and therefore smaller crises are more in the shadow of these big conflicts,” said Brand. “But I also think that the media channels are more and more forced to save money because of a lack of interest by the public.”

Experts point to reduced media budgets

Douglas Okwatch is the secretary of the Foreign Press Association, Africa, an organization of African journalists working for foreign media. He said media budgets have been shrinking, reducing the number of stories being produced from the continent.