Eritrean News Agency (ERINA)

The Eritrean News Agency (ERINA) is the official state news agency of Eritrea, operated as a department of the Ministry of Information from Asmara. ERINA collects and distributes news and information in Tigrinya, Arabic, English and Eritrea’s other national languages, and serves as the upstream news feed for Eri-TV, Dimtsi Hafash, and the state print outlets:Haddas Ertra (Tigrinya), Eritrea Profile (English) and Eritrea Alhaditha (Arabic). It maintains a correspondent network covering all 30 sub-zones (district administrative units) of the country, with reporters communicating with the Asmara head office through a mix of computerised radio transmission, internet, fax and telephone, per the Ministry’s own historical account. ERINA was operational by 1999 (its dispatches from that period were syndicated by AllAfrica with an Asmara contact line) and it succeeded the EPLF’s wartime news service, the central news-gathering function of which dates to the liberation struggle.

Media assets

News agency: ERINA

Ownership and governance

ERINA is wholly owned by the Eritrean state and operated as a department of the Ministry of Information. There is no independent governing board, no public-service charter, and no statutory framework establishing institutional autonomy. The Minister of Information, Yemane Gebremeskel, in post since 11 March 2015, has ultimate authority over ERINA’s editorial line, staffing and operations, with day-to-day leadership exercised by senior Ministry officials. Eritrea publishes no organisational charts, leadership lists or staff numbers for ERINA, and the agency does not maintain a separate public-facing institutional website distinct from the Ministry’s shabait.com portal, which functions as ERINA’s principal output channel.

The Ministry of Information’s annual assessment meeting on 6 February 2026 reported that 90 percent of programmes planned for 2025 had been implemented across all Ministry units, including the migration to advanced media facilities, archive digitisation, and modernisation of static and mobile studios. ERINA was not separately disaggregated in the public summary, consistent with the Ministry’s practice of treating all its outlets as integrated units of a single state information apparatus.

Source of funding and budget

ERINA is entirely state-funded through Ministry of Information allocations from the central budget. There is no published budget, no annual report, no audited accounts, and no disclosure of staff numbers, operating costs, capital expenditure, or correspondent network costs. Eritrea publishes no national budget and is consistently rated among the world’s least fiscally transparent states. ERINA does not generate independent revenue: it does not charge subscription fees, sell wire content commercially, or accept advertising. Some agency content is syndicated externally (e.g. via AllAfrica), but no commercial wire arrangements have been disclosed.

Editorial independence

ERINA has no editorial autonomy. The Ministry of Information determines content priorities, news framing, and political messaging, and there is no internal ombudsman, press council, or independent regulator. Eritrea has no independent media regulator: the Ministry of Information is simultaneously owner, operator and supervisor of all state media, including the agency that supplies their news content. The 1996 Press Proclamation bans private broadcasting; the September 2001 closure of Eritrea’s last independent newspapers eliminated any non-state media presence in the country, and the journalists arrested in that crackdown, including Dawit Isaak (Swedish-Eritrean), Seyoum Tsehaye (founding head of Eri-TV), Temesgen Ghebreyesus, Amanuel Asrat and others, remain in incommunicado detention without trial into a 25th year as of September 2025.

ERINA’s output is heavily oriented toward government messaging on national development programmes, the indefinite National Service, the ruling People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ), and Eritrea’s foreign policy positions. Through 2025–2026, ERINA’s coverage has been dominated by the deteriorating Eritrea–Ethiopia relationship: Minister Gebremeskel’s public rejection of Ethiopian “war rhetoric” and Eritrea’s December 2025 withdrawal from the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), which it accused of “becoming a tool against” countries like itself are emblematic of the agency’s framing. Investigative coverage of state institutions, criticism of President Isaias Afwerki, and dissenting political viewpoints are absent. Reporters Without Borders ranked Eritrea 180/180 in its 2025 World Press Freedom Index, last in the world for the second consecutive year.

ERINA’s structural role within Eritrea’s state-media ecosystem is comparable to that of ADI in Djibouti: it is the upstream news feed propagating across all downstream state outlets: broadcast, print and digital. Because ERINA, Eri-TV, Dimtsi Hafash and the Ministry’s print titles share a single editorial authority, a single editorial line propagates across the entire domestic media environment with no internal contestation.

AI and digital policy

ERINA’s content is distributed primarily through the Ministry’s shabait.com portal, which publishes news in Tigrinya, English, Arabic and Italian. The agency has correspondents reporting through “computerised radio transmission” alongside conventional telecommunications, per the Ministry’s own description, and the digital infrastructure has been progressively upgraded since the 2010 system digitalisation milestone marked across Ministry units. No AI policy, content-provenance commitment (e.g. C2PA), or formal disclosure framework for AI-generated content has been published. There is no public statement on synthetic-media disclosure, automated translation between the agency’s operating languages, or AI use in editorial workflows. As with all Eritrean state media, the absence of any independent regulator or press freedom infrastructure means there is no external audit or verification mechanism for any aspect of ERINA’s digital operations.

April 2026