Agence Centrafricaine de Presse (ACAP)

Agence Centrafricaine de Presse (ACAP) is the Central African Republic’s governmental press agency, established in 1960 and operating from Bangui within the Ministry of Communication and Media. ACAP produces news content in French and serves as the principal state-aligned news-distribution channel for institutional communications, government announcements, and coverage of presidential and ministerial activity, alongside reporting on political, economic, social, cultural, and security developments in the Central African Republic. The agency’s own corporate site is presented under the tagline “Agence de l’Unité Nationale”.

Media assets

News agency: ACAP

Ownership and governance

ACAP was established in 1960, the year of Central African Republic’s independence from France, and began producing regular dispatches in the 1970s, according to Internews’ institutional documentation. Later institutional sources describe ACAP as attached to the office and structure of the Minister of Communication and Media; the agency operates as one of the Ministry’s listed directorates alongside Télévision Centrafricaine and Radio Centrafrique.

In 2014, ACAP was reported by Reporters Without Borders to have around ten employees, journalists, civil servants, and photographers. State Media Monitor baseline review indicates that staffing remained skeletal in 2025, and the agency continues to face chronic resource shortages. The bulletin of ACAP has historically appeared sporadically rather than as a stable daily product.

ACAP’s governance is structured as a directorate within the Ministry of Communication and Media, parallel to the configuration of Télévision Centrafricaine and Radio Centrafrique. The agency has no governing board and no dedicated public-agency statute; recruitment is not governed by an independent or competitive process, but is made at the discretion of ministry officials. The supervisory ministry is currently headed by Minister Maxime Balalou, who also serves as government spokesperson and member of the ruling Mouvement Cœurs Unis (MCU), having succeeded former Minister Ange Maxime Kazagui.

The agency’s Director General is Karl Ngrebada, who signed the February 2025 cooperation agreements with Russian state media on behalf of ACAP and who appears as the author byline and contact account in current ACAP dispatches. Ngrebada succeeded Médard Dagoulou, who retired in September 2022 after a 32-year journalism career and two appointments as DG; in his retirement interview, Dagoulou called on the government to equip ACAP with adequate financial and material resources to fulfil its role as a state news agency in the digital age. According to a 2014 interview with an ACAP journalist by Reporters Without Borders, working for a state news agency influenced editorial coverage, although the journalist reported less direct pressure than colleagues at national radio or television, a difference attributed to ACAP’s smaller audience reach.

Source of funding and budget

ACAP has no publicly disclosed budget and is funded through the Ministry of Communication and Media’s central allocation. The agency operates as a dependent unit within the ministry rather than as a separately budgeted public agency, and no known revenue-generating activity, advertising operation, or independent financial management structure within ACAP has been identified.

The Ministry of Communication and Media has listed Réhabilitation Radio, TVCA & ACAP among its public projects, supporting the inclusion of ACAP in state-led technical rehabilitation programmes; details on timing, financing, and equipment have not been publicly documented in detail. In September 2022, retiring Director General Médard Dagoulou publicly called on the government to equip ACAP with adequate resources, signalling persistent under-resourcing of the agency’s operations. No detailed, standalone ACAP budget, revenue stream, or audited financial statements were identified in publicly accessible sources.

Editorial independence

There are no legal provisions, regulatory mechanisms, or external evaluation procedures that protect or assess ACAP’s editorial independence. State Media Monitor research found that ACAP’s current output remains heavily concentrated on presidential, ministerial, and institutional activities, consistent with Internews’ earlier finding that ACAP mostly produced news on governmental activities. The site functions less as a news wire than as a communication channel for state institutions.

A distinctive feature of ACAP’s 2025 trajectory is its formal integration into Russian state-controlled information flows through two separate cooperation agreements signed within three days. On 19 February 2025, ACAP signed a cooperation agreement with the Russian state broadcaster RT (Russia Today): Director General Karl Ngrebada signed on behalf of ACAP. The agreement provides for the exchange of information material, joint multimedia content production, and journalist training programmes between the two agencies. This ACAP–RT partnership forms part of RT’s broader 2025 redeployment from Europe to Africa, through which the broadcaster has reportedly established seven African bureaus and concluded agreements with approximately thirty local African television stations.

Two days later, on 21 February 2025, ACAP signed a separate cooperation agreement with Sputnik International News Agency and Radio, part of the Rossiya Segodnya state media group, becoming Sputnik’s first official media partner in the Central African Republic. The Sputnik–Rossiya Segodnya agreement was signed with the support of the Russian Embassy in the Central African Republic, between Vasily Pushkov, Sputnik’s Director of International Cooperation, and Karl Ngrebada; the parties committed to intensified information exchange, mutual reliance on each other’s expertise for joint projects, and the organisation of joint events.

The broader Central African media-regulatory environment is shaped by the 2020 Law on Freedom of Communication, which replaced an earlier 2005 framework, and by the Haut Conseil de la Communication (HCC), the formal media regulator. Reporters Without Borders notes that the 2020 law has not, in practice, fostered independent and quality journalism. Efforts to recriminalise press offences have been repeatedly reported since 2022, and the 2025 detention of Le Quotidien de Bangui editor Landry Ulrich Nguéma Ngokpélé, held since 8 May 2025 on charges including “inciting hatred against the government” and “disseminating information tending to cause public disorder”, underscored the continued criminalisation risk facing Central African journalists. The February 2025 ACAP cooperation agreements with RT and Sputnik are the most institutionally formal step in the broader trajectory of Russian-linked influence on the Central African media ecosystem flagged by RSF and other monitors.

AI and digital policy

ACAP maintains a digital corporate presence at acap-rca.com, with a categorised news interface covering national affairs, diplomacy, society, sports, economy, culture, and other beats, alongside social-media accounts on Facebook and X / Twitter. The agency’s content is also distributed through the Ministry of Communication and Media’s portal. No publicly available ACAP policy on AI-generated content, synthetic-media disclosure, or content provenance frameworks such as C2PA was identified. The February 2025 cooperation agreements with RT and Sputnik, both of which provide for joint multimedia content production and information exchange, represent the most consequential 2025 development in ACAP’s content-distribution architecture, and form a distinctive feature of the broader Central African information environment.

May 2026