Inforpress

Inforpress, formally the Agência Caboverdiana de Notícias, is the official, and only, national news agency of Cape Verde, headquartered in the capital, Praia. It traces its origins to Cabopress, founded in 1988, and has operated under the Inforpress name since 1998; it is reported to be a founding member of the Aliança das Agências de Informação de Língua Portuguesa, the alliance of Portuguese-language news agencies formed in 1996. The agency produces and distributes news in text, audio, video and photo formats, supplying Cape Verdean and international media as well as public and private subscribers, and presents itself as a public-service provider of factual and impartial information linking Cape Verde, its diaspora and the wider world.

Media assets

News agency: Inforpress

Ownership and governance

Inforpress is a state-owned enterprise constituted as a sociedade anónima (public limited company) in which the State is the sole shareholder, governed by statutes renewed in 2023, by the legal regime for the state business sector, and by the commercial companies code. Unlike Cape Verde’s public broadcaster RTC, whose board has been selected by an arms-length Independent Council since the 2019 statutory reform, Inforpress has in recent years been managed by a single executive, the Administrador Único (sole administrator), appointed through the government acting as the state shareholder; the journalist Hélio Robalo, previously the agency’s Director of Information, took office in that role in February 2025. The directness of that control had been illustrated two years earlier, in February 2023, when the government exonerated the then sole administrator by instructing the state’s representative, as sole shareholder, to adopt the corresponding deliberation, a removal that followed his dismissal of a journalist who also headed the union AJOC. No independent appointment mechanism comparable to RTC’s Independent Council, nor an editorial board or statutory safeguard sufficient to insulate the agency’s leadership from the executive, was identified, although the media regulator (ARC) does exercise some oversight: in early 2025 it vetoed the agency’s proposed Director of Information on qualification grounds.

Source of funding and budget

Inforpress is predominantly state-funded. It operates under a public-service news and information contract signed with the State in 2023, under which the annual compensatory transfer rose to 72 million escudos (about €653,000), up from around 60 million in 2018–2022 and 35 million in 2015. Accompanying state commitments included a renewed corporate statute and a new career-and-salary framework for staff, and the government launched a new Inforpress website as part of a modernisation drive, reporting in early 2025 that it had met around 90% of its commitments to the agency. Inforpress also earns some commercial revenue from subscription packages for its text and image services, but no detailed audited financial breakdown was identified.

Editorial independence

Inforpress describes its mission in public-service terms, committing to factual, impartial and rigorous information; in practice, as the country’s official news agency it functions as the principal state newswire, and the State Media Monitor review finds its output dominated by official institutional coverage. The decisive factor for its classification, however, is structural rather than tonal: with the State as sole shareholder and a sole administrator appointed and removable directly by the government, Inforpress lacks the arms-length appointment mechanism that distinguishes a captured-but-public broadcaster from a directly state-managed outlet. There is no independent council, editorial board or statutory safeguard insulating the agency’s leadership from the executive.

This is what places Inforpress in the State Controlled (SC) category rather than the Captured Public/State-Managed (CaPu) grouping applied to RTC: where RTC retains formal independence structures that are compromised in practice, Inforpress is directly managed by a government-appointed executive, without such structures at all.

AI and digital policy

No Inforpress-specific published policy on AI-generated content, synthetic-media disclosure, or content-provenance standards such as C2PA was identified. The agency operates an active multimedia and online platform, but no sector-specific framework governing AI-generated or synthetic news content in Cape Verde’s state media was identified.

May 2026