Mauritanian News Agency (AMI)

The Mauritanian News Agency (AMI) is the country’s state-owned national news agency, serving as Mauritania’s official wire and the principal national source of reporting on government activity. Established in 1975 under the name Agence Mauritanienne de Presse (AMP), AMI describes itself as an établissement public à caractère administratif with administrative, accounting and financial flexibility, and traces its origins to its first dispatch on the day of its creation, which coincided with the first issues of the newspapers Chaab (Al-Shaab, Arabic) and Horizons (French), both originally edited by the Société Mauritanienne de Presse et d’Impression (SMPI). The agency’s own official social presence (X/Twitter handle @Ami1975a) reflects the 1975 founding date.

Media assets

News agency: AMI

Publishing: Al-Shaab, Horizons

Ownership and governance

AMI is a state-owned établissement public à caractère administratif. Its President of the Board of Directors, the members of the Board, the Director-General and the Deputy Director-General are all appointed by decree of the Council of Ministers, the 19 February 2025 Council of Ministers meeting, for example, examined a “Projet de décret portant nomination du Président du Conseil d’Administration de l’Agence Mauritanienne d’Information (AMI)”, and the 2 September 2025 meeting examined a parallel decree on the Board members. The 2006 statutory decree organising the agency provides for a Board chaired by a President and composed of eleven other members, including representatives of seven ministries, a Central Bank representative, the directors-general of Radio Mauritanie and Télévision de Mauritanie, and a single staff representative — a state-dominated governance composition.

The agency falls under the supervision of the Ministry of Culture, Arts, Communication and Relations with Parliament, Government Spokesperson, currently headed by El Houssein Ould Meddou, the former president of the Haute Autorité de la Presse et de l’Audiovisuel who was appointed to the cabinet portfolio in August 2024. The 30 October 2025 Council of Ministers communiqué explicitly placed the AMI Director-General appointment under the Établissements Publics section of this ministry.

The current Director-General is Mohamed Taghyoullah Al EDHEM, appointed by the Council of Ministers on 30 October 2025 in the same reshuffle that moved his predecessor, Dia Moctar Malal (also transliterated Dia Malal Moctar), to head the Etablissement Portuaire de la Baie de Repos. Dia Moctar Malal, a former Minister of Justice, had himself been appointed to lead AMI by the Council of Ministers on 4 October 2023.

Source of funding and budget

AMI is primarily dependent on public allocations. The State Media Monitor baseline records a 2020 budgetary allocation of MRU 72.7 million (approximately US$2 million), drawn from coverage of the 2020 increase in the state-media budget allocation; the agency’s statutory framework also permits revenue from agency products and services, cooperation resources and other receipts, but no later disaggregated official budget figures for AMI have been publicly disclosed across the review period. Mauritania’s wider move to a programme-budget framework, implemented in full for the first time in the 2026 finance law under the Organic Law on Finance Laws (LOLF) of 2018, may improve the disaggregation of state-media allocations in future fiscal years.

A significant labour-development of the review period was the 11 June 2025 Council of Ministers announcement that the contracts of 1,865 public audiovisual journalists and media workers would be regularised, including staff at AMI, Radio Mauritanie, Télévision de Mauritanie and Télédiffusion de Mauritanie. The International Federation of Journalists welcomed the decision as ending three decades of precarious pigiste employment, and a closing ceremony was organised in Nouakchott in October 2025 jointly by the Association des journalistes mauritaniens and the IFJ. The measure addressed long-standing employment precarity for the agency’s pigistes but did not alter AMI’s governance structure or introduce editorial-independence safeguards.

Editorial independence

Although AMI is not legally bound to follow an official editorial line, the State Media Monitor review records that the agency’s output to a large degree echoes government narratives. Reporters Without Borders similarly identifies AMI alongside Radio Mauritanie and TVM as state-controlled public media in its Mauritania country profile. Expert interviews carried out for the review during March 2025 identified consistent emphasis on official events and state actors and limited pluralism in political coverage. There is no independent oversight body, complaints mechanism or publicly available editorial charter to guarantee autonomy.

The wider press-freedom environment in Mauritania deteriorated during the review period. In March 2024 the Haute Autorité de la Presse et de l’Audiovisuel (HAPA) suspended two local news websites, Anbaa.info and Taqadoum, for 60 days for allegedly “undermining Algeria” through their coverage of cross-border issues, and in August 2025 the authorities permanently shut down Anbaa.info on the basis of a fresh complaint relayed through HAPA citing alleged damage to Mauritania’s relations with Algeria. Prosecutions under the 2021 Law on the Protection of National Symbols continued to be brought against activists during 2025, and the same period saw arrests and short-term detentions of journalists covering protests or publishing contested content. These wider developments form the backdrop against which the state news agency operates.

These conditions place AMI firmly in the State-Controlled (SC) category. The agency is a state-owned établissement public à caractère administratif whose board president, board members and Director-General are appointed by decree in Council of Ministers. Its statutory board is dominated by state representatives, it is supervised by the Ministry of Culture, Arts, Communication and Relations with Parliament, and it remains primarily dependent on public allocations. While AMI may generate income from its own products and services, no evidence was identified of a funding model or governance framework sufficient to create editorial autonomy. The agency lacks a public editorial charter, independent complaints mechanism or statutory editorial-independence safeguard, and operates within a wider media environment in which regulatory and legal pressure on independent outlets intensified during the review period. The 2025 change of Director-General and the regularisation of public-media workers did not alter this structural configuration. The SC classification therefore remains unchanged for 2026.

AI and digital policy

No AMI-specific published policy on AI-generated content, synthetic-media disclosure or content-provenance standards such as C2PA was identified. AMI maintains a digital presence through its trilingual ami.mr platform and offers SMS distribution alongside its core wire output, but no sector-specific framework governing AI-generated or synthetic content in Mauritanian state media was identified.

May 2026