Radiodiffusion Télévision Ivoirenne (RTI)

Radiodiffusion Télévision Ivoirienne (RTI) is the state-owned public broadcaster of Côte d’Ivoire, headquartered in Abidjan. Created in 1962, with radio dating from 1961 and television from 1963, it is the dominant player in the country’s broadcasting landscape and, for much of the Ivorian population, the primary source of news and information. RTI held a monopoly on television for more than five decades until the audiovisual sector was opened to private channels in 2019.

Media assets

Television: RTI1, RTI2, La3, RTI Bouake

Radio: Radio Cote d’Ivoire, Frequence 2

News portal: RTI Info

Ownership and governance

RTI is a state-owned enterprise whose capital is held wholly by the State, operating under the supervision of the ministry responsible for communication. Its governance is steered by a board of directors whose members are appointed through state and executive processes: a published appointment decree shows a board of eleven, with members representing the President of the Republic, the Prime Minister and a range of ministries alongside a staff representative and a consumer-association representative, a composition that concentrates significant political influence over the broadcaster’s strategic direction and, as the State Media Monitor review notes, has raised persistent concerns about its institutional autonomy.

The leadership has turned over rapidly in the recent period. Jean Martial Adou, a former chief of staff at the communication ministry, was confirmed as Director-General on 27 December 2024, having served on an interim basis since July 2024, when his predecessor Fausséni Dembélé was removed following a 10 July 2024 Council of Ministers decision citing management “dysfunctions.” Dembélé, who had led RTI since 2019, was appointed Director-General of the Agence Ivoirienne de Presse, the national news agency, by decrees of 19 December 2024 and took office there on 16 January 2025, a move within the state-media ecosystem that underscored how closely the sector’s senior appointments track government decisions.

Source of funding and budget

RTI’s financing combines a licence fee, collected through a surcharge on electricity bills, with commercial advertising, state subsidies and revenue from commercial partnerships and sponsored content. According to the State Media Monitor review, the most recent public budget figures, dating to 2021, put the broadcaster’s annual budget at approximately XOF 22 billion (around US$38 million), of which nearly half came from licence-fee contributions and the remainder from commercial operations and government subsidies. The broadcaster has not published detailed or audited financial statements for several years, a gap the review links to transparency concerns raised by media watchdogs; a parliamentary motion tabled in May 2025 to reassess the licence-fee mechanism, amid public discontent over rising utility costs, did not progress beyond committee.

Editorial independence

Côte d’Ivoire’s audiovisual sector is regulated by the Haute Autorité de la Communication Audiovisuelle (HACA), established under the audiovisual-communication law of 2017, while the print and online press fall under the Autorité Nationale de la Presse (ANP). In law, RTI carries public-service obligations of independence and pluralism; in practice, the State Media Monitor review finds those guarantees to be largely symbolic, with the broadcaster’s political-coverage skewed toward the governing administration, investigative and critical journalism nearly absent, and opposition voices rarely afforded balanced airtime. Reporters Without Borders similarly describes RTI as continuing to act as the public-relations arm of the government and president.

That assessment carried particular weight during 2025, an election year. President Alassane Ouattara was re-elected to a fourth term on 25 October 2025 with 89.77% of the vote, in a contest from which two major opposition figures, Laurent Gbagbo and Tidjane Thiam, were barred from running, and whose fourth-term bid opposition figures denounced as unconstitutional; turnout was about 50%. In that environment, the position of RTI as one of the country’s most influential broadcasters carried obvious weight, and although HACA regulates the audiovisual sector, no effective mechanism was identified that has enforced sustained editorial balance or independence at RTI.

These conditions place RTI firmly in the Captured Public/State-Managed (CaPu) category: it is a genuine public-service broadcaster, with a public-service remit, a licence-fee funding model and a statutory regulator, whose independence is nonetheless hollowed out in practice by political control of its governance. Nothing in the 2025–2026 period altered that underlying structure, and the CaPu classification continues to apply for 2026.

AI and digital policy

No RTI-specific published policy on AI-generated content, synthetic-media disclosure, or content-provenance standards such as C2PA was identified. RTI operates online and social-media platforms alongside its broadcast services, but no sector-specific framework governing AI-generated or synthetic news content in Côte d’Ivoire’s state media was identified.

May 2026