Malawi News Agency (MANA)

The Malawi News Agency (MANA) is Malawi’s state news agency, established in 1966 as the news-gathering and dissemination organ of the Malawi Government. Headquartered in Lilongwe, MANA operates under the Department of Information within the Ministry of Information and Communications Technology, and produces and distributes original news copy, features, and photographs to subscriber media houses in Malawi and abroad. Unlike the Malawi Broadcasting Corporation (MBC), Malawi’s other state media institution and a statutory corporation under the Communications Act 2016, MANA is structurally not a corporation or parastatal but a section embedded within the government information hierarchy, comparable in organisational design to other Anglophone African state news agencies such as Kenya News Agency (KNA) or Ethiopian News Agency (ENA).

MANA produces bylined journalistic content across national, political, business, health, culture, sports, and feature categories, distributed via the manaonline.gov.mw portal, a government domain (.gov.mw), and circulated to subscriber media houses including private newspapers, broadcasters, and international wire services. MANA also operates as the state accreditation body for foreign and local journalists working in Malawi: foreign journalists are required to obtain a MANA-issued press card on payment of a US$100 accreditation fee, a function that gives the agency a regulatory as well as journalistic role.

Media assets

News agency: Malawi News Agency (MANA)

Languages: English

Ownership and governance

MANA is fully owned by the Government of Malawi and structurally located within the Department of Information of the Ministry of Information and Communications Technology, currently headed by Cabinet Minister Shadrick Namalomba (DPP, since 30 October 2025), with Harold Msusa as Principal Secretary (since 28 October 2025). The agency is not constituted as a state-owned enterprise, statutory corporation, or parastatal: Malawi’s Ministry of Finance lists statutory corporations such as MBC, the Malawi Communications Regulatory Authority (MACRA), Malawi Posts Corporation, and Malawi Digital Broadcast Network Limited as separate parastatals, but MANA is not on that list. Instead, it operates as a section of the government information hierarchy, with its staff comprising civil servants under the standard public-service framework.

According to MANA’s own institutional description, the agency is headed by a Chief Information Officer responsible for Press, normally referred to as Managing Editor (ME), who reports to the Deputy Director of Information (Press and Publications). The Managing Editor is assisted by a Deputy Managing Editor (DME) and a team of editors. MANA’s four editorial newsrooms, Headquarters in Lilongwe and three Regional Offices (North in Mzuzu, Centre in Lilongwe, South in Blantyre), are each headed by Regional Information Officers (RIOs). The Deputy Managing Editor as of April 2025 is Chikondi Chimala, who has overseen MANA’s continuous professional development training programme. The current Managing Editor is not consistently named in publicly available sources as of April 2026.

Source of funding and budget

MANA is funded entirely by the Government of Malawi through Parliamentary appropriation as a sub-component of the Ministry of Information and Communications Technology budget, with subscription fees from media houses and journalist accreditation fees as supplementary revenue streams. Outlet-level funding figures are not publicly disclosed, with MANA’s costs bundled within the Ministry’s overall recurrent expenditure. The Ministry’s budget environment has been constrained throughout 2024–2026 by Malawi’s broader public-finance pressures: the World Bank’s December 2025 Public Finance Review identified weak governance and fiscal pressures across the public sector, and MANA’s modernisation, including any expansion of its E-Media section, district network, or photography capacity, has not been earmarked for substantial funding increases under the FY 2024/25 or FY 2025/26 budgets.

Editorial independence

MANA does not exhibit meaningful editorial independence and does not claim to. The agency’s own institutional description frames its role as the “news gathering and dissemination organ of the Malawi Government,” explicitly defining the agency as a government information instrument rather than an independent journalistic enterprise. There is no statute guaranteeing MANA’s editorial autonomy, no internal editorial charter, and no independent oversight body monitoring its journalistic standards. Senior editorial staff are appointed and transferred through the standard civil-service framework, a structural arrangement that has historically enabled direct ministerial intervention in editorial decisions. A 2006 case reported by MISA, in which then-Information Minister Patricia Kaliati publicly admonished MANA’s acting Managing Editor Don Napuwa and transferred him to a non-editorial post the following day after he asked President Robert Mugabe a sensitive succession question, illustrated the institutional pattern of ministerial editorial control.

The 2024–2026 period was defined by Malawi’s 16 September 2025 general election, which produced a 76.4% voter turnout and a decisive return of Peter Mutharika and the Democratic Progressive Party. MANA’s coverage during the campaign period mirrored MBC’s institutional pattern: the agency participated in the joint Malawi Electoral Commission: Ministry of Information October 2024 election-coverage training in Salima, and Secretary for Information and Digitalization Baldwin Chiyamwaka described MANA at the event as “the country’s largest media house, with representation in every district and region.” The independent MISA Malawi end-of-year 2025 assessment, which directly criticised MBC for partisan coverage favouring the incumbent MCP, did not separately single out MANA, but the structural alignment of state media coverage with the ruling party of the day is a feature MANA shares with MBC. Following the October 2025 transition, MANA wire copy has aligned with the Mutharika administration’s communications priorities: the BETA-equivalent reform agenda, fiscal reset commitments to international financial institutions, and DPP cabinet announcements have dominated MANA’s news output.

The press freedom environment in which MANA operates is documented in the Reporters Without Borders 2026 World Press Freedom Index, which ranked Malawi 69 / 180 (score 60.96), an improvement of 7 places from 76 / 180 (score 59.20) in 2025, reflecting the peaceful electoral transition, but a deterioration of 6 places from 63 / 180 (score 64.46) in 2024.

AI and digital policy

MANA operates manaonline.gov.mw as its primary digital channel, alongside Facebook and X/Twitter (@MwNewsAgency) presences. The agency established its online publishing capacity in August 2012 under the then-Information Minister Moses Kunkuyu, a digital rollout that extended MANA’s reporting reach but did not change its institutional position within the government information hierarchy. No public MANA policy on AI-generated content, content-provenance commitment (e.g. C2PA), or AI disclosure framework was identified in the publicly available record, a documented absence rather than a definitive institutional claim. At the national level, AI policy is in active development: Malawi was validating a Draft National AI Strategy and a Draft National Digital Transformation Strategy in February 2026, indicating an emerging policy framework rather than a simple absence of national AI activity. The Malawi Communications Regulatory Authority (MACRA), the country’s independent communications regulator, has not issued sector-wide AI guidance as of April 2026.

May 2026