Radio holds its ground. Across 38 African countries, it remains the leading source of regular information, ahead of social networks. Yeku and Junck publish African Digital Cultures at precisely the moment when Afrobarometer 2024-2025 data give substance to their central thesis: the digitization of the continent is reconfiguring cultural and political relationships while opening new possibilities for participation and expression. It is a book that disturbs both camps—the enthusiasts of African mobile-first growth and the nostalgists of radio as a protective shield.

The essentials

  • In Africa, 59% of respondents regularly follow news via radio versus 50% via social media, according to Afrobarometer 2024-2025 across 38 countries.
  • Over 28 countries tracked since 2014, regular radio use has declined by 10 percentage points with no corresponding net increase in total news audience: the data suggest that digital growth has not significantly expanded the total audience for news.
  • Yeku and Junck show that African digital infrastructure is shaped by external logics—data costs, interface languages, algorithms designed elsewhere.
  • The stakes by 2030: whether rural, poor, and female audiences will retain regular access to verifiable civic information, or whether the information gap widens.

Two researchers, one continent, one infrastructure question

James Yeku is a professor of African literature and digital studies at the University of Kansas. His earlier work focused on Nigerian popular culture and online writing practices in West African cities. Leah Junck works on women’s use of digital media in sub-Saharan Africa, with particular grounding in peri-urban areas. Together, they co-direct a research project on attention economies in African media spaces. African Digital Cultures: Platforms, Publics, and Infrastructures is their first joint monograph.

It is published by Routledge in June 2026, in a collection dedicated to global media studies.

The book arrives at a precise moment. Sub-Saharan Africa now has more than 600 million mobile subscribers. Major platforms—Meta, TikTok, YouTube—are investing heavily in development time there. And yet, as Afrobarometer data collected in 2024-2025 and published in 2026 demonstrate, radio remains the primary vector for regular information. The gap with social media is nine percentage points, but it is narrowing, and not necessarily for the better.

The thesis: imported infrastructure that doesn’t speak to everyone

Yeku and Junck present African digital platforms as transforming the forms of relationship and participation, with new political and creative possibilities. They redefine formats and impose recommendation logics designed for other contexts.

The book draws on surveys conducted across several sub-Saharan African countries between 2022 and 2025. The central argument: African digital infrastructure is articulated through layers whose design was conceived outside the continent. Undersea cables deposit data in continental hubs (Lagos, Nairobi, Cape Town) that do not serve rural areas. Platform interfaces are designed in English or standardized Swahili, not in the continent’s 2,000 languages. Recommendation algorithms optimize engagement for North American or Asian user profiles, then apply those parameters to audiences that share video differently, comment differently, use humor differently.

The work documents an asymmetry without pitting radio against platforms. The data show inequalities in access by place of residence and gender. Women and rural residents follow news less frequently via social media than men and urban residents, with no published ranking of rural women as the least-reached group.

Afrobarometer data: confirmations and limits

The authors had access to preliminary data from the Afrobarometer 2024-2025 survey, published a few months before the book’s release. These figures are both their strongest evidence and their principal critical interlocutor.

Over 28 countries tracked since 2014, regular radio use has declined by 10 percentage points, without total news audience growing. The trends are consistent with a partial shift in usage, but do not demonstrate that social media captured existing listeners. Yeku and Junck read this figure as empirical confirmation of their thesis: digital platforms displace attention more than they expand access.

The authors flag an important limitation in their own demonstration. Afrobarometer measures regular news consumption, not the quality of information received, its reliability, or its impact on civic behavior. A listener who tuned in to local radio each morning and now reads Facebook posts three times a week is counted as a radio decline, but nothing proves he is less informed.

The data capture frequency and medium. The civic significance of this shift remains open, and the authors pose it without claiming to settle it.

The article Paying platforms doesn’t make local information more visible offers a useful counterpoint: even where negotiations with platforms have led to financial compensation for local publishers, this has not mechanically improved the visibility of civic content.

African attention economies: who captures, who loses

The most original section of the book concerns attention economies. Yeku and Junck map digital advertising flows across the continent: the vast majority of revenue generated by African users leaves the continent. Meta and Google capture the overwhelming majority of digital advertising spending. Local content producers—community radio stations, newspapers in local languages, bloggers and creators—receive an infinitesimal fraction of what their attention generates.

This imbalance has a practical consequence: the media that best serve rural and female audiences are precisely those that most lack funding. A community radio station in Burkina Faso or Malawi often operates on an annual budget smaller than what a well-ranked content creator generates in a day in Lagos or Nairobi. The data show inequalities in access and use of digital media, without establishing their causal mechanism or historical amplification.

The authors rely here on interviews with journalists, producers, and content creators. This qualitative material is the book’s great strength. We hear community radio editors describe their funding as permanent negotiation with international NGOs with shifting priorities, Kenyan TikTok creators explain they produce in English because the algorithm ranks them better, Senegalese journalists tell how they learned to format their investigations for Facebook without losing their content.

This is a field-based book, not a theoretical essay. And that is its principal quality.

Blind spots: what the book does not settle

African Digital Cultures has two limitations that its authors partly acknowledge.

The first: the book’s Africa is mostly Anglophone and Francophone sub-Saharan Africa. The six countries chosen are representative of major configurations, but they leave aside the Maghreb, Lusophone Africa, and a substantial part of East Africa. The dynamics of Arabic-language media, where the articulation among platforms, radio, and political information is very different, are absent. This is a defensible methodological choice, but it reduces the reach of continental conclusions.

The second limitation is more substantial. Yeku and Junck document the problem rigorously, but their solution pathways remain deliberately vague. They call for “redistributive regulation” of digital advertising revenue without specifying concrete mechanisms: competent authority, scope, tax base, governance.

The authors explain that political and institutional configurations vary too much from country to country to propose a unified model. The reader hoping for a framework for action has a well-posed question but few tools to answer it.

A third angle is missing: the question of content creators themselves as actors. The online Nollywood ecosystem, Nigerian political podcasts, data journalists in Kenya—these actors leverage platforms to build audiences that radio never would have reached. Yeku worked on Nollywood in earlier research, which makes this absence all the more striking. Research on algorithms and their effects on creators shows moreover that these questions span geographies beyond Africa.

The future of attention without deliberate direction

The question posed by African Digital Cultures extends beyond the book itself. If platforms continue to capture a growing share of attention time without funding local content production, two trajectories are possible by 2030-2040, and Afrobarometer data will make them distinguishable.

In the first, radio preserves its role as a civic foundation because states and donors maintain public funding for local radio. Platforms remain a complementary space: urban connected users find their content there, rural and poorly connected women continue to access news via a transistor radio. The information gap remains large but stable. This scenario depends on one simple and fragile condition: that community radio funding survives government budget trade-offs and the priorities of international donors, which tend to follow technological attractiveness rather than social utility.

In the second trajectory, radio declines faster than platforms advance in rural areas. Total news audience continues to stagnate or decline. Rural women, already underrepresented in digital use, lose access to civic content without finding its equivalent on mobile. The information gap between connected urban dwellers and under-informed rural residents widens, with foreseeable consequences for electoral participation and public health. This scenario simply follows the trend measured since 2014, without intervention.

Yeku and Junck clearly lean toward the second trajectory if nothing changes. But they identify two levers. The first: a regional African fund financed by a contribution from platforms operating on the continent, directed toward local radio and content production in African languages. The mechanism resembles what Australia and Canada experimented with through their neighboring rights laws for publishers, whose results in terms of local visibility remain mixed, as recent studies show. The second lever: condition platform operating licenses on the distribution of a quota of locally produced civic content.

This mechanism is more direct but politically difficult, in states whose capacity for digital regulation is still limited.

What the data will allow us to verify by 2027-2028: the evolution of the share of Afrobarometer respondents who declare they regularly follow news via radio in rural areas. If this figure declines faster than in urban areas, the second trajectory is underway. If the gap stabilizes, radio maintains its role as civic infrastructure, at least for this generation.

The question of compensating local creators in an environment dominated by platforms that optimize for other markets is, in this frame, a matter of public policy as much as cultural economy.

Reading this book

African Digital Cultures is useful to two types of readers.

For those who work on media, digital regulation, or development, this work is one of the rare ones to anchor its arguments in recent pan-African survey data while subjecting them to field-based reading. Yeku and Junck make explicit what Afrobarometer figures do not say, which often proves as instructive as what they do say.

For readers of the Journal d’un Progressiste, this is a book that poses a concrete tension between technological progress and equitable access to civic information, without resolving this tension, but formulating it with precision. That is already much. The progress that African mobile data describe is real. But it arrives unequally, and its effects on democracy depend on political choices that neither platforms nor markets will make alone.

Bibliographic information

African Digital Cultures: Platforms, Publics, and Infrastructures

James Yeku and Leah Junck

Routledge

Published: June 2026

Sources

  1. Afrobarometer, How Africans get their news is changing (2024-2025 survey, 38 countries), https://www.afrobarometer.org/publication/ad1173-how-africans-get-their-news-is-changing-how-much-they-get-might-not-be/
  2. James Yeku and Leah Junck, African Digital Cultures: Platforms, Publics, and Infrastructures, Routledge, 2026, https://www.routledge.com/African-Digital-Cultures-Platforms-Publics-and-Infrastructures/Junck-Yeku/p/book/9789048564927