Ethiopia will host the 5th Africa Media Convention (AMC) in May 2027, following a successful bid by the media organisations in the country with support from their government.
The announcement was made during the 4th AMC hosted on the sidelines of the World Press Freedom Day in Lusaka, Zambia, on May 5, 2026, attended by hundreds of delegates, including UNESCO, African Union officials and representatives of media unions and associations from across the continent.
Mesud Reta, who read the acceptance speech from the Ethiopian hosting team led by the Editors Guild of Ethiopia, said the team was ready to host the event and had already set up a committee to work with the government to ensure seamless preparations.
“The preparations are already firmly underway. We have already set up a National Steering Committee, which has since January embarked on several preparatory activities, including securing formal government endorsement.
“We shall launch the Local Organising Committee later this May to drive the preparations,” said Mesud.
He said the hosting team felt honoured by the award to host the convention and would leverage the country’s history as the citadel of the Pan-African spirit and organisational capacity to make the event a success.
He said the AMC -27, promised: “to offer the African media a rare opportunity and a sovereign platform to shape global narratives and amplify African voices”.
The Ethiopian team was officially notified of the award of host rights of the convention through a letter from the Chairperson of the Africa Media Hosting Committee, Susan Makore, dated December 25, 2025, following an evaluation of their application by the AMC Steering Committee on December 18, 2025.
The AMC has become an important continental event since the inaugural forum in Arusha, Tanzania, in May 2022, and has benefited from the support of UNESCO, African Union and other partners.
The second convention took place in Lusaka, Zambia, in May 2023, and the third one was held in Accra, Ghana, in May 2024, drawing in hundreds of local and global participants from key media organisations and international partners.
However, in 2025, a plan to have the event hosted in Morocco failed due to a combination of factors, which the Steering Committee said they had worked hard to overcome.
The immediate former Chairman of the AMC Steering Committee, Churchill Otieno, told participants in Lusaka that significant progress had been made to institutionalise the initiative, including the drawing up of an operational charter to guide it into the future.
The charter was tabled and discussed by delegates during the Lusaka convention.
Several proposals were made to improve the document to strengthen AMC’s governance system and streamline regional representation to make the leadership more inclusive, given the diversity of the continent and the plurality of stakeholders.
A plan to elect a new steering committee was therefore shelved, and a caretaker team, led by the former chair, Otieno, selected to oversee the transition process in the next 90 days before the formal election of a new team is conducted.
The term of the last Steering Committee, elected in 2023 in Lusaka for a term of three years, came to an end this May, and with the charter, a new leadership was expected to take over to steer the AMC for the next three years. In proposing the selection of the caretaker committee, participants said the AMC was expected to grow into an important continental organization which therefore needed further review of the charter to entrench solid provisions for election of leadership, regional representation and criteria for membership.
The participants called on African media stakeholders and partners to support the AMC to grow into an important and resilient institution as a continental platform for dialogue on press freedom, freedom of expression and accountable governance and democracy.
