Information Minister in Beijing as China-Africa media forum turns to artificial intelligence

BEIJING (SONNA): Information, Culture and Tourism Minister Abdulfatah Kasim Mohamud has attended the opening of the seventh Forum on China-Africa Media Cooperation in Beijing, alongside information ministers, heads of media organisations and senior officials from across Africa and from China.

The forum runs from 19 to 21 August and brings together the Chinese and African authorities responsible for radio and television, major media organisations, think tanks, companies and international organisations. The Minister is to address the forum on media development in the region, cooperation between Somalia and China in the sector, and the capacity of Somali media institutions.

The programme is organised around four themes, which are content innovation in the service of cultural and human cooperation, technological cooperation for shared industrial prosperity, audiovisual services supporting the growth of trade, and the application of artificial intelligence in radio, television and audiovisual work. A joint declaration is to be issued at the close, together with a list of outcomes under the China-Africa audiovisual innovation cooperation programme.

The place of artificial intelligence on that agenda is the item of most immediate consequence for Somali newsrooms. The technologies under discussion in Beijing are the same ones now reaching editorial floors in Mogadishu, and the question of how a national broadcaster verifies material, labels synthetic content and trains staff to work alongside such tools is not one that resolves itself with equipment.

The forum sits within a framework agreed at the highest level. The Beijing Action Plan adopted at the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation summit in September 2024 committed China to carry out a plan of cooperation on radio, television and audiovisual innovation with African countries, and designated 2026 as the Year of China-Africa People-to-People Exchanges. The media forum is the mechanism through which the broadcasting element of that plan is taken forward.

It has a longer history than that. The forum was founded in 2012 and has met periodically since, with the sixth held in Beijing in August 2024 alongside a China-Africa think tank dialogue, at which six agreements on radio and television were signed and twenty cooperation projects launched. More than five hundred representatives from government departments, media organisations, think tanks and international bodies attended that meeting, drawn from China and over forty African countries.

What African participants have sought from it has been consistent. At the third forum in 2016 the African Union Commission set out three priorities, which were building the capacity of the media through training, infrastructure and institution building, industrialisation through the transfer of technology, and cooperation on cyber security and digitalisation. Those remain the areas in which African broadcasters approach the mechanism, and they map closely onto what the Somali Minister is expected to raise.

For Somalia the visit falls within a widening set of exchanges with China. The Chinese Ambassador to Somalia met the Defence Minister in Mogadishu on 2 August, and on 16 August the Embassy held a reception for 150 Somalis awarded Chinese government scholarships this year, an intake that has risen from seventy last year and from sixteen when the programme resumed after the Embassy reopened. Media cooperation now joins education, security and trade on that list.

The Minister is also holding meetings in Beijing with Chinese officials and with African counterparts attending the forum. Neither the Ministry nor the forum organisers have announced any agreement involving Somalia, and the joint declaration due at the close will be a continental document rather than a bilateral one. What the visit establishes for now is that Somalia is in the room where the terms of that cooperation are being set.