The need for national Audience research in Rwanda has been expressed by the Rwandan media sector for a long time. Some research has been conducted in the country, but primarily focusing on Kigali and other urban areas, failing to cover the rural areas where the majority of people live.

Like every media sector in the world, Rwandan media is in rapid transition. Driven by technological innovation and the deployment of new networks and services, the media industry is undergoing major changes, making it increasingly complex to operate. The entire value chain, from content production to distribution and consumption, is being altered by new processes and emerging players.

The boundaries of traditional media are gradually dissolving, giving rise to an environment in which the life cycles of content accelerate, multiply and abundance appears unlimited. Frontiers between sectors and countries are becoming blurred, and national markets are no longer separated from global, but more interdependent than ever before. Such a context, together with the speed of change and the disruption capacity of global players, is forcing well-established media business models to be revised. The pace of technology innovation results in the urgent need to launch internal transformation processes to adapt to the digital ecosystem, which is something that every media company in every country needs to align with, always with the audience in focus.

The “Rwanda Media programme 2021-2026 - Capacity Building and Professionalisation of the Media”, led by Fojo Media Institute (Fojo), in partnership with the Swedish Media Development Office (SR MDO) and others, has therefore made it a priority to provide the media sector with data and insights on media consumption patterns including all media categories and from all parts of the country. A programme funded by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC).

Two national media consumption surveys are included in the programme, and this report describes the first one, the National Media Consumption Survey 2021, which is the first of its kind in Rwanda. It was prepared in 2020 and conducted in 2021, and the results will be instrumental in building capacity and professionalism in the Rwandan media sector. The media providers have now been granted the same tool as is used worldwide to get closer to audiences, analysing their needs and preferences and developing content and sales based on facts, instead of assumptions.