Introduction To The Special Issue: Africa’s Digital Youth And Media And Information Literacy Competencies And Practices

Abstract

Across Africa, young people are living digital lives that manifest in their growing uptake of digital resources and media for daily routines. Africa’s media landscape is changing rapidly and has been characterized by increased media access among the youth (Silver & Johnson, 2018; Commey, 2020; Boulianne & Theocharis, 2020). The re-democratization and media liberalization wave of the 1990s expanded media availability significantly, bringing particularly radio and TV close to young people. But perhaps the biggest catalyst to the growth in access to, and use of media among young people across the continent has been the significant expansion in internet access and its affordance of access to new media. As shown in Table 1 and Fig. 1, internet access across the continent has expanded significantly over the past decade.