Eritrea Trained Its Own Ministry Staff in Photography and Video. The Story Behind the Headline Is About Who Controls the Image

The Eritrean Ministry of Information has completed a two-month theoretical and practical training programme in photography and video production for 22 participants, including 19 ministry staff and members from the Ministry of Marine Resources and the Ministry of Public Works. Ten of the 19 Ministry of Information participants were women. The training covered camera fundamentals, composition, lighting, sound, and photo evaluation. Certificates were distributed by the Director General of Press. In a related announcement, the Department of Culture and Sports of the Southern Red Sea Region conducted a parallel two-month training for youth on traditional musical instruments.

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The Ministry of Information's own account of the training frames it as an initiative to "enhance the capacity of its members and developing media production in content and quality." That framing is accurate at the technical level. Eritrean state media does produce images and video that circulate on the official news agency's platforms, at diplomatic events, and in foreign press release distributions. Improving the technical competence of the people who produce that content is, in narrow terms, an institutional capacity exercise.

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The context required to understand what this training programme represents in practice is the nature of Eritrea's information environment. Eritrea has no privately owned media. All newspapers, radio, television, and online news platforms are state-owned or state-controlled. The country has had no independent domestic press since September 2001, when the government closed all private newspapers and arrested eleven journalists — some of whom remain in detention today, more than two decades later. Reporters Without Borders consistently ranks Eritrea at or near the bottom of its World Press Freedom Index, in most years placing it last or second-to-last globally.

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In this environment, the Ministry of Information's photography and video production capacity is not a supplement to a broader media ecosystem. It is the ecosystem. The images of Eritrea that circulate internationally — of government programmes, infrastructure projects, diplomatic events, and development initiatives — are produced almost exclusively by state media trained and directed by the same ministry conducting this programme. There is no independent photojournalist in Eritrea to provide a competing visual narrative. There is no foreign correspondent based in the country. The press releases distributed by APO Group on the ministry's behalf, including this one, represent the totality of what external audiences can observe about Eritrean state activity unless they consult the testimony of asylum seekers, UN special rapporteur reports, or diaspora media.

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That is not to say that well-trained state media photographers cannot produce technically competent, even aesthetically strong work. They can, and the training described produces real skills. But the function of those skills within Eritrea's information system is to produce better images for a single-source narrative with no counterweight. The mention that women constitute nearly half the participants in the training programme, and the simultaneous training in traditional musical instruments, reflect a consistent feature of Eritrean official communications: the pairing of modernisation signals with cultural continuity imagery, both directed by the same institution.

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The Southern Red Sea Region's traditional musical instruments training is more culturally specific in its framing. The region includes communities from the Afar and Tigrinya ethnic groups, among others, and the training is described as "the first of its kind," aimed at transferring knowledge of traditional musical instruments to younger generations. Cultural preservation programming is a legitimate government function that is not inherently political. In Eritrea's context, however, cultural programming has historically been used to construct a unified national identity that downplays internal ethnic and religious diversity — a project that has produced significant tensions, particularly with Christian and Muslim communities and with groups perceived as having cultural ties to neighbouring Ethiopia.

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None of this complexity appears in the Ministry of Information's press release. That absence is itself informative.