To strengthen Press Freedom in Nigeria, the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development (CJID) on Thursday launched its Openness Index report.
The initiative is Nigeria’s first-ever subnational assessment of press freedom and civic space across the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) is supported by The Embassy of the Netherlands in Nigeria.
Dapo Olorunyomi, CJID’s Chief Executive Officer, said the index is the first comprehensive attempt to systematically assess the state of openness and the conditions that enable expression, participation, and media freedom across all 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory.
Olorunyomi said: “By combining the lived experiences of over 1,100 respondents with verified incident tracking, this index offers a data‑driven picture of where openness thrives and where it is under threat. What we find is both sobering and hopeful. Openness is not a given; it is uneven, often fragile, and must be continuously protected”.
The Executive Director of CJID, Akintunde Babatunde, highlighted the broader ambitions of the project, noting that it will redefine what openness entails in a democracy.
“As we develop this into a pan-African tool, we hope to influence public discourse and policy reform across the continent. This index builds on CJID’s legacy of data-driven media freedom advocacy.
“The CJID Index provides a state-by-state ranking of openness in Nigeria for the first time, combining perception-based and incident-based data into a composite score for each state.
“The index is built on a rigorous methodology and informed by the perspectives of more than 1,110 professional journalists, media owners, publishers, and civil society actors, alongside empirical incident tracking from the CJID Press Attack Tracker. The Index offers a nuanced portrait of Nigeria’s democratic landscape,” he said.
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