The ambitious plans have been fueled by the Western broadcast bans on the Russian outlet, Margarita Simonyan has said

RT is seeking to expand its operations in Africa, with plans to broadcast in a number of local languages, Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan has revealed.

Simonyan made the remarks on Saturday during a session of the Russia-Africa Partnership Forum. The inaugural ministerial conference of the forum is currently underway in the Sirius Federal Territory outside the Black Sea city of Sochi.

The expansion of the outlet on the continent is in part fueled by the continuing Western assault against RT, Simonyan stated. The broadcasting bans imposed on RT due to the Russia-Ukraine conflict allowed it to redirect funding and focus its efforts elsewhere.

”We have reoriented the work of our French TV channel: It was shut down in Paris, in France – we moved it to Moscow, and now it works, of course, for French-speaking Africa,” Simonyan said, noting that the French-language channel has already reached an audience of around 215 million viewers on the continent.

RT is seeking to expand its operations in Africa further, she stated, including broadcasts in a number of African languages.

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“We will expand our broadcasting, in the sense that we will directly broadcast in African languages... We currently have four English-language bureaus, and a large network of correspondents has been created,” she said.

RT Academy, an international education project of the RT global TV news network, was launched in Africa in September and has already proven to be extremely popular, with more than 1,000 journalists from the continent enrolling, Simonyan revealed. The largest number of reporters taking part in the project come from Congo, Cameroon, Nigeria, and Tanzania, according to the editor-in-chief.

The expansion of RT Academy in Africa has been met with some pushback in the West, Simonyan said. “We’ve launched the RT Academy in Africa, causing incredible indignation in the Western press and Western politics... They are calling these people who enrolled in our academy and trying to persuade them not to go there.”