ACI Africa was inaugurated in Nairobi on 17 August 2019 before more than 400 guests, hosted by Bishop Joseph Obanyi of the Kenyan bishops' social communication commission, who said the bishops wanted a platform through which the Church could be heard "from the base." Its lineage runs back to ACI Prensa, founded in Lima in 1980 by Fr Adalbert Marie Mohm, a German missionary who wanted a steady supply of Catholic news reaching secular media. The agency belongs to the ACI Group under EWTN News, and Fr Don Bosco Onyalla has been editor-in-chief since launch. It publishes in English at aciafrica.org and in French at aciafrique.org, and EWTN added a sister Arabic agency, ACI MENA, from Erbil in 2022. Today, ACI Africa is mainly focused on the Catholic Church across the continent, covering episcopal conference statements and pastoral letters, SECAM and AMECEA assemblies, elections and peacebuilding appeals, conflict and displacement in South Sudan and elsewhere, papal visits and Holy See affairs, diocesan appointments, and Catholic schools, universities and hospitals, from their newsroom in Nairobi, Kenya. One interesting fact: at the launch, the apostolic nuncio to Kenya and South Sudan, Archbishop Bert van Megen, told the audience that much of contemporary communication is "taken by forces that work against the Church and God himself," which set out the agency's founding rationale unusually plainly for a launch event.