West African News API

Quick start

All public news requests require an API key. Store the key on your server and send it using the HTTP Authorization header.

curl -sS \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer wan_live_YOUR_API_KEY" \
  "https://news-api.scanafrik.org/v1/news?region=west-africa&language=en&limit=20"

Authentication

API customers authenticate with bearer credentials beginning with wan_live_.

Authorization: Bearer wan_live_YOUR_API_KEY

The API stores a cryptographic digest of the credential rather than the original API key.

Primary endpoint

GET /v1/news

Returns published or corrected news that satisfies the requested filters, active content rights and the caller's product entitlement.

GET https://news-api.scanafrik.org/v1/news

Example: Sierra Leone

curl -sS \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $NEWS_API_KEY" \
  "https://news-api.scanafrik.org/v1/news?country=SL&language=en&limit=20"

Example: West Africa

curl -sS \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $NEWS_API_KEY" \
  "https://news-api.scanafrik.org/v1/news?region=west-africa&language=en&limit=20"

Example: topic

curl -sS \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $NEWS_API_KEY" \
  "https://news-api.scanafrik.org/v1/news?topic=technology&language=en&limit=20"

Query parameters

Supported region values

west-africa
central-africa
east-africa
southern-africa
north-africa

Response format

Responses use JSON. Dates and timestamps use ISO 8601 UTC representations.

{
  "data": [
    {
      "id": "00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000",
      "slug": "example-west-african-news-story",
      "headline": "Example West African News Headline",
      "summary": "An illustrative summary returned by the API.",
      "body": "Full text is returned only for authorised full-text products.",
      "language": "en",
      "countries": ["SL"],
      "topics": ["development", "technology"],
      "eventAt": null,
      "publishedAt": "2026-09-17T00:00:00.000Z",
      "updatedAt": "2026-09-17T00:00:00.000Z",
      "source": {
        "name": "Salone Redeemer",
        "url": "https://saloneredeemer.com/news"
      },
      "rights": {
        "representation": "full_text",
        "attributionRequired": true
      }
    }
  ],
  "nextCursor": null
}

Response fields

Rights-aware representations

The API evaluates product entitlement and active content rights before returning content. A successful request can therefore contain different representations for different API customers.

Cursor pagination

List requests use cursor pagination rather than offset pagination. The API returns nextCursor when more results are available.

{
  "data": [ ... ],
  "nextCursor": "OPAQUE_CURSOR_VALUE"
}

Pass that value unchanged into the next request:

GET /v1/news?region=west-africa&language=en&limit=20&cursor=OPAQUE_CURSOR_VALUE

A value of null means there is no additional page in the current result set.

Errors

Error responses use JSON. Most errors also contain arequestId that can be used for diagnostics.

{
  "error": "Missing or invalid credential",
  "requestId": "75046a30-cdfe-4c15-99de-0842f411648e"
}

Usage and quotas

Successful news-list requests are metered against the API key. Each credential has a monthly request limit. When the monthly quota is exhausted, the API responds with HTTP 429.

Clients should implement normal retry and backoff handling for temporary failures, but should not repeatedly retry a monthly quota error.

Health checks

Health endpoints do not require a customer API credential.

Liveness

GET https://news-api.scanafrik.org/health/live

Readiness

GET https://news-api.scanafrik.org/health/ready

A healthy readiness response is:

{
  "ok": true
}

The readiness check also verifies database connectivity.

Request IDs

Every API response includes an x-request-id HTTP header. Clients may also supply their ownx-request-id value for end-to-end tracing.

x-request-id: 75046a30-cdfe-4c15-99de-0842f411648e

Client examples

JavaScript / TypeScript

const url = new URL(
  "https://news-api.scanafrik.org/v1/news"
);

url.searchParams.set("region", "west-africa");
url.searchParams.set("language", "en");
url.searchParams.set("limit", "20");

const response = await fetch(url, {
  headers: {
    Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.NEWS_API_KEY}`,
    Accept: "application/json"
  }
});

if (!response.ok) {
  throw new Error(
    `News API request failed: ${response.status}`
  );
}

const page = await response.json();

console.log(page.data);
console.log(page.nextCursor);

Python

import os
import requests

response = requests.get(
    "https://news-api.scanafrik.org/v1/news",
    headers={
        "Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['NEWS_API_KEY']}",
        "Accept": "application/json",
    },
    params={
        "country": "SL",
        "language": "en",
        "limit": 20,
    },
    timeout=10,
)

response.raise_for_status()
page = response.json()

print(page["data"])
print(page["nextCursor"])

Security guidance

The API is intended primarily for server-to-server integrations. Browser access is restricted by CORS and API credentials must not be exposed to end users.

Versioning

The current public contract is versioned under/v1. Breaking API changes should be introduced under a new major version rather than silently altering the existing v1 contract.

Additive response fields may be introduced over time. Clients should ignore JSON fields they do not recognise.

Editorial API

Contributor, editorial review, rights-management and publication endpoints belong to the protected ScanAfrik newsroom environment and are not part of the public customer API documented on this page.

Editorial users should use newsroom.scanafrik.org.