Every one of those numbers points at the same thing. The asset that drives commercial performance in the creator economy is not reach. It is not production value. It is not even consistency, though that matters. The single most valuable thing a creator can offer a brand and an audience in 2026 is trust. And trust, at scale, is built through only one mechanism: being recognisably, verifiably, unperformatively yourself.

For African creators, this is not a trend to adapt to. It is the founding condition of everything they have already built.

The Proof Is Already In the Numbers

What makes Afrobeats’ rise truly extraordinary is the rare balance it has achieved between commercial success and cultural authenticity. Nigerian artists have reached the highest levels of global popularity without sacrificing the essence of their sound, language, or identity. Rather than reshaping Afrobeats to fit Western pop expectations, they stayed rooted in African rhythms, storytelling, and expression and the world responded by embracing the music on its own terms.

That is not a cultural observation dressed up as a business case. It is a business case. The African music industry generated an estimated $1.2 billion in revenue in 2024, up from $400 million in 2019. That growth did not come from African artists sounding more Western. It came from them sounding more fully themselves while the infrastructure around them streaming, social platforms, diaspora network finally caught up with the size of the audience that was already there.

Nigeria’s wider creative sector, driven by Nollywood and Afrobeats, reached $14.8 billion in value in 2025, contributing 2.3% to GDP and employing over four million people. Nollywood is not a billion-dollar industry because it learned to tell American stories. It is a billion-dollar industry because it told Nigerian stories with enough honesty and enough consistency that 500 million African viewers and a growing global audience chose to watch.

Afrobeats listenership globally grew by 22% in 2025. In Nigeria, local music consumption shot up 82% over the previous year. Daily streams rose by 23%. Podcast consumption jumped 97%, while local podcast creation increased by 48%.

Those are not numbers driven by imitation. They are numbers driven by specificity. By the confidence to make something that sounds, looks, and feels like where it came from.

Why Authenticity Is Harder Than It Sounds

Here is where the thought leadership piece has to get honest, because the word authenticity has been flattened by overuse until it means almost nothing. Every brand brief in 2026 asks for authentic content. Every creator handbook tells you to be yourself. The word has become a content strategy buzzword at exactly the moment it has become a genuine economic force.

For African creators, authenticity is not a tone of voice. It is a negotiation. A constant one.

The pressure to code-switch for global audiences is real and documented. When Afrobeats crossed into Western markets in the mid-2010s, the advice many Nigerian artists received from international labels was to soften the accents, translate the slang, make the hooks more legible to ears that had never heard Lagos pidgin. Some took that advice. The ones who did not are the ones commanding stadium tours on three continents in 2026. Burna Boy’s Afrofusion. Asake’s uncompromising Yoruba verses. Wizkid’s refusal to let the music become anything other than what it was.

Afrobeats now exists in a condition of full arrival. By the end of 2025, it has moved beyond emergence, contestation, or marginality and settled into global familiarity. It circulates across continents with ease, embedded in the machinery of playlists, festivals, brand partnerships, and pop crossover.

That arrival happened because enough artists held the line. They made the bet that the world would come to the music rather than the music going to the world. They were right. And the commercial results are the proof.

The negotiation is not only about sound. It is about image, language, subject matter, and the stories a creator chooses to tell and not tell. In 2026, 61% of creators reported turning down at least three brand deals in the past year specifically due to poor content quality or brand value misalignment, up from 44% in the prior year. That number is not altruism. It is strategic. Creators who protect audience trust by refusing misaligned partnerships earn more per partnership from the brands they do accept, because the audience’s belief in the endorsement holds.

The Structural Advantage African Creators Have and Must Protect

Global media consumers, particularly younger, more diverse, and tech-savvy audiences, are looking for representation and authenticity in the content they consume. Sixty-nine percent of US music listeners engage with music from artists originating outside the US. African creators sit at the centre of that appetite. International companies expanding into Africa need authentic voices. They need brand influencers who understand local culture, language, humor, and consumer behavior. This is where African content creation becomes extremely valuable. Tooxclusive

That demand is real and it is growing. But it comes with a structural risk that the African creator economy needs to name clearly: the same global appetite that rewards African cultural specificity can, if not managed carefully, create pressure to perform that specificity for external audiences rather than express it for internal ones. There is a version of authenticity that is actually exoticism repackaged. A creator who tailors their Lagos street content specifically to what they think a London audience finds interesting is not being authentic. They are being strategic in a way that erodes the very thing driving the commercial value.

Micro and niche creators now sit at the centre of influence, as relevance overtakes raw reach. Micro-influencers with audiences between 10,000 and 100,000 followers captured 54% of total consumer preference in 2026, while celebrity influencer preference dropped to just 8% among consumers under 35. That data confirms something African creators have known for longer than the data has been tracking it: a tightly held, deeply trusted audience is worth more commercially than a large, loosely engaged one.

One of the most encouraging signs of 2025 was how performance metrics began favoring smaller creators and niche voices. Micro and nano-creators began delivering impressive engagement, authenticity, and niche reach to brands. Large corporations including telecoms, beverage companies, and lifestyle brands responded.

The African creator who has spent three years building a community around a specific cultural world, whether that is Yoruba fashion, East African food culture, South African electronic music, or Ghanaian comic storytelling, now has a commercially competitive asset. The audience trusts them because they have never been anyone other than themselves. That trust converts.

What This Means for Where the Industry Goes

Authenticity in Africa’s creative economy is not a defensive position. It is an offensive one. The data globally and the commercial results continentally point in the same direction: the creative output that travels furthest and earns most is the output that is most specifically rooted.

44.9% of creators now value stability, consistency, and deeper brand alignment over one-off campaigns, recognising that long-term partnerships deliver more predictable income, reduce time spent on constant pitching, and result in more authentic content that resonates with audiences. For African creators negotiating with brands that want access to their audience, this is the leverage position: the long-term partnership with a brand that genuinely aligns with their creative world is worth more, to the creator and to the brand, than the one-off campaign that pays well and erodes trust slowly.

The risk to watch is not whether African creators will lose their authenticity. Most of the ones building durable careers are managing that boundary well. The risk is whether the commercial infrastructure around them, the agencies, the labels, the platforms, the brand marketing teams, will develop the sophistication to work with African cultural specificity rather than trying to smooth it out for easier deployment.

The world has already shown it will pay for the real thing. The next chapter of Africa’s creative economy depends on an ecosystem that knows how to price it correctly.

Written by Layo
Lead Editorial Writer, Creative Brief Africa

Outside of her editorial work, she writes Curious Health, a newsletter focused on everyday health questions, explored with clarity and care.

Subscribe to Curious Health for more

Connect with Layo on LinkedIn

When the African Muzik Magazine Awards (AFRIMMA) released its 2026 nominations this week, the immediate headlines were familiar. Davido led the nominations as the awards returned after a two-year hiatus. Nigerian stars once again dominated several continental categories.

But the most interesting story wasn’t about Davido.

It wasn’t even about Nigeria.

It was about the map.

Read carefully through the nominations and a different Africa emerges. Tanzania’s Bongo Flava stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Nigeria’s Afrobeats. South Africa’s Amapiano continues its remarkable ascent. Congolese rumba remains deeply influential. Cape Verde, Angola, Morocco, Algeria, Kenya, Uganda, Côte d’Ivoire and francophone West Africa all appear not as supporting characters but as distinct musical economies with their own stars, audiences and export potential.

For years, conversations about African music have been compressed into a single narrative: Afrobeats.

That narrative helped introduce the continent to global audiences. It created billion-stream artists, sold-out stadium tours and Grammy recognition. Yet it also flattened one of the world’s most diverse musical ecosystems into a single export category.

The 2026 AFRIMMA nominations suggest that story has reached its limits.

The African music economy has become too large, too regional and too commercially diverse to be explained by one genre alone.

Africa’s Music Economy Has Never Been One Industry

The tendency to treat African music as synonymous with Afrobeats is understandable.

Nigeria has produced some of the continent’s biggest global exports. Burna Boy, Wizkid, Davido, Tems, Ayra Starr, Asake and Rema have collectively transformed international perceptions of African popular music. Streaming platforms now dedicate entire editorial strategies to Afrobeats, while festivals across Europe and North America increasingly build African line-ups around Nigerian artists.

But the numbers increasingly suggest a more complex reality.

Sub-Saharan Africa remains the world’s fastest-growing recorded music market. According to the IFPI, recorded music revenues in the region grew by more than 20% in 2024, continuing several consecutive years of double-digit growth driven by streaming expansion, mobile connectivity and rising global demand for African music.

That growth is not coming from one country.

Nor is it being fuelled by one sound.

Instead, Africa’s music economy increasingly resembles a portfolio of interconnected regional ecosystems, each with its own audiences, production networks, languages, touring circuits and commercial opportunities.

AFRIMMA’s nominations quietly illustrate exactly that.

Unlike many global awards that focus primarily on commercial success, AFRIMMA retains regional categories covering East, West, North, Central and Southern Africa alongside continental awards, creating one of the clearest snapshots of the continent’s musical diversity.

Viewed this way, the nominations become less of an awards list and more of an economic map.

South Africa Has Built More Than A Genre

Few musical movements have travelled faster over the past five years than Amapiano.

What began in the townships of Gauteng has evolved into a global club language.

From London and Paris to New York, Lagos and Tokyo, Amapiano rhythms now shape DJ sets, dance challenges, fashion campaigns and brand activations.

Its success has also created an ecosystem rather than merely producing hit songs.

Behind every successful Amapiano record sits an expanding economy of producers, DJs, choreographers, dancers, engineers, visual artists, promoters, festival organisers and digital creators.

Artists such as Kabza De Small, DJ Maphorisa, Uncle Waffles, Tyler ICU, Scotts Maphuma and others have transformed South Africa into one of Africa’s most influential music-export markets.

Importantly, Amapiano’s influence extends well beyond South African borders.

Nigerian artists increasingly collaborate with South African producers.

East African performers adopt Amapiano production styles.

Dance creators across TikTok have helped turn the genre into one of the continent’s strongest cultural exports.

This is no longer simply South African music.

It has become African infrastructure.

Tanzania Quietly Built One of Africa’s Strongest Music Industries

While Afrobeats dominated headlines, Tanzania was building something equally significant.

Bongo Flava has matured into one of Africa’s most commercially sustainable local industries.

Artists such as Diamond Platnumz, Harmonize, Zuchu, Marioo and Juma Jux have developed businesses that extend far beyond streaming.

Their operations include regional touring, television, endorsements, talent management, record labels, media production and digital distribution.

Diamond Platnumz’s WCB Wasafi has become one of Africa’s most influential independent entertainment companies, developing artists while expanding East Africa’s commercial music infrastructure.

Unlike many export-focused industries, Bongo Flava has remained deeply rooted in Swahili.

Rather than abandoning local language for international audiences, Tanzania demonstrated that linguistic identity itself can become an export advantage.

That lesson carries implications far beyond music.

Congo Continues To Export Cultural Capital

Long before Afrobeats entered global charts, Congolese music shaped African popular culture.

Soukous and rumba influenced musicians from Senegal to Kenya, from Cameroon to Angola.

Today artists including Fally Ipupa, Ferre Gola and Innoss’B continue extending that legacy while modernising Congolese music for digital audiences.

In 2021, UNESCO added Congolese rumba to its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, recognising its historical significance beyond entertainment.

That recognition also reinforces an important economic reality.

Cultural heritage increasingly functions as export infrastructure.

Music is no longer simply consumed.

It attracts tourism.

It strengthens diplomacy.

It builds national brands.

It shapes international perception.

Regional Music Economies Are Becoming Investment Markets

Perhaps the biggest shift revealed by AFRIMMA is that African music is becoming geographically diversified.

Consider what now exists simultaneously:

• Nigeria dominates commercial Afrobeats.

• South Africa leads electronic dance exports through Amapiano.

• Tanzania anchors Swahili popular music.

• Congo maintains one of Africa’s richest live performance traditions.

• Morocco and Algeria continue expanding North African rap and fusion scenes.

• Kenya’s Gengetone and alternative scene continue evolving despite commercial volatility.

• Ghana remains central to Afrobeats, drill and highlife innovation.

Each ecosystem produces different audiences.

Different revenue models.

Different touring circuits.

Different languages.

Different investment opportunities.

This is exactly how mature music industries evolve.

Awards Are Becoming Market Intelligence

Perhaps awards like AFRIMMA deserve to be viewed differently.

Instead of asking who wins, investors should ask what nominations reveal.

Awards increasingly function as datasets.

They indicate where creative production is accelerating.

Which countries consistently produce exportable talent.

Which genres continue attracting industry attention.

Where labels may invest next.

Where touring markets are expanding.

Where audiences are growing.

The AFRIMMA nominations are effectively signalling that Africa’s future music economy will not belong to a single country or genre.

It will belong to an increasingly interconnected continental network.

The Next Phase Won’t Be Dominated By One Sound

The first global chapter of African music belonged largely to Afrobeats.

It opened doors.

It changed perceptions.

It created billion-stream artists and proved African music could compete commercially on the world’s biggest stages.

The next chapter looks different.

Rather than one dominant sound, Africa is entering an era of multiple export economies operating simultaneously.

Amapiano is reshaping global dance culture.

Bongo Flava continues expanding East Africa’s commercial influence.

Congolese rumba remains culturally foundational.

North African hip-hop attracts millions of listeners across the Arab world and Europe.

Francophone pop continues connecting West and Central Africa with international markets.

The 2026 AFRIMMA nominations make that shift impossible to ignore.

The most important question is no longer whether African music can conquer the world.

It already has.

The more important question is whether governments, investors, streaming platforms and policymakers are ready to support an industry that is far more geographically distributed than the world still imagines.

Because the future of African music may not belong to the loudest genre.

It may belong to the continent that finally learns to value all of its sounds equally.

Written by Layo
Lead Editorial Writer, Creative Brief Africa

Outside of her editorial work, she writes Curious Health, a newsletter focused on everyday health questions, explored with clarity and care.

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These are being covered as breakthroughs.

African creators have been doing this for years.

The Gap Western Media Is Closing

The Reuters Institute’s 2026 Digital News Report dropped a number that sent legacy publishers into a quiet panic. For the first time, social media and video platforms are now the single most widely used way people access news online. Twenty-seven percent of people globally get news each week from news-focused creators or influencers. Forty-six percent get news from creators of any type. The audience did not wait for publishers to catch up. It moved, and the publishers are now running after it.

What the WSJ’s Taneth Evans said about this is worth sitting with: “News is often seen as a commodity now, and so our journalists are our biggest differentiator. Leaning into their personal brand is a really important priority for us right now.”

Personal brand. Trust. Direct relationship with audience. Building a face behind the content.

Any African creator who has been building on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, or a Substack newsletter since 2019 knows this is not a new insight. It is the founding logic of the creator economy. The difference is that a Wall Street Journal talent lab is now formalising what African independent creators figured out by necessity, with no budget, no coaching, and no dedicated training editor.

What African Media Brands Are Actually Building

The more interesting question for this continent is not whether African creators are ahead of Western publishers. They clearly are, in format fluency and audience intimacy. The more interesting question is whether African media brands are building the kind of institutional infrastructure that turns individual creator popularity into something durable.

The Western publishers getting attention right now are doing two things at once. They are training journalists to act more like creators. And they are building the commercial architecture around that, dedicated teams, subscriber video platforms, live experiences, brand partnerships, native podcast formats, retail extensions. The Economist built a long-form subscriber-only video platform. OK! extended into beauty retail and live shopping events. Publisher brands are being treated as platforms for growth rather than fixed editorial identities.

African media brands with genuine audience trust are sitting on the same opportunity and most of them have not moved into it yet with the same deliberateness.

Think about what a newsletter like this one represents. A trusted name in the African creator economy space with a defined audience and a clear editorial identity. The Western publisher playbook says that kind of brand equity is a foundation for vertical video, a podcast, a live event, a cohort programme, a paid community. It says the brand is not a fixed thing. It is a permission structure. Audiences who trust you in one format will follow you into another, provided the quality holds and the extension feels authentic.

That logic applies here as much as it applies to the WSJ.

The Creator as Correspondent Was Always the African Model

There is something slightly absurd about watching Fortune hire a showrunner and build a daily news show to compete for audience attention that independent African creators have been commanding for years with a ring light and a phone.

The creator economy in Africa did not emerge because platforms gave creators infrastructure. It emerged because creators built audiences without infrastructure, on platforms that were not monetising their markets, with internet connections that charged by the megabyte and equipment that was never designed for their conditions. What Western publishers are calling “journalist as creator” is just what an African digital creator does every day. Research your topic, write your script, set up your camera, record, edit, post, engage your audience, and do it again tomorrow.

The fluency is already there. What the Western publisher model is adding, slowly and expensively, is the commercial architecture that sits around that fluency. The brand strategy, the subscriber model, the live experience layer, the advertiser relationships that make the whole thing financially sustainable.

That is the gap African media brands and creator-led newsletters need to close. Not the format gap. The monetisation and institutional infrastructure gap.

What This Means for Where African Media Goes Next

The Reuters Institute’s finding that sustainable media comes from relationships rather than reach is not a Western insight. It is a structural truth that African creators understood early because they never had the reach to fall back on. You build community or you build nothing.

The opportunity now is to match that community strength with the commercial seriousness that Western publishers are belatedly applying to their own creator strategies. That means African media brands treating their editorial identity as a platform, not a product. It means thinking about what a trusted brand in the African creative economy space can extend into without losing the thing that made the audience trust it in the first place.

Live events. Paid communities. Cohort programmes. Branded video series. Partnerships with African companies who want access to a specific, engaged audience.

The New York Times is hiring video training editors. The WSJ is building talent labs. Fortune is launching daily shows. They are, with significant resources and considerable fanfare, catching up to where African creators already are.

The question African media brands need to be asking is not how to do what Western publishers are doing. It is how to build the structures that make what they are already doing commercially sustainable at scale.

That is the next chapter. And it is ours to write.

Written by Layo

Lead Editorial Writer, Creative Brief Africa

Outside of her editorial work, she writes Curious Health, a newsletter focused on everyday health questions, explored with clarity and care.

Subscribe to Curious Health for more

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“The barrier is not a lack of vision — it’s a lack of access. Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not.”

Idris Elba said that on a video call at Google’s AI summit in Johannesburg on July 1. It was the kind of line that travels well because it is both obviously true and quietly damning — an indictment of the structural gap African creators have been navigating for years, delivered at the moment Google and the Elba Hope Foundation announced a $1 million initiative to do something about it.

The programme will give approximately 100,000 creators across Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, Kenya, and Sierra Leone free access to Google’s Gemini AI assistant and other digital tools.

The funding covers the subscription costs for the tools — effectively subsidising access that independent creators, educators, filmmakers, and digital entrepreneurs across those five markets have historically not been able to afford. Google’s Senior VP for Research and Technology, James Manyika, framed the logic plainly: “We think about all those creatives who don’t have access to these enormous studio budgets. AI is potentially a tool that can enable them to do work that they couldn’t otherwise do because they don’t have huge budgets.”

Why This Is Bigger Than the Number

Ten dollars per creator, if you do the simple math. That’s what $1 million across 100,000 people works out to — not a transformational amount on its own. And some coverage of this announcement has done exactly that math and stopped there, treating the initiative as impressive in headline and modest in substance.

That reading misses what’s actually interesting about this.

The access gap for premium AI tools is real and it is specific. Gemini Advanced, Google’s flagship AI subscription, runs at roughly $20–$30 per month in markets where it is available. For an independent creator in Lagos or Accra or Nairobi building a content business without studio backing, that is not an abstract affordability question — it is a genuine decision against rent, data costs, equipment, and the other operational expenses of being a creator in a market where those costs compress margins already. Multiply that across the most useful tools in an AI-augmented production workflow and you have a creator in San Francisco with access to capabilities that a creator in Nairobi, with comparable talent and output volume, simply cannot access at the same cost.

That asymmetry is what the Gemini initiative is targeting. Not the talent gap — everyone agrees the talent gap is not the issue. The tools gap. And tools gaps compound: the creator who can use AI to cut video production time in half, generate multilingual captions, run audience analytics, and research content at speed produces more content, grows faster, attracts better brand deals, and compounds an advantage that a creator locked out of those tools cannot replicate through effort alone.

Closing that gap — even partially, even for 100,000 people, even for the duration of a subsidised programme — changes the arithmetic for the creators who get access.

Idris Elba’s Africa Play Is Getting Serious

The Google partnership is the most visible signal yet of something that has been building for a couple of years: Idris Elba has shifted from being a prominent figure with African heritage to being a genuine investor and institution-builder in African creative infrastructure.

In 2024, he co-founded Akuna Wallet — a digital finance platform built specifically for African creatives, giving musicians, filmmakers, and freelancers access to a virtual US bank account to receive international payments without punishing transaction fees. In 2025, he launched his house music label Sound International at an event in Nairobi that put the city’s electronic music scene in front of a global audience. The Google initiative also integrates Akuna Wallet’s payment infrastructure, so creators who use Gemini to build their output have a route to actually getting paid for it across borders without the friction that has historically eaten into African creator earnings.

Beyond those building blocks, Elba has been public about plans to establish a physical creative presence on the continent: a creative village in Ghana, a studio complex in Zanzibar aimed at producing culturally grounded content for global streaming platforms. These aren’t casual diaspora investment gestures. They’re pieces of an infrastructure argument — the same argument that Manyika was making at the Johannesburg summit, that the constraint on African creative output is not creativity, it’s the scaffolding that creative output needs to scale.

The Google partnership fits inside that logic. Gemini access and Akuna payments together give a creator in Accra two things they currently have to work hard to access separately: production capability and monetisation infrastructure. The combination is the point.

The Questions Worth Asking

None of this means the initiative is beyond scrutiny. A few things are genuinely worth watching.

The sustainability question is the obvious one. <cite index=”28-1”>What’s notably absent from Google’s announcement is any detail on outcomes: no target for how many projects the tools are expected to produce, no benchmark for what “high-quality content faster and more cheaply” will actually look like in practice, and no word on what happens to creators’ access once the initial funding runs out.</cite> Tool access that disappears after a grant cycle doesn’t build an industry — it builds temporary capacity that reverts when the funding does. The programme’s value will ultimately be measured by what it puts in place beyond the subsidised window.

The interest alignment question is also worth naming. <cite index=”25-1”>YouTube’s purge of “AI slop” channels led some Africans to question whether they can put their faith in a content strategy that relies on generative AI.</cite> Google owns YouTube. Google is also, through this initiative, positioning Gemini as the default AI tool for 100,000 African creators at the moment when those creators are deciding which platforms and tools to build their workflows around. That is a legitimate business interest, not a disqualifying one — but it is worth understanding that democratising access and building platform dependency are not mutually exclusive objectives.

None of that makes the initiative less valuable. It makes it worth holding to a standard of outcomes, not just intentions.

What It Signals About the Moment

Africa’s broader media and entertainment market is currently valued at about $93 billion and projected to climb to $118 billion by 2031. Google has also confirmed it has fulfilled its earlier promise to invest $1 billion in African economies, and plans to select 15 African startups for an AI-focused accelerator beginning July 21 — part of a goal to back 50 ventures on the continent by 2028.

The Johannesburg summit, the creator initiative, the startup accelerator, the fulfilled $1 billion commitment — together they describe a moment where Africa’s creative and digital economy has become legible enough to major global technology companies that they are making strategic bets on it publicly and at scale. Not charity bets. Strategy bets.

Idris Elba put the same point more simply from a creator’s perspective: “Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not.”

The initiative is one attempt to close that distance. Whether it does so durably — whether 100,000 African creators leave this programme with capabilities they can compound, not just access they can remember — is the thing worth watching.

Written by Layo
Lead Editorial Writer, Creative Brief Africa

Outside of her editorial work, she writes Curious Health, a newsletter focused on everyday health questions, explored with clarity and care.

Subscribe to Curious Health for more

Connect with Layo on LinkedIn

But something else is quietly happening. And Deborah Oyedijo is one of the clearest signs of it.

Deborah graduated with a first-class honours degree in law from the University of Ibadan — one of Nigeria’s most demanding academic programmes. On July 6, she posted to LinkedIn that she had just started an IP and content licensing internship at Mavin Records, as part of the Mavin Future Five cohort 3. The post was warm and understated. The reaction was anything but. It spread because it snagged on something people hadn’t fully articulated yet: the feeling that the gates between formal education and the creative industry are finally, visibly, starting to open.

What Used To Happen

For a long time, there was an unofficial sorting mechanism in how African families thought about talent and career.

If you were academically gifted, you went to university. You studied law, medicine, engineering, accounting. You built a CV that could be handed to an institution — a bank, a law firm, a government agency — and receive a salary in return. The creative industry existed in a separate lane. It was for people who were artistic, yes, but also, implicitly, for people who hadn’t made it into the other lane. Or who had decided the risk was worth it. Or whose families had given up fighting them about it.

This was never entirely true — there have always been formally educated professionals inside African creative industries. But it was true enough to shape the culture around it. The Nigerian entertainment lawyer who loved music was the exception. The accountant who left a Big Four firm to manage an artist was a curiosity. The first-class law graduate who walked into a record label was, apparently, surprising enough in 2026 to go viral on LinkedIn.

That surprise is the real data point here.

What Changed

The creative industry changed. The money changed.

When Universal Music Group acquired a majority stake in Mavin Global in 2024 — a deal valued at $150–200 million — it wasn’t buying a vibe. It was buying a business: masters, rights, licensing agreements, artist contracts, royalty structures, distribution deals, and the commercial infrastructure that sits underneath the music. Mavin’s roster had achieved a combined six billion streams in 2023. Don Jazzy became a Billboard Global Power Player in 2026. This is a label that competes at the level where intellectual property has a dollar value that institutional investors will pay nine figures for.

At that scale, IP is not paperwork. It is the product. And managing it properly requires people who understand both music and law at the same time — people who can sit across from UMG’s legal team and know exactly what they’re signing.

More broadly, the African creator economy has developed enough financial mass to become legible to formally trained professionals as a serious career destination. Nollywood generates around $3 billion annually. Afrobeats is streaming in 180 countries. African gaming crossed $1 billion in 2024. African animation is building its first dedicated film market in Abidjan this November. These are not informal-sector numbers. They are industry numbers. And industries need accountants, strategists, licensing specialists, brand managers, data analysts, and lawyers — not as optional extras but as the operational backbone that makes the creative output commercially sustainable.

The money made the creative industry legible. Legibility made it a viable destination for people who had options.

The Cultural Shift Underneath It

But the money is only part of the story. The other part is cultural, and it is harder to quantify.

There is a generation of young Africans who grew up consuming African creative output — Nollywood, Afrobeats, African gaming, African fashion — as mainstream culture, not as a regional curiosity. For them, the creative industry is not an alternative to a serious career. It is a serious career. The same way someone who grew up watching big law firms or consulting firms on TV or in their family might aspire to work there, this generation grew up watching Don Jazzy build Mavin, watching Asa Asika manage Davido’s international calendar, watching creative directors shape the visual language of Nigerian brands.

The aspiration followed the visibility. And the visibility has never been higher.

What Deborah Oyedijo represents — and what makes her LinkedIn post resonate beyond the usual professional announcement — is that this shift is now happening at the level of the continent’s most formally credentialed talent. It is not just artists flowing into the creative industry. It is first-class law graduates. It is MBA holders. It is people who had the academic profile to go anywhere and chose to come here.

That is a different kind of signal.

What the Industry Is Building in Response

The creative industry, to its credit, has not waited for universities to catch up. It has started building its own pipelines.

Mavin’s Future Five programme — the same one Deborah is part of — is an internal talent development initiative that identifies and trains people across the specific disciplines a global entertainment business needs. It is the label saying: we cannot wait for a university to produce the IP and licensing specialists we need. We will develop them ourselves.

This is not unique to Mavin. Across the African creator economy, labels, agencies, studios, and platforms have built internship pipelines, accelerator programmes, and training initiatives that explicitly target formally educated people and give them the industry-specific context that bridges the gap. Endow’s Business School trains creators in content writing, offer development, and commercial fundamentals. Production companies run attachment programmes for writers and directors with film school backgrounds. Creative agencies recruit from law and business schools and train graduates in-house.

The industry is doing what industries do when the talent supply doesn’t match the talent demand: it grows its own. But this is a transitional strategy, not a permanent solution. The permanent solution is an education system — and a cultural framework around careers — that treats the creative economy as a serious destination from the start, not a detour people take after their first career didn’t work out.

The Gap That Still Exists

None of this means the transition is complete. It is not.

The creative industry in Africa still carries cultural weight from its informal origins — the assumption, in many family settings, that a stable corporate job is safer than anything the entertainment industry can offer. That assumption is increasingly wrong in financial terms. A senior IP lawyer at a major Nigerian label can earn competitive market rates. A brand strategist at a pan-African creative agency is not making less than their counterpart at a traditional marketing firm. A content licensing manager whose deals touch UMG and Netflix and Showmax is operating in a commercial environment that is measurably sophisticated.

But the perception hasn’t caught up with the reality. Which is why Deborah Oyedijo’s post went viral. Which is why people reacted with admiration rather than with the quiet recognition of something ordinary. The creative industry hasn’t fully arrived in the imagination of Africa’s formally educated professional class — not yet. But it is arriving. Quietly, dealflow by dealflow, internship by internship, LinkedIn post by LinkedIn post.

The suits are moving to the studio. The industry they’re walking into is ready for them. The only thing still catching up is the story we tell ourselves about what a serious career looks like.

Written by Layo
Lead Editorial Writer, Creative Brief Africa

Outside of her editorial work, she writes Curious Health, a newsletter focused on everyday health questions, explored with clarity and care.

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MAFA is accepting submissions now, across short films, feature films, television series, and student projects. It will run alongside the existing Abidjan Animation Film Festival (FFAA), which has been running since 2017 and held its most recent edition from April 26 to May 3, 2026, at the French Institute Ivory Coast. The two events together are positioning Abidjan as one of the continent’s anchoring cities for animation — not just as a celebration venue, but as a genuine industry hub where projects find money, partners, and routes to market.

That distinction matters more than it might initially appear.

What a Market Is, and Why Africa Didn’t Have One

A film festival and a film market solve different problems. A festival is a showcase: completed work competes for recognition, audiences watch, prizes are awarded. A market is a transaction space: projects in development find financing, rights are negotiated, co-production deals are structured, distribution territories are carved up. Cannes has both — the festival runs alongside the Marché du Film, one of the world’s most commercially significant film markets. FESPACO, Africa’s most prestigious and long-running film festival held biennially in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, is primarily an exhibition event. So is the FFAA.

What MAFA is attempting is structurally different: it is prioritising commerce over celebration. Adayé was explicit about this in Abidjan. “Le MAFA ne sera pas seulement un événement culturel. Il sera un moteur économique, un incubateur de talents et un accélérateur d’opportunités pour la jeunesse africaine.” A cultural event, yes — but primarily an economic engine, a talent incubator, and an opportunity accelerator.

For African animation, that framing is significant. The sector has had no shortage of talent validation. South Africa’s Triggerfish produced Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire — a pan-African anthology drawing animators from Zimbabwe, South Africa, Uganda, Nigeria, Kenya, and Egypt — which earned multiple Emmy nominations. Nigeria’s Kugali Media produced Iwájú, the first Disney+ original long-form series created by an external African studio, which also earned three Emmy nominations alongside a seven-book publishing deal with Disney Hyperion. Tanzania’s Ubongo reaches over 11 million children weekly with educational animated content across nine countries. Roye Okupe’s Iyanu, rooted in Yoruba mythology, premiered on Cartoon Network and HBO Max in 2025 and was renewed for a second season alongside two feature films.

The creative credibility is established. What has been missing is the commercial infrastructure that turns individual creative wins into a functioning industry — the financing pipelines, co-production frameworks, and distribution deals that have to be negotiated somewhere, by people in rooms together, repeatedly.

MAFA is building the room.

The Numbers Behind the Urgency

Africa’s animation market is growing, but the baseline remains thin relative to global scale. The continent’s broader creative and animation ecosystem is projected to reach approximately $15.7 billion in 2025 — real and compounding growth from $12.3 billion in 2022, but still a fraction of a global animation market valued at $462.32 billion in 2025 and headed toward $953.31 billion by 2035, growing at a compound annual rate of 7.52%.

The financing gap is where the urgency is sharpest. Animation production in Kenya and Nigeria runs approximately $6,000–$8,000 per minute. In South Africa, closer to $12,000–$14,000 per minute. These costs require institutional financing — broadcaster presales, co-production deals, grants, development funds — that African studios have historically had to source internationally, on terms set by European and American partners.

Triggerfish, Africa’s most internationally recognised animation studio, opened offices in Ireland and the UK not because it chose to, but because European tax rebates and co-production treaties unavailable on the continent required a European legal address. France offers a 30% production tax rebate. Saudi Arabia offers 40%. Mauritius up to 50%. No major African production hub currently offers anything comparable. This means African IP is frequently financed and partly owned through foreign entities by structural necessity, not creative preference.

MAFA cannot fix tax policy from a conference hall. But it can do something foundational: create a regular, dedicated space where African studios negotiate from a continental platform rather than individually in rooms built elsewhere. The difference between those two positions is the difference between a sector and an industry.

Abidjan Is an Intentional Choice

The city selection is itself a signal worth reading.

Abidjan is not where people typically look first when mapping Africa’s creative economy. That conversation usually starts in Lagos, Johannesburg, Nairobi, and Accra. But Côte d’Ivoire’s creative economy has been building infrastructure steadily. The country’s CCI sector contributes more than 4% of GDP. Its fashion industry has made Abidjan an emerging rival to Dakar for French-speaking West African design. And its animation ecosystem has been quietly growing since the FFAA launched in 2017.

The broader context matters too. In 2026, AFRIFF — the Africa International Film Festival, based in Lagos — was selected by Cannes’ Marché du Film as one of seven international festivals globally invited to curate their own pitch sessions for films in post-production. Those five African titles, from Nigeria, South Africa, and Rwanda, were presented to sales agents, distributors, and festival programmers at the Marché du Film in May. The continent’s film industry is building credibility inside the world’s most commercially significant film market infrastructure, even as it builds its own.

MAFA sits inside that wider arc: a continent that is simultaneously working inside existing global market frameworks while building parallel structures that center African projects and African deal-making. For animation specifically — which is newer to this institutional development than live-action film — a dedicated market has been a structural gap for years.

Cape Town’s CTIAF, which operates an animation festival and competition circuit including a three-city South African tour across Johannesburg, Durban, and Cape Town, has built a regional animation community. The FFAA has provided an exhibition platform in francophone West Africa since 2017. What neither provides is the transaction infrastructure: the rights negotiations, the financing conversations, the co-production frameworks, the broadcaster deals that are the economic substance of a functioning animation industry.

MAFA’s stated objective, in Adayé’s own framing, is precisely that substance. The goal is not to reveal African creativity to the world — the Emmy nominations and Disney deals have already done that. The goal is to build the market conditions that allow African animation to capture the economic value of that creativity at home, on terms structured by African industry participants.

What Comes Next

The November 2026 launch is a first edition. First editions of markets tend to be smaller and messier than their founders hope, and more consequential than their critics predict. What matters more than the precise headcount in November is whether MAFA builds toward regularity — whether it becomes the kind of annual event that African animation studios plan their financing calendars around, that international broadcasters add to their acquisition scouting schedules, and that emerging creators treat as the most important pitch opportunity on the continent.

If it does that, it will have built something the African animation industry has needed since Triggerfish first started winning international attention: a commercial home.

Written by Layo
Lead Editorial Writer, Creative Brief Africa

Outside of her editorial work, she writes Curious Health, a newsletter focused on everyday health questions, explored with clarity and care.

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On the surface, this is the kind of story that runs in a single news cycle and disappears: another Afrobeats star, another South African feature, another data point in the ongoing momentum of pan-African collaboration. Outlets are framing it exactly that way — as evidence that Afrobeats’ influence across the continent and beyond keeps strengthening.

It is that. But for an artist with Davido’s specific history, a Nigeria-South Africa collaboration is never just a collaboration. It is a move inside a much more contested space than the press releases let on.

The Album That Started the Argument

Davido’s relationship with South African sound did not begin with this single. It began, in earnest, with Timeless — his fourth studio album, built around an overt pivot toward Amapiano and anchored by collaborations with South African producer Musa Keys and South African artist Focalistic. That pivot came at a specific moment in his career: after a run of albums that underperformed relative to the commercial ceiling Afrobeats had built in Western markets, and after watching contemporaries like Burna Boy pull further ahead internationally.

The read on that pivot, within Nigerian and South African music commentary, has never been simple. Some framed it as a genuine creative embrace — Davido has, by most accounts, been one of Amapiano’s most visible and consistent champions as the genre climbed in global prominence. Others read it as something closer to strategy: an artist who had hit a ceiling in one market looking south for a new one, at a moment when South African Amapiano fandom had grown openly hostile toward some of his Afrobeats peers.

Either read sits inside the same underlying fact: Nigeria and South Africa’s musical relationship is not a clean story of pan-African solidarity. It is a live, occasionally ugly argument over credit, originality, and who gets to claim ownership of a sound that both countries have shaped.

“Amapiano’s Biggest Concert”

The clearest evidence of how charged this terrain is came at a 50,000-seat stadium in Pretoria, where Davido headlined what was billed as Amapiano’s biggest concert. He was, by multiple accounts, given a hero’s welcome — cheered as though he were a local artist, in a country whose immigration discourse and history of violence toward African migrants does not typically produce that kind of reception for a Nigerian performer.

The warmth of that welcome was itself the story. Commentators described the night as a study in Afrophobia as much as fandom — a moment that exposed how selectively South African cultural nationalism applies its hostility. Nigerians, as a group, have frequently been cast by South African ultranationalist politics as a symbol of everything that went wrong with the post-apartheid economic order. Culture has become one of the main battlegrounds where that resentment plays out, and Nigerian Afrobeats stars — as some of the most visible symbols of Nigerian presence and success abroad — have repeatedly found themselves targets of it.

Davido, that night, was the exception. And the exception revealed the rule: solidarity and hostility in this relationship are not stable. They are negotiated, performance by performance, hit by hit.

Underneath the concert itself sits the deeper dispute that gives it weight: a running argument over whether Amapiano’s global breakthrough owes anything to Afrobeats’ reach and collaborative infrastructure, or whether crediting Afrobeats with helping carry the genre West is itself a kind of erasure of South African originators. What started as a regional debate — which part of South Africa actually birthed the genre — has since hardened into something closer to nationalist grievance, with culture functioning as the proxy battlefield for a much older, much less musical rivalry between the continent’s two largest economies.

Why “I Know Who I Be” Lands Differently Now

Set against that backdrop, a new Davido single built on South African collaboration is not a neutral creative choice. It is a re-entry into a relationship that has already produced both a triumphant stadium night and a documented undercurrent of Afrophobia aimed at his peers.

The title itself invites a reading that the press coverage hasn’t engaged with: “I Know Who I Be” lands, whether intentionally or not, as a statement of identity at a moment when Davido’s musical identity — Afrobeats artist, Amapiano convert, or something genre-fluid in between — has been actively contested by audiences on both sides of the Nigeria-South Africa divide. Working with Jazzwrld and GL_Ceejay, two artists he has never collaborated with before, reads less like routine industry networking and more like a continuation of the bridge-building Davido has been doing, deliberately, since Timeless — bridge-building that has earned him warmth in Pretoria stadiums that other Nigerian stars have not received.

It also arrives inside a broader structural reality this newsletter has tracked closely: Afrobeats and Amapiano are, commercially, the two dominant sounds carrying African music into global markets, but the relationship between them is asymmetric in ways that go beyond chart performance. South Africa still dominates Sub-Saharan recorded music revenues. Nigeria supplies most of the export-level headliners booking UK and US stadium tours. The genres need each other commercially. The nationalisms surrounding them do not always agree.

What This Single Actually Signals

None of this means “I Know Who I Be” is a calculated political statement dressed up as a song. It is most plausibly what it looks like on the surface: an artist returning from a break with a high-energy cross-border record, working the same Afrobeats-Amapiano fusion lane that has defined his sound since 2023.

But covering it as simple cross-border collaboration — without the history — misses what makes it a genuinely interesting data point for anyone tracking the African music industry’s internal politics. Every Nigeria-South Africa feature happening right now, regardless of artist intent, lands inside a relationship that swings between genuine creative exchange and nationalist resentment depending on the room, the crowd, and the moment. Davido has, more than almost any other major Afrobeats artist, learned to navigate that swing in his own favor — and “I Know Who I Be” is the latest evidence that he intends to keep doing exactly that.

The single will likely perform well. The bigger story is what it confirms: that the most commercially important cross-border relationship in African music right now is also one of its most unresolved.

Written by Layo
Lead Editorial Writer, Creative Brief Africa

Outside of her editorial work, she writes Curious Health, a newsletter focused on everyday health questions, explored with clarity and care.

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MrBeast — Jimmy Donaldson — retained the top spot for the fifth consecutive year, with an estimated $300 million in earnings from a business empire that now spans YouTube, the Feastables and Lunchly food brands, the Viewstats analytics platform, and Amazon Prime’s Beast Games. Dhar Mann came in second with $65 million. Steven Bartlett, the Diary of a CEO host, rounded out the top three with $52 million. The rest of the top 20 reads like a cross-section of where global digital attention now lives: Markiplier, Rhett & Link, Charli D’Amelio, Druski, IShowSpeed, Mark Rober, Codie Sanchez, and Alix Earle.

Scroll the full list of 50, and one name carries the weight of an entire continent’s presence in this economy.

Khaby Lame, and Almost No One Else

Khaby Lame — born in Senegal, raised in Italy — ranked 15th on this year’s list with an estimated $9.9 million in earnings. He remains TikTok’s most-followed creator, with 252.1 million followers across platforms and an average engagement rate of 4.72%, built almost entirely on wordless reaction videos that require no translation to travel across borders. His brand partnerships include Hugo Boss and Binance, alongside Hollywood studio deals.

His placement is being reported across African media as evidence that the continent has arrived in the global creator economy. It is also, on closer inspection, the entire extent of that arrival. Among 50 names spanning gaming, comedy, lifestyle, finance, fitness, food, and tech, Khaby Lame is the only creator with African origin on Forbes’ list. No Nigerian creator. No Kenyan creator. No South African, Ghanaian, or Egyptian creator — despite all four countries having genuinely large, commercially active creator economies and despite Nigeria’s Afrobeats and Nollywood ecosystems demonstrating that African digital content can travel globally and monetize at scale.

This is worth sitting with for a moment, because it cuts against the prevailing narrative in African creative-economy coverage — a narrative this newsletter has contributed to. Africa’s gaming sector hit $1 billion in 2024. Nigerian music generated over $400 million in the same year. Nollywood now outproduces Hollywood in West African market share. All of that growth is real. None of it has yet produced a second name on a list that exists specifically to measure individual creator earning power at the very top of the global pyramid.

Why the Gap Exists

The Forbes ranking does not measure follower count or cultural relevance. It measures dollars: account earnings, entrepreneurial ventures, brand partnerships, and what Forbes calls a “clout” score combining reach and engagement. And dollars, for creators, flow disproportionately through infrastructure and monetization systems that remain structurally tilted against African-based creators — even when the audience numbers are comparable to entrants who made this year’s list.

Three structural gaps explain most of the distance between Khaby Lame’s $9.9 million and the absence of anyone building primarily from an African base.

Advertising rates. CPM — the rate advertisers pay per thousand views — is significantly lower for audiences in African markets than for audiences in the US, UK, or Western Europe, regardless of engagement quality. A Nigerian or Kenyan creator with the same view count as a mid-tier name on this list earns a fraction of the ad revenue, simply because the advertisers buying against African inventory pay less.

Platform monetization eligibility. TikTok’s Creator Rewards Program — the platform’s core revenue-sharing mechanism — does not currently extend payouts to any African country. Only Morocco, Egypt, and South Africa have access to narrower monetization tools through TikTok’s Effect Creator Rewards scheme, and only for specific creative formats. A creator building primarily from Lagos or Nairobi is, structurally, building on a platform that has not built a path for them to get paid at scale.

Brand deal infrastructure. The biggest dollar figures on the Forbes list come not from platform payouts but from entrepreneurial ventures — Donaldson’s Feastables, Bartlett’s investments in Replit and Lovable, Druski’s national commercial deals with T-Mobile and Dunkin’. These deals depend on access to global advertising agencies, venture capital relationships, and brand decision-makers concentrated in New York, Los Angeles, and London. African creators, even highly followed ones, often have less direct access to that dealmaking infrastructure — not because the audience isn’t there, but because the relationships and capital aren’t built to reach them yet.

Khaby Lame’s path is itself instructive here. His global breakout happened after he relocated to Italy as a child, and his brand deals run through agencies and networks based in Europe. The creator carries Senegalese origin. The earning infrastructure around him is European.

What Would Change This

None of this means African creators lack the audience or the creative output to compete at this level. It means the systems that convert audience into dollars are not yet built with African creators in mind — the same structural pattern this newsletter has tracked across music royalties, film distribution, and gaming monetization.

Closing the gap looks less like waiting for the next Khaby Lame and more like fixing the specific mechanisms that kept fifty slots almost entirely African-absent: CPM parity for African ad inventory, platform monetization programs that actually include African markets, and brand partnership pipelines that route through Lagos and Nairobi as readily as they route through London and Los Angeles.

The creator economy just proved it can generate over a billion dollars a year for fifty individuals. The number worth tracking next is how many of next year’s fifty are building that wealth from an African base, on African terms — not just carrying an African name into rooms built somewhere else.

Written by Layo

Lead Editorial Writer, Creative Brief Africa

Outside of her editorial work, she writes Curious Health, a newsletter focused on everyday health questions, explored with clarity and care.

Subscribe to Curious Health for more

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Whichever number you trust, the direction is unmistakable. Animation has quietly become one of the fastest-growing segments of the global content economy, and the forces driving it are structural, not cyclical: an insatiable streaming appetite, the rise of real-time gaming engines, and mobile-first consumption habits that favor short-form, visually dense content over almost anything else.

For Africa, this growth curve is not background noise. It is the most significant opportunity the continent’s creative industries have been handed in a decade — and the most significant test of whether African studios can graduate from service work to ownership.

Why the Number Is Growing So Fast

Three forces are doing most of the work.

Streaming has changed who commissions animation

Netflix’s animation strategy is the clearest proof point: large-scale investment in animated content driving audience engagement, global expansion, and sustained subscriber growth. Disney+, Amazon Prime, and Hulu have followed the same playbook. Animation is cheaper to localize than live action, ages better across markets, and travels across language barriers more easily than dialogue-heavy drama. Streamers have figured out that animated content is a retention engine, not a kids’-programming afterthought.

Real-time engines have rewritten production economics

Tools built originally for video games — Unreal Engine, Unity — are now standard in animation and VFX pipelines. They collapse render times, enable virtual production, and make high-end visual quality achievable at a fraction of the cost and timeline of traditional rendering. This is part of why the broader Animation and VFX market is projected to reach $386 billion by 2031, growing faster than animation alone.

Mobile consumption rewards animation’s core strength

Animation was built for the small screen before the small screen existed — bold colors, exaggerated motion, high visual clarity at low resolution. As gaming and short-form video become primarily mobile experiences, animation’s native visual language is winning by default. The global gaming market alone is projected to hit $408 billion in 2026 en route to $1.09 trillion by 2034, and animation is structurally embedded inside that growth, not adjacent to it.

Layer onto this the rise of generative AI tools, which grew from a $2.37 billion market in 2025 to an estimated $3.23 billion in 2026 — automating tasks like in-betweening and character rigging that have historically consumed 60–70% of production schedules. That shift frees studios to spend more time on IP development and less on repetitive labor. It is, in theory, exactly the kind of efficiency gain that should help under-resourced studios compete.

Where Africa Actually Stands

The African animation market itself is far smaller than the global figure, but its trajectory is genuinely encouraging: from $12.3 billion in 2022 to $14.52 billion in 2024, with a projected $15.71 billion in 2025. That is real, compounding growth — and it has come with unmistakable creative credibility.

South Africa’s Triggerfish Animation Studios, widely regarded as the continent’s most influential animation house, has built relationships with Disney, Netflix, BBC, Lucasfilm, and Sony Pictures Animation. Its pan-African anthology Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire drew animators from Zimbabwe, South Africa, Uganda, Nigeria, Kenya, and Egypt, earned multiple Emmy nominations, and proved that African studios could run productions at a scale and quality bar that satisfies the biggest commissioners in the world.

Nigeria’s Kugali Media did something arguably more significant: it became the first external studio to produce an original long-form Disney+ series — Iwájú, a Lagos-set science fiction story that earned three Emmy nominations and a seven-book publishing deal with Disney Hyperion. Roye Okupe’s Iyanu, rooted in Yoruba mythology, premiered on Cartoon Network and HBO Max in 2025 and was renewed for a second season alongside two feature films. Tanzania’s Ubongo reaches over 11 million children weekly with educational animated content across nine countries — proof that African animation’s commercial potential extends well beyond entertainment into edtech.

These are not isolated wins. They are evidence that African animation has crossed a credibility threshold with the platforms that control global distribution.

The Catch: Service Work Versus Ownership

Here is where the optimism needs a harder edge.

As Stuart Forrest, Triggerfish’s CEO, has pointed out, most African audiences have still never heard of African animated shows outside of the handful that break through via Kugali or Disney partnerships. The industry, in his words, is “really in its infancy” — even as international accolades pile up.

The deeper structural issue is financial. Animation production in Kenya and Nigeria costs roughly $6,000–$8,000 per minute. In South Africa, costs climb closer to $12,000–$14,000 per minute, approaching European standards. Triggerfish itself, despite being the continent’s flagship studio, had to open offices in Ireland and the UK to access tax rebates, co-production treaties, and funding schemes unavailable on the continent. France offers a 30% production tax rebate. Saudi Arabia offers 40%. Mauritius offers up to 50%. No major African production hub currently offers anything comparable, which means African IP is often financed, banked, and partly owned through foreign entities by necessity, not preference.

This pushes many studios toward what the industry calls “prestige service work” — high-quality outsourced production for international clients, used to stabilize cash flow while studios slowly fund their own original IP. It is a legitimate survival strategy. Triggerfish’s video game co-development arm, Balisti Studios, generates revenue precisely this way. But it also means a meaningful share of African animation talent and labor hours are spent building someone else’s intellectual property rather than the continent’s own.

The distribution problem compounds this. Independent African animated shows reaching audiences directly via YouTube — Kenya’s Super Sema, Nigeria’s Omo Berry, Uganda’s Kunda & Friends — have built genuine subscriber bases in the hundreds of thousands to over a million. But monetizing those audiences runs into the same CPM disparity that constrains every other African content category: advertisers pay less for African viewership than American or European viewership, regardless of audience size or engagement quality.

What This Means for the Decade Ahead

The global animation market’s run toward $953 billion is not a forecast African creators should watch from the sidelines. The underlying demand drivers — streaming appetite, real-time engines, mobile-first consumption — map almost perfectly onto conditions already present across the continent: young populations, mobile-dominant internet access, and a storytelling tradition deep enough to supply a decade of original IP without repeating a single myth.

What is missing is not talent or ambition. It is the financial infrastructure — tax incentives, production financing, IP-retention deal structures — that turns service work into ownership. Triggerfish, Kugali, Ubongo, and a growing list of smaller studios have already proven the creative case. The economic case is still being built, deal by deal, rebate by rebate, often outside the continent’s own borders.

The global animation boom is coming regardless. The only open question is how much of that nearly trillion-dollar market Africa ends up owning, versus how much of it Africa simply renders for somebody else.

Written by Layo
Lead Editorial Writer, Creative Brief Africa

Outside of her editorial work, she writes Curious Health, a newsletter focused on everyday health questions, explored with clarity and care.

Subscribe to Curious Health for more

Connect with Layo on LinkedIn

But there is a question underneath all of that enthusiasm that rarely gets asked.

A creator cannot monetize without internet connectivity. They cannot distribute without platforms. They cannot get paid without payment systems. They cannot scale without cloud infrastructure. And right now, almost every single one of those layers, the pipes, the servers, the algorithms, the payment rails — is controlled by companies based outside Africa.

That is not an accusation. It is a structural fact. And it is worth sitting with.

The Connectivity Layer: Renting the Sky

In October 2024, Starlink suspended new subscriptions in Lagos, Abuja, Nairobi, Accra, and Lusaka. The reason was blunt: residential plans had hit maximum capacity. The demand from African users had outpaced the infrastructure built to serve them.

That moment — an American satellite company pausing sign-ups in African capitals because Africans wanted it too badly — captures where things stand.

By mid-2025, Starlink had resumed service in those cities after deploying new ground stations in Okun Ajah, Sagamu, and Port Harcourt in Nigeria. It now operates in at least 24 African countries, with Nigeria recording over 65,000 active subscribers by late 2024 — a 175% increase in nine months. SpaceX has also partnered with Airtel Africa to extend Direct-to-Cell coverage across Airtel’s 174 million customers in 14 African markets, with rollout beginning in 2026.

Amazon Leo — rebranded from Project Kuiper in November 2025 — is following behind. It secured a seven-year licence from Nigeria’s NCC in January 2026 and filed for a network facilities provider licence in Kenya in April 2026. It has partnered with Vodacom to extend mobile backhaul in underserved areas and with Vanu to bring satellite connectivity to rural communities in Southern Africa.

The infrastructure is arriving. But it is arriving on terms set in Seattle and California.

Until recently, Starlink’s Lagos connections were being routed through a ground station in Frankfurt, Germany — adding latency and sending African internet traffic through European infrastructure before it reached the open internet. Internet penetration across Africa still sits below 40% of the total population. The NCC estimates that over 23 million Nigerians live in unserved or underserved areas, with mobile broadband penetration at 50.58% as of late 2025. These are the conditions into which foreign satellite operators are expanding — and the conditions in which African creators are trying to build careers.

The question is not whether foreign satellite infrastructure beats no infrastructure. It clearly does. The question is what it means for a creative economy to depend, at its most basic layer, on pipes it does not own.

The Platform Layer: Building on Someone Else’s Land

YouTube. TikTok. Instagram. These are not neutral tools. They are platforms with their own monetization policies, geographic eligibility rules, and algorithmic priorities — none of which were designed with African creators in mind.

TikTok is the sharpest example. The platform has grown explosively across Africa. Nigerian, Kenyan, South African, and Ghanaian creators have built audiences of millions on it. But as of January 2025, zero African countries were eligible for payouts through TikTok’s Creator Rewards Program — its primary revenue-sharing mechanism. The program covers the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Brazil, Japan, and South Korea. Africa, despite tens of millions of active users and creators, is not on that list. Only Morocco, Egypt, and South Africa are included in any part of TikTok’s creator monetization schemes, and only for specific tools, not the main program.

What this means in practice: African creators are generating views, building audiences, and driving engagement that benefits TikTok’s growth metrics and advertising revenue — while being systematically excluded from the program that converts that activity into income.

YouTube’s AdSense operates in more African markets, but CPM rates — what advertisers pay per thousand impressions — remain significantly lower for African audiences than North American or European ones. A Nigerian creator with a million monthly views earns a fraction of what a US-based creator with identical numbers takes home. The output is the same. The payout is not.

Meta launched Reels on Facebook across Africa in October 2022 and is now investing in West African data infrastructure, including a new facility in Lagos with plans to extend to Ghana and the DRC. Meta’s edge strategy manager described Sub-Saharan Africa as “the last continent yet to be fully connected” and pointed to its 2.1 billion projected population by 2050 as “a huge opportunity.” Meta is also running one of the world’s most profitable advertising businesses on African user attention — attention that feeds its algorithms and scales its ad inventory — while returning comparatively little of that value directly to African creators.

This is the paradox of platform dependence. The platforms need African audiences to grow. African creators need the platforms to distribute. The terms of that exchange are set entirely by one side.

The Payment and Cloud Layers: Where the Money Gets Lost

If a creator does manage to monetize, the money still has to travel. For years, PayPal — the de facto global payout infrastructure — was largely unavailable to African creators. A 2014 partnership with Nigeria’s First Bank enabled only outbound payments, not inflows. The company’s 2021 deal with Flutterwave allowed merchants to receive PayPal payments, but came with fees and conversion costs that ate into already thin margins.

That gap is what created Flutterwave and Paystack. When global infrastructure ignored African needs, African fintechs built their own rails. Flutterwave processed approximately $30 billion in transactions across 30+ African countries in 2024. Paystack has seen volumes grow more than twelvefold since its Stripe acquisition. Moniepoint processes over 800 million transactions monthly. Africa’s electronic payments market is projected to generate $40 billion in revenue in 2025 — up 152% from 2020.

The payment layer is the one genuine infrastructure success story. Africans identified the gap, built the solution, and are now expanding it. Flutterwave now serves over 60% of African countries. PayPal is now seeking to partner with M-Pesa rather than compete with it — which means African fintech has developed enough gravity to reshape the behaviour of global platforms.

The cloud layer is less encouraging. Nigeria, Egypt, Kenya, and South Africa have all released draft AI policies since January 2025 that name the same structural problem: they depend too heavily on Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta for computing infrastructure. A 2026 analysis found that most African nations rely on U.S. companies for computing power, funding, and expertise. Countries in North Africa have built data centres only to outsource their management to foreign operators, creating what analysts describe as “technical vendor lock-in without sovereignty.”

For creators, this plays out in every tool they use. The video editing software, the AI assistants, the analytics dashboards, the distribution platforms — almost uniformly American. Their data lives on foreign servers, processes through foreign systems, and trains recommendation algorithms they will never have access to.

The Question That Matters

There is a version of this conversation that ends with policy recommendations: invest in local data centres, mandate monetization parity on global platforms, regulate satellite licensing more strategically. Some of those are worth pursuing and several African governments are beginning to try.

But the structural issue runs deeper.

When a Lagos creator goes viral on TikTok, the value of that virality flows to a platform headquartered in Beijing and regulated in Washington. When a Nairobi filmmaker uploads to YouTube, their audience data trains algorithms controlled in Mountain View. When a Ghanaian artist hits 10 million Spotify streams, the royalty infrastructure that determines what that is worth was built by a Swedish company.

None of this stops African creators from creating. They are creating anyway — through power cuts and bandwidth caps and currency devaluations and monetization exclusions that would have collapsed creative industries in markets with less resilience. The output is remarkable.

But there is a difference between a creative economy and a creative labour pool. One controls its own means of distribution, monetization, and data. The other produces the content while others capture the infrastructure value.

Africa is building a creative economy. The talent is not in question. The cultural output is not in question. What is in question is whether the infrastructure that translates creative output into durable economic value can be owned — or at minimum negotiated — on African terms.

Right now, most of it cannot.

Written by Layo

Lead Editorial Writer, Creative Brief Africa

Outside of her editorial work, she writes Curious Health, a newsletter focused on everyday health questions, explored with clarity and care.

Subscribe to Curious Health for more

Connect with Layo on LinkedIn

The more interesting question may be why he was saying it at all.

Because for most of Africa’s modern economic history, the people running stock exchanges did not spend much time discussing musicians.

They did not spend much time discussing filmmakers.

They did not spend much time discussing creators, fashion designers, gaming studios, storytellers, or intellectual property.

Stock exchanges financed banks.

Banks financed manufacturers.

Investors analysed mining companies.

Governments prioritised agriculture, telecommunications and energy.

Culture existed largely outside those conversations.

It was important.

It was celebrated.

But it was rarely treated as a core economic sector.

That appears to be changing.

But because institutions are finally beginning to recognise value that has existed for years.

And perhaps the most important development in Africa’s creative economy today is not what creators are doing.

It is who is paying attention.

A Different Kind of Audience Has Entered the Room

The Africa Soft Power Summit has always occupied an unusual position in the continent’s conference landscape.

Unlike traditional creative industry events, it deliberately places finance, technology, policy, culture and business inside the same conversation. The 2026 edition focused heavily on the intersection of creativity, capital, technology and ownership.

That matters because it reflects a broader shift happening across Africa.

The people showing up to creative economy conversations are changing.

A decade ago, discussions about African music might have centred around artistic quality.

Today those same discussions increasingly involve export earnings, copyright systems, intellectual property monetisation and infrastructure.

A decade ago, conversations about film focused largely on storytelling.

Today they increasingly involve streaming economics, investment structures and distribution networks.

A decade ago, creator economies barely existed as a policy category.

Today governments are designing creator-focused programmes, development institutions are funding creative ventures and technology companies are building creator tools.

The audience has changed.

And when the audience changes, the conversation usually changes too.

The Creative Economy Has Moved Beyond Awareness

One of the dominant arguments surrounding Africa’s creative economy was visibility.

The continent needed recognition.

Its artists needed exposure.

Its stories needed distribution.

Its creators needed global audiences.

In many respects, that battle has already been won.

African music has become a global force.

African fashion increasingly appears on international runways.

African filmmakers are securing global distribution deals.

African creators are building audiences that extend far beyond national borders.

The challenge today is different.

It is no longer primarily about visibility.

It is about ownership.

That theme surfaced repeatedly throughout discussions at the Africa Soft Power Summit, where speakers argued that Africa’s next challenge is not simply producing influence but controlling more of the infrastructure, platforms, capital and institutions through which that influence generates value.

That is a fundamentally different conversation.

Visibility is cultural.

Ownership is economic.

Institutions Are Following The Money

One reason financial institutions are paying closer attention is simple.

The creative economy has become too large to dismiss.

Globally, cultural and creative industries generate trillions of dollars in economic activity and support millions of jobs. Across Africa, music, film, fashion, gaming and digital content are increasingly contributing to employment, exports and entrepreneurship.

Afreximbank’s response illustrates this shift clearly.

In 2024, the bank announced plans to double funding for its Creative Africa Nexus (CANEX) programme from $1 billion to $2 billion, citing growing demand across sectors ranging from music and film to fashion and sports.

That is not philanthropic behaviour.

It is investment behaviour.

And it reflects a broader institutional realisation.

Creativity is no longer sitting at the edge of the economy.

It is becoming part of the economy’s growth engine.

The institutions are not creating this shift.

They are responding to it.

Culture Is Becoming An Economic Category

Perhaps the biggest transformation is conceptual.

Historically, culture and economics occupied separate rooms.

Culture was discussed through identity, heritage and artistic expression.

Economics was discussed through GDP, capital formation and industrial growth.

Increasingly, those rooms are merging.

Consider the range of sectors now being pulled into creative economy discussions:

• intellectual property

• digital platforms

• AI training data

• creator businesses

• streaming infrastructure

• audience analytics

• licensing systems

• tourism

• cultural exports

These are not traditionally cultural topics.

Nor are they purely technological or financial topics.

They sit at the intersection of all three.

That intersection is becoming one of the most important economic battlegrounds of the next decade.

Why This Moment Feels Different

Africa has experienced creative economy optimism before.

What feels different today is the institutional density forming around the sector.

The conversation is no longer being driven solely by creators.

It increasingly includes:

• stock exchanges

• export-import banks

• technology companies

• venture capital firms

• development finance institutions

• ministries of finance

• regulators

When multiple institutions begin converging around the same sector, it usually signals a structural transition.

Not a trend.

Not a moment.

A transition.

The same process happened with telecommunications.

It happened with fintech.

It happened with renewable energy.

The conversation moved from enthusiasts to institutions.

The creative economy appears to be entering a similar phase.

The Real Story Isn’t About Creators

Ironically, the most revealing story in Africa’s creative economy right now may not be about creators at all.

Creators have been building value for years.

Musicians have been exporting culture.

Filmmakers have been building industries.

Designers have been expanding markets.

The new development is that institutions are finally starting to behave as though those activities matter economically.

That is why a stock exchange chairman discussing Afrobeats is noteworthy.

Not because he suddenly discovered music.

But because the institutions he represents are beginning to recognise something creators have understood for a long time.

Culture is not simply expression.

It is infrastructure.

And when the people who allocate capital start talking about culture differently, it often means the economy itself is starting to see it differently too.

The most interesting thing about Africa’s creative economy is no longer what it produces.

It is who has started paying attention.

Written by Layo
Lead Editorial Writer, Creative Brief Africa

Outside of her editorial work, she writes Curious Health, a newsletter focused on everyday health questions, explored with clarity and care.

Subscribe to Curious Health for more

Connect with Layo on LinkedIn

A record representation.

At least $125 million in guaranteed participation payments before a knockout ball is even kicked.

On the surface, Africa’s presence at the 2026 FIFA World Cup looks like a football story.

But the most important prize may not be financial.

It may be influence.

Because when Algeria, Cape Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, DR Congo, Egypt, Ghana, Morocco, Senegal, South Africa and Tunisia walk onto football’s biggest stage this summer, they will not simply be representing national teams.

They will be representing brands.

Cultures.

Narratives.

Creative industries.

And increasingly, entire economic ecosystems built around attention.

For decades, African countries have viewed music, film, fashion and tourism as instruments of soft power. What the 2026 FIFA World Cup reveals is that football may be becoming one of the continent’s most powerful cultural export mechanisms.

And it arrives at a moment when African culture is already experiencing unprecedented global visibility.

The convergence is difficult to ignore.

The Real Currency of the World Cup Is Attention

FIFA expects the 2026 tournament, hosted across the United States, Canada and Mexico, to become the largest World Cup in history.

The 2022 World Cup in Qatar generated an estimated five billion engagements across FIFA digital platforms and reached billions of viewers globally throughout the tournament.

The expanded 48-team format means even more matches, more content, more media coverage and more opportunities for national visibility.

Historically, nations competed for trophies.

Today they compete for attention.

And attention increasingly converts into economic value.

Tourism.

Foreign investment.

Brand partnerships.

Media rights.

Cultural exports.

Global reputation.

The modern World Cup is not simply a sporting competition.

It is one of the largest attention markets in the world.

Countries understand this.

Which is why governments increasingly invest in sport the same way they invest in tourism campaigns, film incentives and cultural diplomacy programmes.

The objective is no longer simply winning.

The objective is visibility.

Morocco Showed What Football Soft Power Looks Like

No African nation has demonstrated this more clearly than Morocco.

When Morocco reached the semi-finals of the 2022 World Cup, becoming the first African and Arab nation in history to achieve the feat, the achievement extended far beyond football.

The country suddenly became the centre of a global conversation.

Search interest surged.

International media coverage expanded dramatically.

Global audiences who previously knew little about Morocco encountered its culture, language, identity and history through football.

The team’s success generated widespread discussions about North Africa, Arab identity and African representation in global sport.

Morocco’s tourism industry benefited from heightened international visibility.

Its footballers became global cultural ambassadors.

Its national brand received exposure that traditional marketing budgets would struggle to replicate.

The lesson was powerful.

Football success creates attention.

Attention creates curiosity.

Curiosity creates economic opportunity.

That sequence increasingly defines soft power in the digital age.

African Football Is Arriving During Africa’s Cultural Boom

What makes the 2026 World Cup particularly significant is timing.

African football is not arriving on the global stage in isolation.

It is arriving during a broader expansion of African cultural influence.

Over the past decade, African music has become one of the world’s fastest-growing cultural exports.

Artists like Burna Boy, Tems, Tyla, Rema and Asake have transformed Afrobeats from a regional genre into a global commercial force.

African fashion is receiving increasing attention from luxury brands, international fashion weeks and global consumers.

African film industries continue expanding their reach through streaming platforms.

Creator economies across Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, Ghana and Egypt are producing globally distributed content at unprecedented scale.

This matters because football no longer exists separately from these industries.

The modern fan experiences football through music, fashion, creators and social media.

A World Cup goal becomes a TikTok trend.

A celebration becomes a viral meme.

A player’s outfit becomes a fashion statement.

A stadium soundtrack becomes a global hit.

Culture moves alongside sport.

And increasingly, they amplify one another.

Mohamed Salah Is Bigger Than Football

Perhaps no player illustrates this better than Mohamed Salah.

Salah is not merely Egypt’s star player.

He is arguably one of Africa’s most influential cultural exports.

His impact extends across football, advertising, tourism branding and national image.

Research conducted in the United Kingdom has previously shown measurable shifts in perceptions of Muslims and Egyptians linked to Salah’s visibility and popularity.

His image appears in campaigns, documentaries, social media content and international brand partnerships.

He functions simultaneously as an athlete, celebrity, cultural ambassador and national brand.

That is the essence of soft power.

The ability to shape perceptions without direct political influence.

And Africa increasingly possesses more figures capable of doing exactly that.

Senegal, Ghana and the Power of Sporting Identity

Long before many African countries developed globally recognised music industries, football served as one of the continent’s most visible exports.

Senegal’s victory over France at the 2002 World Cup remains one of the defining moments in African sporting history.

Ghana’s dramatic run to the quarter-finals in 2010 became a continental story that transcended sport.

The Black Stars became symbols of possibility for millions of Africans.

These moments matter because they contribute to national narratives.

Countries are remembered through stories.

Football creates stories that travel.

The same way Nollywood exports stories.

The same way music exports stories.

The same way creators export stories.

Sporting success becomes part of national identity.

And national identity increasingly influences economic perception.

The Creator Economy Has Changed Everything

Twenty years ago, World Cup visibility was largely controlled by broadcasters.

Today, creators play an equally important role.

Every match generates:

reaction videos,

podcasts,

TikTok edits,

YouTube analysis,

fan communities,

memes,

newsletters,

live streams,

and social media commentary.

The World Cup has effectively become a creator economy event.

A single standout moment can generate millions of pieces of derivative content.

That means African participation now extends far beyond the players on the pitch.

African creators, photographers, filmmakers, journalists and influencers all participate in the attention economy surrounding the tournament.

This dramatically increases the cultural value generated by major sporting events.

The audience is no longer merely watching.

The audience is producing.

Governments Are Starting to Understand the Opportunity

Across Africa, governments increasingly view culture and sport through similar strategic lenses.

The objective is visibility.

Kenya’s interest in hosting major international cultural events.

Morocco’s investments in football infrastructure.

Rwanda’s sports sponsorship partnerships.

South Africa’s efforts to attract global sporting competitions.

Nigeria’s growing emphasis on creative industries.

These initiatives share a common logic.

Attention creates economic opportunities.

The World Cup represents one of the largest concentrations of global attention available to any country.

For African nations, participation increasingly functions as both sporting achievement and international marketing campaign.

The Bigger Competition Is No Longer On The Pitch

The most interesting aspect of the 2026 World Cup may not be which African team progresses furthest.

It may be which country converts visibility into long-term influence.

Because influence compounds.

A tourist inspired to visit Morocco.

A fan discovering Afrobeats through football content.

A creator building a global audience through World Cup storytelling.

An investor developing interest in a country’s creative industries.

These outcomes often outlast the tournament itself.

And they increasingly determine who benefits most from global visibility.

Africa’s Biggest Prize May Not Be The Trophy

A record ten African nations are competing at the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

That achievement alone reflects the growing strength of African football.

But the deeper story sits beyond sport.

Africa enters this tournament at a moment when its music is travelling further than ever.

Its films are reaching new audiences.

Its creators are building global communities.

Its fashion is attracting international attention.

Its cultural influence is expanding across multiple industries simultaneously.

The World Cup arrives as another stage within that broader story.

A larger one.

A louder one.

Perhaps the loudest of all.

Because in the modern economy, influence increasingly functions like currency.

And this summer, Africa will have more of the world’s attention than ever before.

The question is no longer whether the continent can command global visibility.

The question is what it chooses to do with it.

Written by Layo
Lead Editorial Writer, Creative Brief Africa

Outside of her editorial work, she writes Curious Health, a newsletter focused on everyday health questions, explored with clarity and care.

Subscribe to Curious Health for more

Connect with Layo on LinkedIn

An hour later, she is clipping highlights for TikTok.

By lunchtime, she is writing newsletter copy.

Before the day ends, she is analysing audience retention data, scheduling content across platforms, and responding to comments from listeners who have become a community rather than an audience.

Twenty years ago, those responsibilities would have belonged to five different people.

Today, they increasingly belong to one.

Much of the conversation around the creator economy focuses on platforms. We talk about TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, podcasts, Substack, and whatever platform appears next.

But beneath the platform conversation lies something far more consequential.

The creator economy is quietly reshaping labour itself.

It is changing what creative work looks like, what skills are valuable, how careers are built, and who gets hired.

The real story is not simply that more people are creating content.

It is that the definition of a creative professional is being rewritten.

The Creator Economy Is Producing Hybrid Workers

For most of the twentieth century, creative industries were built around specialisation.

Newsrooms had reporters, editors, photographers, graphic designers, producers, distribution teams and advertising departments.

Film productions separated directing, editing, cinematography, sound, production design and marketing.

Music industries divided responsibilities between artists, managers, marketers, distributors, publicists and promoters.

The system worked because distribution was relatively stable.

A newspaper reached readers through newspaper stands.

A television programme reached viewers through broadcast schedules.

A musician reached audiences through radio, record labels and physical distribution networks.

Creative work and distribution were largely separate functions.

That separation is collapsing.

Today, a fashion photographer may also be a content strategist.

A journalist may also run a newsletter business.

A filmmaker may spend as much time thinking about audience acquisition as production.

A musician may function simultaneously as artist, marketer, community manager and media company.

The most valuable creative workers increasingly operate across disciplines rather than within them.

This shift is visible everywhere.

Independent journalists are building media businesses on newsletter platforms.

YouTubers are launching merchandise brands.

Podcast hosts are creating live events.

Photographers are developing educational products.

Designers are becoming creators.

Creators are becoming entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs are becoming publishers.

The boundaries separating creative professions are becoming increasingly difficult to identify.

The result is a workforce that looks fundamentally different from the one traditional media institutions were designed to support.

Every Creative Job Is Becoming A Distribution Job

For decades, creative industries treated distribution as something that happened after production.

The work was creating the content.

Getting it to audiences was someone else’s responsibility.

That distinction no longer exists.

Today, distribution has become part of the creative process itself.

A video editor must understand how retention works on TikTok.

A writer must understand newsletter growth.

A podcaster must understand platform discovery.

A musician must understand algorithmic recommendation systems.

A filmmaker must understand audience behaviour across social platforms.

Creating something good is no longer sufficient.

People must also understand how it travels.

This represents one of the biggest shifts in creative labour over the past decade.

The most successful creators are not necessarily those producing the highest volume of content.

They are often those who understand audience pathways.

They understand where people discover content.

How they consume it.

What keeps attention.

What encourages sharing.

What creates loyalty.

What drives return visits.

In other words, distribution knowledge has become a creative skill.

This is particularly significant in Africa, where digital platforms have dramatically reduced barriers to entry.

A filmmaker in Nairobi can distribute work globally.

A podcaster in Accra can build an international audience.

A fashion creator in Kigali can reach consumers across continents.

But access alone does not guarantee visibility.

The challenge has shifted from publishing to discovery.

And discovery increasingly depends on understanding distribution systems.

The creative professional of the future must understand both.

The Rise Of Jobs That Barely Existed A Decade Ago

One of the most overlooked aspects of the creator economy is how many entirely new roles it has created.

Many of today’s fastest-growing creative careers would have been difficult to explain ten years ago.

Consider the creator manager.

This role now sits at the centre of influencer marketing, talent development and digital entrepreneurship.

Creator managers negotiate partnerships, oversee commercial relationships, coordinate production schedules, manage brand reputation and support long-term growth strategies.

Then there are community strategists.

As audiences increasingly organise around digital communities, someone must manage relationships between creators and their audiences.

These professionals design engagement systems, moderate discussions, develop loyalty programmes and help transform audiences into communities.

Newsletter operators represent another emerging profession.

What began as a publishing format has evolved into a business model.

Many newsletter professionals now oversee content strategy, audience acquisition, sponsorship sales, analytics and subscriber retention.

Podcast producers have undergone a similar transformation.

The role increasingly extends beyond recording audio.

It includes audience growth, platform optimisation, distribution planning, video adaptation and community development.

Other emerging professions include:

• Audience growth strategists

• Creator partnerships managers

• Rights management specialists

• Metadata managers

• Digital asset coordinators

• Creator operations managers

• Monetisation strategists

• Platform partnerships specialists

• Content intelligence analysts

These jobs exist because creative industries are becoming more complex rather than less.

As audiences fragment across platforms, someone must coordinate the systems that connect creativity to visibility and revenue.

The creator economy is not simply generating more content.

It is generating entirely new categories of work.

The Hidden Profession: Managing Information

One of the least visible but increasingly important roles emerging across creative industries involves information itself.

As digital content expands exponentially, metadata is becoming infrastructure.

Metadata determines how songs are credited.

How royalties are distributed.

How videos are discovered.

How creators are identified.

How rights are tracked.

How payments flow.

Without accurate metadata, creators risk losing both visibility and income.

This is particularly relevant across Africa, where rights management systems remain fragmented and many creative industries continue to struggle with attribution challenges.

As music catalogues expand, streaming grows, and digital distribution becomes more sophisticated, metadata specialists may become some of the most important workers in the creative economy.

The future creative workforce will not consist solely of artists and performers.

It will increasingly include people managing the information systems that support creative commerce.

AI Is Not Eliminating Creative Work. It Is Reorganising It

No conversation about creative labour can avoid artificial intelligence.

Much of the public debate focuses on replacement.

Will AI replace writers?

Will AI replace designers?

Will AI replace filmmakers?

Will AI replace musicians?

These questions dominate headlines because they are dramatic.

But they may also be the wrong questions.

The more useful question is this:

What becomes valuable when content becomes easier to produce?

Historically, scarcity created value.

Producing a video required expensive equipment.

Publishing required institutional access.

Distribution required infrastructure.

Today, technology is reducing many of those barriers.

Generative AI accelerates that process further.

The consequence is not necessarily fewer creative jobs.

It is a reordering of which skills matter most.

When content production becomes easier, attention becomes harder.

When outputs become abundant, judgment becomes scarce.

When anybody can generate content, selecting the right content becomes increasingly valuable.

This elevates a different set of human capabilities.

Taste.

Editorial judgment.

Cultural fluency.

Narrative thinking.

Audience understanding.

Strategic decision-making.

Context.

These qualities are difficult to automate because they rely on interpretation rather than generation.

A generative model can produce images.

It cannot easily determine which image best captures a cultural moment.

A tool can generate text.

It cannot easily understand the emotional dynamics of a community.

Technology can create options.

Humans increasingly create meaning.

The future creative professional may spend less time producing and more time directing, curating, interpreting and orchestrating.

That distinction matters.

Because it suggests AI is changing creative labour far more than it is eliminating it.

Africa’s Education Systems Are Not Fully Prepared

This transformation creates a challenge that receives far less attention than technology itself.

Most educational institutions continue to train students for industries that are rapidly evolving.

Journalism programmes teach journalism.

Film schools teach filmmaking.

Marketing departments teach marketing.

Design schools teach design.

The creator economy increasingly rewards people who understand how all of these systems interact.

A creator launching a podcast may need:

• storytelling skills

• audio production knowledge

• audience analytics

• platform strategy

• sponsorship sales understanding

• community management capability

These competencies often sit across multiple disciplines.

Yet most educational systems continue to treat them separately.

This creates a growing mismatch between training structures and labour market realities.

The issue is not that traditional disciplines have become irrelevant.

Far from it.

Strong foundations remain essential.

The challenge is that foundations alone are no longer enough.

Future creative professionals increasingly require systems thinking.

They must understand not only how content is made but how value moves around content.

How audiences behave.

How platforms operate.

How monetisation works.

How intellectual property functions.

How communities form.

How technologies evolve.

The future workforce requires a broader understanding of creative ecosystems rather than isolated creative functions.

The New African Creative Worker

For years, conversations about Africa’s creative economy focused on sectors.

Music.

Film.

Fashion.

Publishing.

Advertising.

Media.

Those sectors remain important.

But the more significant shift may be happening at the level of labour.

A new category of worker is emerging.

Not defined by industry.

Not defined by platform.

Not defined by job title.

Defined instead by adaptability.

These professionals move fluidly between disciplines.

They create across formats.

They understand audiences.

They navigate platforms.

They combine creativity with technology and business understanding.

Their careers look less like ladders and more like networks.

Less linear.

More interconnected.

This may ultimately become one of the creator economy’s most enduring contributions to Africa’s economic future.

Not simply new content.

Not simply new platforms.

But a new workforce.

One built for an environment where creativity, technology, media, entrepreneurship and community increasingly overlap.

The creator economy is often described as a platform revolution.

TikTok.

YouTube.

Instagram.

Substack.

Spotify.

But platforms will rise and fall.

The deeper transformation is happening elsewhere.

It is happening in the labour market.

And the future creative professional will not be defined by a single craft.

They will be defined by their ability to connect multiple crafts together.

In the next decade, the most valuable creative workers in Africa may not have one job title.

They may have five.

Written by Layo
Lead Editorial Writer, Creative Brief Africa

Outside of her editorial work, she writes Curious Health, a newsletter focused on everyday health questions, explored with clarity and care.

Subscribe to Curious Health for more

Connect with Layo on LinkedIn

Creators were the disruption.

News organisations were the institutions being disrupted.

Creators were agile.
Media companies were bureaucratic.

Creators understood the internet.
Newsrooms were still adapting to it.

Creators built audiences on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, newsletters, and podcasts. Meanwhile, traditional publishers spent years trying to figure out how to survive declining print revenues, collapsing advertising models, and shifting audience behaviour.

The assumption was that creators represented the future while traditional media represented the past.

But something interesting is happening.

The longer the creator economy matures, the more it begins to resemble the very industry it was supposedly replacing.

And the longer news organisations evolve, the more they begin to behave like creators.

The gap between the two is narrowing.

Fast.

Today, both creators and publishers are confronting remarkably similar problems:

fragmented attention,

platform dependence,

AI disruption,

trust deficits,

distribution uncertainty,

and rapidly changing monetisation models.

The distinction between a media company and a creator business is becoming increasingly difficult to identify.

Which raises an important question for Africa’s creative economy:

What happens when everyone becomes a publisher?

The Creator Economy Was Never Just About Content

The popular narrative around the creator economy often focuses on individual success stories.

A YouTuber builds a million subscribers.

A TikTok creator lands brand partnerships.

A newsletter writer grows a paying audience.

A podcaster develops a loyal community.

The conversation usually centres on content creation.

But mature creator businesses are increasingly doing something else.

They are building media companies.

The most successful creators no longer simply create content.

They build distribution systems.

Audience relationships.

Advertising businesses.

Membership products.

Events.

Merchandise lines.

Digital products.

Communities.

Multiple revenue streams.

In other words, they are solving many of the same problems traditional media organisations have always needed to solve.

The difference is that they often do so with smaller teams and more flexible structures.

The creator economy is becoming less about content creation and more about audience ownership.

And audience ownership has always been the core business of media.

News Organisations Are Becoming Creator Businesses

At the same time, traditional news organisations are moving in the opposite direction.

Consider what major publishers are doing today.

They are investing heavily in:

short-form video,

social-first content,

podcasts,

newsletters,

live events,

creator partnerships,

audio products,

streaming platforms,

and personality-driven journalism.

These strategies increasingly resemble creator playbooks.

Take CNN as an example.

The company now operates across television, digital platforms, social media, newsletters, streaming services, connected TVs, audio products, and live events.

Its Global Perspectives events series brings together policymakers, business leaders, creators, and cultural figures for conversations that extend far beyond traditional journalism.

This is not simply news production.

It is audience ecosystem building.

And that is precisely what creators have spent the last decade mastering.

The modern media company increasingly behaves like a creator business.

Not because it wants to.

Because audience behaviour demands it.

Attention Is More Fragmented Than Ever

One reason this convergence is happening is because attention itself has changed.

Historically, media companies controlled distribution.

Television networks controlled programming.

Newspapers controlled information.

Radio stations controlled discovery.

Audiences had relatively limited choices.

Today, attention exists in thousands of simultaneous streams.

A consumer might move between:

TikTok,

Instagram,

YouTube,

WhatsApp,

X,

Substack,

Spotify,

Netflix,

podcasts,

streaming platforms,

and traditional news websites within a single hour.

No single institution controls audience attention anymore.

Everyone is competing simultaneously.

A journalist competes with a TikTok creator.

A newspaper competes with a YouTube channel.

A broadcaster competes with a podcast.

A media company competes with a newsletter.

The competition is no longer industry-specific.

It is attention-specific.

And everybody is fighting for the same finite resource.

Newsletters Have Become Media Companies

Perhaps nowhere is this convergence more visible than in the rise of newsletters.

A decade ago, newsletters were largely distribution tools.

Today, they have become businesses.

Platforms like Substack have enabled writers, analysts, journalists, researchers, and creators to build direct relationships with audiences.

Many newsletter operators now function like miniature media companies.

They publish regularly.

Sell subscriptions.

Host events.

Launch podcasts.

Build communities.

Create premium content products.

Some individual writers now generate revenues that rival or exceed those of small media organisations.

This changes the economics of publishing entirely.

Instead of building a publication first and then finding an audience, creators increasingly build audiences first and then create publications around them.

The sequence has reversed.

And that reversal has implications far beyond journalism.

Journalists Are Becoming Creator Brands

The same transformation is affecting journalism itself.

Historically, journalists built credibility through institutions.

A publication provided authority.

A newsroom provided reach.

A media brand provided distribution.

Today, journalists increasingly build personal audiences alongside institutional ones.

Readers follow individual reporters.

Listeners subscribe to individual hosts.

Viewers trust specific personalities.

The relationship is becoming more direct.

This does not mean institutions no longer matter.

It means trust is increasingly being shared between institutions and individuals.

Many journalists now operate similarly to creators:

building personal brands,

growing newsletter audiences,

hosting podcasts,

developing social media communities,

and monetising expertise independently.

The creator economy has not replaced journalism.

It has changed how journalism is distributed.

Podcasts Are Competing With Newsrooms

Another area where boundaries are disappearing is audio.

Podcasts began as an alternative medium.

Today they are increasingly functioning as primary media channels.

Many audiences now receive news, analysis, education, and commentary through podcasts rather than traditional news outlets.

The appeal is obvious.

Podcasts create intimacy.

They build trust.

They encourage longer engagement.

They create stronger audience relationships.

In some cases, a podcast host may command more influence than an entire publication.

For creators, podcasts offer an opportunity to become media brands.

For publishers, podcasts have become essential audience products.

Again, both groups are solving the same problem from different directions.

How do you build durable audience relationships in a fragmented media environment?

AI Is Creating a New Shared Challenge

If audience fragmentation brought creators and publishers closer together, artificial intelligence may accelerate that convergence even further.

Both groups now face a similar threat.

Content production is becoming cheaper.

Faster.

More abundant.

AI can generate:

articles,

videos,

images,

audio,

translations,

summaries,

graphics,

and social content at scale.

The result is not a shortage of content.

It is a surplus.

And when content becomes abundant, attention becomes more valuable.

But something else becomes valuable too.

Trust.

In a world where anyone can generate content, audiences increasingly care about where information comes from.

Who produced it?

Why should it be believed?

What expertise supports it?

This challenge affects creators and publishers equally.

Both now operate in an environment where credibility becomes a competitive advantage.

The Real Asset Is No Longer Content

This may be the most important shift of all.

For years, media businesses focused on content.

Today, content alone is rarely enough.

The true assets are becoming:

trust,

audience relationships,

distribution networks,

community,

and reputation.

Content is increasingly the entry point.

Not the business itself.

This explains why creators are launching memberships.

Why media companies are hosting events.

Why newsletters are building communities.

Why podcasts are creating subscription products.

Why audiences increasingly pay for access rather than information alone.

The economics of media are moving away from content scarcity and toward relationship value.

And that affects everyone.

What This Means for Africa’s Creative Economy

For African creators, this convergence presents both opportunities and challenges.

The opportunity is obvious.

Creators can now build businesses that previously required large media organisations.

A single creator can reach global audiences.

Launch products.

Build communities.

Sell subscriptions.

Host events.

And operate across multiple platforms.

The barriers to entry have fallen dramatically.

But the challenge is equally significant.

The creator economy is becoming more competitive.

More crowded.

More dependent on trust.

More dependent on audience loyalty.

And more dependent on building sustainable businesses rather than simply creating content.

Success increasingly requires media thinking.

Not just creative thinking.

The creators who thrive in the next decade may not necessarily be the most talented content producers.

They may be the best audience builders.

The best community builders.

The best operators.

The best publishers.

The Future May Belong to Hybrid Media Businesses

The creator economy and the news industry are no longer moving in opposite directions.

They are converging.

Creators are becoming publishers.

Publishers are becoming creator businesses.

Journalists are becoming brands.

Brands are becoming media companies.

Media companies are becoming community platforms.

Everyone is experimenting with the same challenge:

how to build trust, attention, and revenue in an increasingly fragmented digital environment.

What emerges next may not look like traditional media.

Nor will it look like the creator economy we know today.

Instead, we may be entering an era of hybrid media businesses.

Part creator.

Part publisher.

Part community.

Part platform.

And for Africa’s creative economy, understanding that shift may become one of the most important competitive advantages of all.

Because in a world where everyone can publish, the real challenge is no longer creating content.

It is building something people choose to return to.

Written by Layo
Lead Editorial Writer, Creative Brief Africa

Outside of her editorial work, she writes Curious Health, a newsletter focused on everyday health questions, explored with clarity and care.

Subscribe to Curious Health for more

Connect with Layo on LinkedIn

Roads.

Railways.

Ports.

Power plants.

Bridges.

But the infrastructure deficit confronting Africa today is no longer just an industrial challenge.

It is increasingly a creative economy challenge.

According to a recent report by S&P Global Ratings, Africa faces an annual infrastructure financing gap of between $30 billion and $70 billion. The continent requires roughly $130 billion to $170 billion annually to meet its infrastructure needs, yet financing commitments reached only around $100 billion in 2023.

The result is a persistent shortfall that continues to slow economic growth, trade integration, and industrial development.

What receives less attention, however, is how this same infrastructure gap increasingly shapes the future of Africa’s creative economy.

Because while music, film, fashion, gaming, creator businesses, digital media, and entertainment are often discussed as cultural sectors, they are increasingly infrastructure-dependent industries.

And without the systems that support them, creative growth eventually encounters hard limits.

The Creative Economy Runs on Infrastructure More Than Ever

Historically, creative industries could operate with relatively limited infrastructure.

A musician needed a recording studio.

A filmmaker needed cameras and editing equipment.

A fashion designer needed access to manufacturing and distribution.

Today’s creative economy operates differently.

Modern creative industries increasingly depend on digital infrastructure.

Streaming platforms.

Cloud computing.

High-speed internet.

Digital payment systems.

Content delivery networks.

Data centres.

Artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Cross-border financial systems.

Audience analytics.

E-commerce platforms.

The creator economy itself exists almost entirely because this infrastructure exists.

A YouTuber in Lagos depends on global broadband networks.

A podcaster in Nairobi depends on cloud storage systems.

A filmmaker in Johannesburg depends on reliable electricity, internet access, payment rails, and digital distribution platforms.

Creativity may begin with talent.

But scale increasingly depends on infrastructure.

The Hidden Cost of Unreliable Power

Perhaps nowhere is this challenge more visible than energy.

Africa continues to experience some of the world’s most significant electricity access and reliability challenges.

For creative businesses, unreliable electricity creates costs that are often invisible in economic reports.

Studios invest in generators.

Production companies budget for backup power.

Event organisers spend heavily on temporary energy solutions.

Content creators purchase batteries, inverters, and alternative energy systems.

Every additional cost reduces available capital for creativity itself.

Money that could be invested in talent, production quality, distribution, or business growth instead gets redirected toward compensating for infrastructure deficiencies.

The infrastructure gap quietly becomes a creativity tax.

Why Data Centres Matter to Creators

A decade ago, data centres were rarely part of creative economy conversations.

Today they are central to them.

Every streamed song.

Every uploaded video.

Every digital subscription.

Every creator platform.

Every AI model.

Every online course.

Every digital product.

All rely on data infrastructure.

Africa currently accounts for a small fraction of global data centre capacity despite representing nearly 20 percent of the world’s population.

That imbalance matters.

Because the future of creative industries increasingly depends on where data is stored, processed, distributed, and monetised.

As artificial intelligence becomes embedded into media production, content discovery, advertising, and audience targeting, countries that lack digital infrastructure risk losing more than technological competitiveness.

They risk losing economic value generated from their own cultural output.

The Infrastructure Behind Streaming Success

Africa’s music success story often appears effortless from the outside.

Afrobeats dominates global playlists.

African artists headline international festivals.

Streaming numbers continue to rise.

Yet every stream relies on infrastructure.

Reliable connectivity.

Affordable data.

Digital payments.

Licensing systems.

Cloud services.

Cross-border financial networks.

Without these systems, audiences cannot access content efficiently and creators cannot monetize effectively.

The same applies to film.

The rapid growth of streaming platforms across Africa depends not only on content production but also on broadband expansion and digital payment adoption.

Infrastructure determines who can participate in the digital entertainment economy and who remains excluded.

Events Need Infrastructure Too

The continent’s growing festival economy also depends heavily on infrastructure.

Governments increasingly recognise the value of cultural events.

Lagos recently announced support for more than 200 creative programmes.

Kenya has pursued major cultural initiatives including efforts linked to the Grammy Awards.

Rwanda continues to position Kigali as a destination for conferences and international gatherings.

But cultural events do not exist independently of infrastructure.

Visitors need airports.

Hotels.

Reliable transportation.

Internet access.

Payment systems.

Public spaces.

Security systems.

Energy supply.

The success of creative tourism increasingly depends on investments that extend far beyond culture ministries.

Cities competing for cultural relevance are ultimately competing on infrastructure as much as programming.

Why Financial Infrastructure Matters Just as Much

The S&P report identifies another major problem.

Many African financial systems remain unable to channel long-term capital efficiently into infrastructure projects.

The same challenge affects creative industries.

Across much of Africa, creators still struggle to access financing.

Creative businesses often remain underbanked.

Intellectual property is rarely treated as collateral.

Royalty streams are difficult to finance.

Film catalogues are rarely securitised.

Music rights remain under-monetised.

Creative startups frequently operate without access to growth capital.

In many ways, Africa’s creative economy suffers from the same financing problem as its infrastructure sector.

The assets exist.

The systems required to finance them remain underdeveloped.

The Creative Economy Cannot Scale Without Systems

This is perhaps the most important lesson emerging across Africa.

Talent is not the continent’s biggest challenge.

Africa has already proven its creative potential.

Its music influences global charts.

Its films reach international audiences.

Its creators command millions of followers.

Its designers increasingly shape global aesthetics.

The question is no longer whether Africa can produce creativity.

The question is whether Africa can build the infrastructure required to scale creativity into long-term economic value.

That means:

better energy systems,

stronger broadband networks,

deeper capital markets,

more data centres,

better payment infrastructure,

improved logistics,

modern event facilities,

and financial systems capable of investing in creative businesses at scale.

The Real Infrastructure Debate

Africa’s infrastructure gap is often discussed as an industrial challenge.

But increasingly it is a cultural one too.

Because the next phase of Africa’s creative economy will not be determined solely by talent, visibility, or global recognition.

It will be determined by systems.

The continent already has creators capable of competing globally.

What it needs now is the infrastructure capable of supporting them.

The $70 billion infrastructure gap is not simply slowing roads, ports, and power plants.

It may also be slowing the future growth of one of Africa’s most promising economic sectors.

And as creative industries become more digital, more global, and more dependent on technology, the distinction between infrastructure policy and creative economy policy may become increasingly difficult to separate.

The future of African creativity will depend not only on what creators build.

But also on the systems that make building possible.

Written by Layo
Lead Editorial Writer, Creative Brief Africa

Outside of her editorial work, she writes Curious Health, a newsletter focused on everyday health questions, explored with clarity and care.

Subscribe to Curious Health for more

Connect with Layo on LinkedIn

But this isn’t one story. It’s twenty.

Below is a country-by-country breakdown of the nations shaping the continent’s creative future — what they make, what it earns, and why it matters.

The Big Picture First

Before the countries, the context.

UNESCO estimates that cultural and creative industries (CCI) account for 6.2% of global employment and contribute 3.1% of world GDP. On the African continent, UNCTAD’s 2024 survey found CCI contributing between 0.5% and 7.3% of GDP in surveyed economies, employing between 0.5% and 12.5% of the workforce. Africa’s share of the global creative economy remains under 1% as of 2020 — but creative output on the continent more than doubled between 2004 and 2017.

The gap between talent and infrastructure is real. Piracy alone erodes 50–75% of film revenues across many markets. Less than 5% of Africa’s creative businesses can access traditional bank loans. The continent has 1 cinema screen per 787,000 people, compared to 1 per 50,000 in Europe.

And yet: Africa’s gaming industry hit $1 billion in 2024. Music from the continent reaches fans in over 180 countries. Streaming platforms have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into African content. The infrastructure gap hasn’t stopped the culture. It’s just made the numbers more remarkable.

Here are the countries leading the charge.

1. Nigeria

Creative Economy Sectors: Film (Nollywood), Music (Afrobeats), Fashion, Digital Content Key Numbers: Nollywood generates an estimated $1.2 billion in annual revenue. The arts, entertainment, and motion picture industries contributed N728.80 billion (~$470M) to GDP in Q1 2024 alone — a 152.79% increase over the same quarter a decade earlier. Nigeria’s music industry generated over $400 million in streaming revenues, brand deals, and international performances in 2024.

Nigeria is Africa’s loudest creative story, and the data justifies the noise.

Nollywood is the world’s second-largest film industry by volume, producing more than 2,500 films annually. It directly employs over 300,000 people and supports around one million jobs indirectly across distribution, marketing, and retail. In 2025, Nollywood surpassed Hollywood in West African market share — 49.4% versus 48.8% — a milestone once considered decades away.

The music side is just as consequential. Afrobeats has become Nigeria’s leading cultural export after oil, with audiences in over 180 countries. Spotify royalties paid to Nigerian artists more than doubled between 2023 and 2024, reaching over ₦58 billion ($36–38M). The number of Nigerian artists earning at least ₦10 million annually has tripled since 2022. Universal Music Group’s majority acquisition of Mavin Global — reportedly valued at $150–200 million — is the most visible signal of how seriously global players are taking Nigerian music.

Netflix has invested over $23 million in Nigerian film over seven years, supporting 5,140 jobs and contributing $39 million to GDP. Titles like Blood Vessel topped global charts with nearly 9 million hours streamed in a single week.

The structural problems — piracy, naira depreciation, inadequate production infrastructure — are documented and real. But Nigeria’s creative output has grown through all of them.

2. South Africa

Creative Economy Sectors: Film & TV, Gaming, Music, Design, Digital Media Key Numbers: CCI contributed approximately 3% of GDP in 2018, equivalent to $55 billion in economic output in 2020. The gaming industry crossed the $300 million revenue mark in 2024. Cinema spending stands at $29.9 million, the highest in sub-Saharan Africa despite a population a third of Nigeria’s.

South Africa is the most comprehensively measured creative economy on the continent. It is the only African nation to use Culture Satellite Accounts (CSA) — a UNESCO-developed model — to formally track the economic impact of CCI. The South African Cultural Observatory found that Design and Creative Services lead contributions at 32% of CCI GDP impact, followed by Audio-visual and Interactive Media at 30%.

The multiplier effects are striking: every $1 invested in Audio-visual media produces a Type II multiplier of 4.17, meaning the downstream economic impact is more than four times the original spend.

South Africa’s gaming sector is one of the continent’s most developed. Esports tournaments in 2024 drew global sponsors and crossed $300 million in revenue. The industry has also benefited from its proximity to deep digital infrastructure and a more established broadband ecosystem than most of the continent.

On the streaming side, South Africa’s Showmax is producing a slate of 21 original African series, positioning Johannesburg as a production hub that competes directly with Lagos for pan-African content. Live-streamed performance revenue reached a peak of 30% of in-person live event earnings in 2023 — a higher share than almost anywhere else on the continent.

3. Kenya

Creative Economy Sectors: Film, Digital Content, Music, Cultural Tourism Key Numbers: CCI contributed $66 million to Kenya’s economy in 2013 — 5.32% of GDP at the time. Kenya’s film rebate scheme has since accelerated international productions, drawing Netflix, Amazon, and local studios into co-productions.

Kenya’s creative economy story is as much about policy as it is about talent. The film rebate scheme — which offers production incentives to international companies — turned Nairobi into East Africa’s leading production hub. The results have been tangible: major streaming platforms now run African original productions out of Nairobi, and co-production deals have grown steadily.

On the digital side, Kenya’s M-Pesa infrastructure has made creative content monetization more accessible at the grassroots level than in most African markets. A Safaricom Swahili-first rural content campaign recorded a 45% increase in engagement compared to English-only equivalents — a metric that points to the untapped potential of language-native creative content.

Kenya’s music sector is growing, though royalty systems remain an obstacle. Musicians in Kenya and Tanzania have lost measurable monetization opportunities due to outdated royalty frameworks — a structural issue that also creates an investment opportunity for rights management platforms.

Kenya has also benefited from cultural tourism infrastructure tied to its national parks and heritage sites, which in turn amplifies demand for local craft, music, and performance sectors.

4. Egypt

Creative Economy Sectors: Film, Gaming, Media, Advertising Key Numbers: Egypt’s entertainment industry generated approximately $14.7 billion in revenue in 2023, with tourism contributing $13.2 billion of that figure. The media market is projected to reach $3.72 billion in 2024, with gaming at $1.93 billion — the largest single media segment. Egyptian consumers spent $1.71 billion on electronic games in 2023, a 17% year-on-year increase.

Egypt has the most storied film industry in the Arab world and one of the oldest on the continent. Where Nigerian cinema is disrupting, Egyptian cinema has deep institutional roots — studios, festivals, and a regional Arabic-language audience that stretches from Morocco to the Gulf.

The export numbers tell the clearest story. In 2024, Egyptian films earned over $53 million in Saudi Arabia alone — more than twice the total domestic box office ($23.5 million). Saudi Arabia is now Egypt’s primary film export market, accounting for a disproportionate share of top-grossing Egyptian productions. Films like Sons of Rizk 3: Knockout grossed $22.3 million in foreign markets against $6.1 million at home.

Egypt’s gaming market is the continent’s largest by consumer spend. In 2023, Egyptian consumers ranked second only to one other Arab nation in gaming expenditure — a figure projected to keep growing with the country’s young, digitally active population.

The advertising and media sector remains one of Egypt’s most internationally competitive. Major global agencies including JWT, Ogilvy & Mather, and TBWA maintain strong Egyptian operations, partly due to Egypt’s position as the regional media capital for Arabic-language advertising.

Economic headwinds — currency depreciation, inflation, and the Suez Canal disruptions — have pressured the sector. Cinema admissions were 12 million in 2024, still recovering toward the pre-pandemic 14 million benchmark. The creative fundamentals, however, remain strong.

5. Ghana

Creative Economy Sectors: Music, Film, Cultural Tourism, Fashion, Visual Arts Key Numbers: The Tourism, Culture and Creative Arts sector contributed $4.8 billion to Ghana’s GDP in 2024 and attracted approximately 1.2 million visitors. The Year of Return campaign in 2019 injected nearly $1.9 billion into the economy.

Ghana punches above its weight. The 2019 Year of Return — a campaign marking 400 years since the first enslaved Africans arrived in colonial America — did more than attract diaspora tourists. It reframed Ghana’s cultural identity as a global asset and created a model for how African nations could leverage heritage as economic policy.

By 2024, Ghana recorded its highest annual tourism receipts since COVID-19 — $4.82 billion — from 1.28 million international arrivals. Tourism pre-COVID contributed approximately 5% to GDP, making it the country’s fourth-largest source of foreign exchange.

Ghana’s music sector — particularly Afropop, highlife, and the emerging Afrobeats adjacent sound — has grown rapidly on streaming platforms, though royalty infrastructure remains underdeveloped. Micro-fashion brands have found a workaround: in Ghana, brands are increasingly selling up to 80% of collections via Instagram Live auctions, with limited-edition items selling out in under 10 minutes.

Ghana’s visual arts market, anchored in Accra, has attracted international gallery interest. The Accra art scene sits within a broader West African cultural cluster alongside Lagos and Dakar. The government’s 2026 budget allocated GH¢20 million as seed capital for a creative arts fund — a signal of intent, if not yet at scale.

Across five countries on the continent recognized by UNESCO for effectively addressing youth unemployment through CCI employment of 15–25 year olds, Ghana makes the list.

6. Ethiopia

Creative Economy Sectors: Music, Film, Fashion (Apparel Manufacturing), Heritage Tourism Key Numbers: CCI contributed 4.733% to Ethiopia’s GDP in 2014. In 2012, the motion picture and video sector alone accounted for 5.54% of GDP. Ethiopia’s apparel and textile sector has positioned Addis Ababa as a manufacturing base for global fashion brands.

Ethiopia’s creative economy story has two chapters running simultaneously.

The first is cultural: Ethiopia has one of the richest and most distinctive music traditions on the continent, rooted in the pentatonic scales of Ethio-jazz, Orthodox choral heritage, and a diverse mosaic of regional musical cultures. Addis Ababa has become a hub for African contemporary music that draws on those traditions while engaging global audiences.

The second chapter is industrial: Ethiopia’s garment manufacturing sector has attracted investment from H&M, PVH, and other global fashion brands drawn to the country’s low labor costs and preferential trade access. While this is technically manufacturing rather than “creative” in the cultural sense, it places Ethiopia at the convergence of global fashion supply chains and local artisan craft — a position that has policy implications for how the country can move up the value chain.

The challenges are well-documented: filmmakers contend with outdated equipment and limited distribution infrastructure. Electricity unreliability disrupts production across sectors. But with CCI at nearly 5% of GDP over a decade ago, the baseline potential is among the highest on the continent.

7. Morocco

Creative Economy Sectors: Film Production, Fashion, Crafts, Cultural Tourism Key Numbers: Morocco’s Ouarzazate Studios is North Africa’s leading international film location, having hosted productions including Game of Thrones, Gladiator, Lawrence of Arabia, and numerous Hollywood blockbusters.

Morocco has built a creative economy on a distinctive proposition: it is Africa’s most accessible international film set. The Atlas Mountains, Saharan landscapes, ancient medinas, and a sophisticated production infrastructure have made Ouarzazate and Marrakech standing locations for global productions that need scale and visual grandeur on a manageable budget.

The strategy has worked. Morocco is recognized in international production circles alongside established locations like Jordan and New Zealand. The economic spillover is substantial: international productions fund local crew, accommodation, transportation, catering, and equipment supply chains.

Fashion is the other cornerstone. Morocco’s craft and artisan economy — zellige tilework, hand-woven textiles, leatherwork from Fez — is a significant export and tourism driver. Marrakech has become a destination for luxury fashion buyers and designers seeking traditional craft techniques that can be reimagined for global markets.

Morocco’s cultural tourism receipts are among the highest in North Africa, reinforcing the feedback loop between creative industries, national brand, and visitor spending.

8. Senegal

Creative Economy Sectors: Fashion, Visual Arts, Music, Film Key Numbers: Dakar Fashion Week is recognized on the calendar of international buyers. The Biennale de Dakar draws global galleries and collectors. Senegal is consistently cited in UNCTAD and UNESCO reports as a West African creative hub.

Senegal has built cultural capital through deliberate policy and artistic legacy. Dakar is, by consensus, West Africa’s fashion and arts capital — a position reinforced by the government’s support of Dakar Fashion Week and the Biennale, and by a tradition of state investment in culture dating back to Léopold Sédar Senghor’s presidency.

Dakar Fashion Week has gone from a regional showcase to an event with genuine international press coverage and buyer attendance, driving demand for Senegalese designers and the broader “Made in Senegal” aesthetic. The Biennale de Dakar — the oldest and most prestigious contemporary art event in sub-Saharan Africa — has made Dakar a stop on the itinerary of international collectors and gallerists.

Senegal’s music, particularly mbalax, has influenced West African and diasporic sound for decades. The country’s film industry, though small, has produced directors with international recognition. Regional film collaboration platform Sentoo — founded in 2019 in partnership with Burkina Faso, Mali, Morocco, Niger, and Senegal — supports co-productions between sub-Saharan and Maghreb filmmakers through writing residencies, development grants, and networking.

Senegal’s creative soft power extends well beyond its economic size.

9. Côte d’Ivoire

Creative Economy Sectors: Music, Film, Fashion, Cultural Tourism Key Numbers: CCI contributed more than 4% of Côte d’Ivoire’s GDP, according to recent estimates.

Ivory Coast is an underreported creative economy story. Abidjan’s music scene — particularly coupé-décalé and the broader Ivorian pop sound — has shaped West African music tastes for two decades and exported significantly into francophone diaspora markets in Europe.

The country’s fashion sector is growing, with Abidjan emerging as a rival to Dakar for fashion design and retail in French-speaking West Africa. Ivorian designers are gaining visibility in Paris showrooms, and the government has increasingly recognized the fashion sector as an economic development tool.

Côte d’Ivoire participates in several regional film co-production initiatives, including Sentoo, and its audiovisual sector has received support from both government programs and French cooperation frameworks. With CCI at over 4% of GDP, Côte d’Ivoire ranks among the continent’s highest in terms of creative contribution to national output.

10. Cameroon

Creative Economy Sectors: Music, Film, Crafts, Cultural Tourism Key Numbers: Cameroon is described as “Africa in miniature” for its geographic and cultural diversity — over 250 ethnic groups, Francophone and Anglophone traditions, and ecosystems ranging from rainforest to savanna. This diversity is itself a creative asset.

Cameroon’s music — bikutsi and makossa — has been internationally influential, with artists like Manu Dibango and Les Têtes Brûlées building decades-long global careers. The country’s cultural diversity supports a rich craft sector and increasingly a tourism economy tied to that heritage.

Cameroon’s film industry is small but growing, and the country participates in regional African film networks. More significantly, Cameroon’s position as a regional media hub for Central Africa — particularly through Yaounde and Douala — gives it outsized influence in the French-speaking creative economy of Central and West Africa.

11. Uganda

Creative Economy Sectors: Music, Film, Digital Content Key Numbers: Uganda is one of five African nations recognized by UNESCO as among the top 10 low- and middle-income countries globally for effectively employing 15–25 year olds in CCI.

Uganda’s creative economy is driven by its youth and its digital infrastructure — though electricity unreliability remains a structural barrier. The Ugandan music industry has developed a distinctive sound through genres like Afrobeats-adjacent “Afrobeats UG” and urban Ugandan pop, which has expanded audiences regionally and on streaming platforms.

The country’s film industry, while constrained by limited production budgets, is growing in output and beginning to develop diaspora distribution channels. Uganda’s social media content creator economy is particularly active, with Ugandan creators among the more prolific producers of viral content in East Africa.

UNESCO’s recognition of Uganda for youth CCI employment is significant: it means the creative sector is functioning as a genuine labor market pathway for young people, not just an aspirational career track.

12. Tanzania

Creative Economy Sectors: Music (Bongo Flava), Film, Crafts, Tourism Key Numbers: Tanzania’s music industry has suffered measurable monetization losses due to outdated royalty systems. Its tourism sector generated significant foreign exchange, contributing to the broader creative-tourism overlap that anchors East African cultural economies.

Tanzania’s most significant creative export is Bongo Flava — a genre that fuses hip-hop, R&B, and East African rhythms and has built an audience across East and Central Africa. Artists like Diamond Platnumz have developed regional and international careers that position Tanzania’s music alongside Kenya and Uganda in the East African music cluster.

Tanzania also holds one of Africa’s richest craft heritages, including Tinga Tinga visual art, Makonde sculpture, and Zanzibar’s intricately carved wooden doors — all of which feed into the country’s cultural tourism economy.

The royalty infrastructure gap is a documented constraint. Tanzania’s musicians have left money on the table compared to peers in markets with functioning collection management organizations. Closing that gap is one of the clearest policy levers available to the country.

13. Rwanda

Creative Economy Sectors: Cultural Tourism, Fashion, Film, Music Key Numbers: Rwanda’s GDP growth has consistently ranked among Africa’s fastest. It has attracted major international events, built a reputation for safety and ease of doing business, and positioned Kigali as a conference and creative events capital.

Rwanda’s creative economy is inseparable from its national branding strategy. Kigali has been developed as a tier-one African meeting city, hosting summits, cultural festivals, and sporting events that generate creative economy spillover across hospitality, fashion, and media.

The government’s targeted investment in cultural infrastructure — including performance venues, film support, and craft cooperatives — reflects a view of the creative economy as a tool of national development, not just an entertainment byproduct. Rwanda participates in AfCFTA’s Guided Trade Initiative in ways that include creative goods and textile sectors.

Rwanda’s fashion sector, while smaller than Senegal’s or Nigeria’s, is growing in regional influence. Kigali Fashion Week has developed a following and draws designers from across East Africa.

14. Zimbabwe

Creative Economy Sectors: Music, Visual Arts, Craft, Film Key Numbers: Zimbabwe is among the African countries that have developed frameworks to support their film industry’s production and development.

Zimbabwe’s creative economy has operated in the shadow of a prolonged economic crisis, which makes its cultural output — in music, visual arts, and craft — more remarkable. Zimbabwean stone sculpture is internationally recognized, with Shona sculpture artists represented in galleries in Europe, the United States, and Asia.

The country’s music tradition, from chimurenga to mbira to contemporary Afrobeats-influenced pop, has maintained cultural resonance even as the economic infrastructure around it has been strained. Zimbabwe is developing its film sector with new frameworks aimed at professional production support.

Tourism is recovering, and Zimbabwe’s creative economy is closely tied to it — the country’s cultural heritage, wildlife experiences, and arts scenes are intertwined propositions for international visitors.

15. Angola

Creative Economy Sectors: Music (Kizomba, Semba), Film, Fashion Key Numbers: Angola’s economy has historically been dominated by oil, but a deliberate government push toward diversification has raised the profile of creative industries as a development priority.

Angola is the birthplace of kizomba and semba — genres that have traveled through the Lusophone diaspora to become globally recognized dance music forms. Kizomba, in particular, has developed international scenes across Europe and the Americas, generating cultural export value that formal economic statistics largely fail to capture.

Angola’s government has invested in cultural infrastructure including theaters, national film programs, and creative hubs in Luanda. The city is one of Africa’s more expensive capitals, but it is also developing a creative middle class that is beginning to build professional creative industry infrastructure.

Angola participated in UNCTAD’s framework and is increasingly integrated into the continental creative economy conversation.

16. DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo)

Creative Economy Sectors: Music (Soukous, Congolese Rumba), Fashion, Visual Arts Key Numbers: Congolese Rumba was inscribed on UNESCO’s list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2021 — formal recognition of a music tradition that has shaped African popular music for 70 years.

The DRC’s creative economy operates under severe structural constraints — infrastructure, political instability, piracy — but its cultural output is foundational to the continent. Soukous and Congolese rumba from Kinshasa and Brazzaville directly shaped the development of popular music across Central, East, and Southern Africa. Artists like Fally Ipupa and Fabregas Le Métis Noir command pan-African audiences.

Kinshasa’s fashion scene — marked by the Sapeurs, the Société des Ambianceurs et Personnes Élégantes — is one of Africa’s most internationally photographed subcultures, a form of style-as-social-statement that has been documented by global media from the BBC to The New York Times.

The DRC’s cultural capital is enormous. Its translation into economic value remains the continent’s most significant untapped creative opportunity.

17. Mali

Creative Economy Sectors: Music, Craft, Cultural Tourism Key Numbers: Mali is one of five African nations recognized by UNESCO for effectively employing youth (15–25) in CCI, alongside Ghana, Uganda, Mozambique, and Togo. The Festival au Désert, before security concerns closed it, was one of the world’s most distinctive music festivals.

Mali’s music tradition — anchored in the griot storytelling tradition and the kora — has produced internationally recognized artists including Salif Keita, Ali Farka Touré, Amadou & Mariam, and Fatoumata Diawara. This output has given Mali a creative footprint far larger than its economic size.

The country’s craft sector — particularly textiles, gold, and leatherwork — feeds into cultural tourism and regional trade. Mali participates in regional film co-production networks and cultural policy coordination through ECOWAS and the African Union.

Political instability and security concerns in the Sahel region have significantly constrained economic development, including the creative sector. The cultural heritage, however, persists.

18. Mozambique

Creative Economy Sectors: Music, Craft, Cultural Tourism, Fashion Key Numbers: Mozambique is one of five African nations on UNESCO’s list for effective CCI youth employment. It participated in UNCTAD’s 2024 Creative Economy Survey, making it one of the few countries on the continent with formal data submissions.

Mozambique’s creative economy is smaller in scale than many on this list, but it is distinguished by its formal engagement with international data frameworks and its youth employment performance. Music — particularly marrabenta, the national genre — and craft are the dominant sectors.

The country’s coastline and relative political stability have made it an emerging cultural tourism destination, with Mozambican music, cuisine, and craft becoming part of the visitor experience proposition.

19. Burkina Faso

Creative Economy Sectors: Film, Music, Craft Key Numbers: Burkina Faso hosts FESPACO — the Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou — the largest and most prestigious film festival on the continent, held biennially since 1969.

Burkina Faso’s creative economy contribution vastly exceeds what its GDP figures would suggest, because FESPACO gives Ouagadougou a continental cultural role that no other city on the continent holds in the same way. Every two years, Ouagadougou becomes the capital of African cinema — drawing filmmakers, distributors, critics, and international industry figures from across the continent and beyond.

The country participates in Sentoo’s regional film co-production network and has contributed significantly to the development of Sahelian and pan-African cinematic language. Security challenges in recent years have strained the country’s creative infrastructure, but FESPACO has continued.

20. Tunisia

Creative Economy Sectors: Film, Music, Cultural Tourism, Digital Creative Services Key Numbers: Tunisia participated in UNCTAD’s 2024 Creative Economy Survey. It is a founding partner of the Sentoo regional film platform and has one of North Africa’s most active independent film cultures.

Tunisia’s film industry sits at a crossroads between African and Mediterranean creative economies. Carthage Film Festival — one of the continent’s oldest film festivals, founded in 1966 — has maintained Tunisia’s position as a serious cinema culture. Tunisian directors have achieved international recognition at Cannes, Berlin, and Venice.

The country’s cultural tourism infrastructure — anchored in Roman ruins, Phoenician heritage, and Islamic architecture — generates significant creative-adjacent economic activity. Tunisia’s digital creative services sector is growing, with Tunis increasingly competitive as a tech and creative outsourcing destination for European clients.

Tunisia’s partnership with Senegal, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, and Morocco in Sentoo reflects a broader understanding that North African and sub-Saharan film cultures have more to gain from collaboration than from operating in parallel.

The Unfinished Map

Twenty countries. One trajectory.

Africa’s creative economy is not waiting for infrastructure to arrive. It is building infrastructure through output — forcing streaming platforms to invest, compelling music labels to acquire, turning cultural events into economic policy.

The numbers still have gaps. Comprehensive continent-wide data remains patchy. Many creative enterprises are informal. Royalty systems are outdated. Piracy bleeds revenue at every level.

But consider what exists despite all of that: the world’s fastest-growing music market, a film industry that out-produces Hollywood by volume, a youth demographic that is simultaneously the creative workforce and the primary consumer base, and a cultural influence — in sound, image, style, and story — that is reshaping global popular culture in real time.

The map is still being drawn.

Written by Layo
Lead Editorial Writer, Creative Brief Africa

Outside of her editorial work, she writes Curious Health, a newsletter focused on everyday health questions, explored with clarity and care.

Subscribe to Curious Health for more

Connect with Layo on LinkedIn

Oil fields.

Telecommunications infrastructure.

Banks.

Real estate.

Mining concessions.

Manufacturing plants.

These assets are tangible. They can be seen, measured, valued, and financed. Investors understand them. Banks lend against them. Governments build policies around them.

But something unusual is happening across the global economy.

Some of the world’s most valuable assets are becoming increasingly intangible.

A song.

A film library.

A television format.

A gaming franchise.

A character.

A story.

A copyright.

An audience.

An algorithm.

Increasingly, the assets generating the most value are no longer physical objects. They are intellectual property.

And while global financial markets have spent years developing mechanisms to finance, acquire, securitise, and monetise intellectual property, much of Africa’s creative economy still treats copyright primarily as legal protection rather than economic infrastructure.

That distinction may be costing the continent billions.

Because the next major investment opportunity in Africa may not sit underground.

It may sit inside intellectual property portfolios that remain largely invisible to traditional finance.

The World Has Already Started Investing in Intellectual Property

For most of the twentieth century, intellectual property was viewed primarily as a legal concern.

Copyright lawyers protected it.

Artists owned it.

Publishers managed it.

Studios licensed it.

But few financial institutions treated intellectual property itself as an investment class.

That changed dramatically over the last two decades.

Today, intellectual property is increasingly traded, acquired, financed, and valued like any other financial asset.

Music catalogues have become investment products.

Film libraries generate predictable recurring revenues.

Publishing rights produce long-term royalty streams.

Franchises create decades of licensing opportunities.

Investors no longer buy only companies.

They increasingly buy ownership of creative assets themselves.

Perhaps the most visible example was Hipgnosis Songs Fund, which spent years acquiring music rights from globally recognised artists and songwriters.

Its thesis was simple.

Songs generate recurring income.

Streaming platforms pay royalties.

Radio stations pay royalties.

Television licensing generates royalties.

Advertising placements generate royalties.

Public performances generate royalties.

If those revenue streams can be measured, they can also be valued.

And if they can be valued, they can be financed.

The result was a business model that transformed songs into investable financial assets.

Similar strategies have emerged across publishing, film, gaming, and entertainment.

In many developed markets, intellectual property is no longer treated as an artistic by-product.

It is treated as capital.

Why Intellectual Property Matters More Than Ever

The rise of digital platforms has fundamentally changed the economics of creative work.

Historically, creative products were difficult to distribute at scale.

Physical limitations constrained growth.

Books required printing.

Music required manufacturing.

Films required cinemas.

Distribution costs limited reach.

Digital platforms changed that equation.

Today, a song recorded in Lagos can reach listeners in London, Johannesburg, Toronto, Nairobi, and São Paulo simultaneously.

A YouTube video can generate revenue for years.

A television format can be adapted across multiple countries.

A film can live indefinitely on streaming services.

This means intellectual property can now produce income over far longer periods and across far wider markets than ever before.

The asset itself becomes increasingly valuable.

The song is no longer merely a song.

It becomes a revenue-generating asset.

The film becomes a catalogue asset.

The character becomes licensing infrastructure.

The audience becomes economic leverage.

Ownership becomes increasingly important because the value often lies not in the initial creation but in the recurring monetisation that follows.

Africa’s Creative Economy Is Producing Valuable Intellectual Property

The challenge is not that Africa lacks intellectual property.

The continent is producing enormous amounts of it.

African music now dominates conversations about global popular culture.

Artists such as Burna Boy, Tems, Tyla, and Diamond Platnumz have built audiences that stretch far beyond national borders.

Meanwhile, Nollywood remains one of the world’s largest film industries by output.

African animation studios are emerging.

Gaming ecosystems are expanding.

Digital creators are building global audiences.

Podcast networks are growing.

Independent publishers are attracting subscribers.

New forms of cultural production appear almost daily.

The creative output exists.

The intellectual property exists.

The audience exists.

The demand exists.

Yet the systems required to convert intellectual property into investable assets remain underdeveloped.

The Invisible Wealth Problem

One reason intellectual property remains underfinanced in Africa is because much of its value remains invisible.

A commercial building can be appraised.

Land can be surveyed.

Machinery can be valued.

Copyright is harder.

Many creative businesses struggle to answer basic questions that investors require:

Who owns the rights?

How much revenue does the asset generate?

What historical earnings exist?

How long can earnings continue?

How reliable are royalty records?

How enforceable are ownership claims?

Without clear answers, financial institutions perceive greater risk.

Risk increases financing costs.

Or eliminates financing entirely.

As a result, many creators fund projects through personal savings, informal networks, grants, sponsorships, or short-term partnerships.

Traditional financial markets often remain absent.

This creates a paradox.

The creative economy produces valuable assets.

But those assets often cannot access the same financing mechanisms available to traditional industries.

The Copyright Infrastructure Gap

Ownership alone does not create value.

Infrastructure does.

The most successful intellectual property markets rely on systems that make ownership visible, trackable, enforceable, and monetisable.

These systems include:

copyright registries,

rights management organisations,

licensing databases,

royalty collection systems,

audience analytics,

distribution networks,

legal enforcement mechanisms,

valuation standards.

Without these structures, intellectual property becomes difficult to measure.

And assets that cannot be measured rarely attract investment.

Across Africa, copyright systems have improved significantly in recent years, but major challenges remain.

Royalty collection remains inconsistent in some markets.

Data fragmentation creates uncertainty.

Cross-border licensing can be complicated.

Informal distribution channels continue to limit transparency.

Many creators themselves lack access to detailed rights management knowledge.

The result is a marketplace where substantial value exists but remains difficult to capture efficiently.

Why Investors Are Beginning to Pay Attention

Despite these challenges, interest in intellectual property financing is growing.

Partly because traditional investment sectors face increasing competition.

Partly because creative industries continue to expand.

And partly because digital distribution has made creative revenue streams easier to track than before.

Streaming platforms provide consumption data.

Digital storefronts generate transaction histories.

Subscription platforms offer recurring revenue models.

Creator businesses increasingly produce measurable economic activity.

As transparency improves, intellectual property becomes easier to evaluate.

And once investors can evaluate assets, financing becomes possible.

This shift is already visible globally.

Private equity firms invest in entertainment rights.

Music catalogues are acquired as long-term assets.

Film libraries are treated as recurring revenue businesses.

Gaming intellectual property attracts significant institutional capital.

The same logic could eventually apply to African creative assets.

What Happens If Copyright Becomes Collateral?

Perhaps the most transformative possibility is treating intellectual property as collateral.

Imagine a filmmaker using a proven film catalogue to secure financing for future productions.

Imagine a musician leveraging royalty streams to access growth capital.

Imagine publishing rights supporting business expansion.

Imagine creators accessing loans based not on physical property ownership but on intellectual property ownership.

This concept already exists in several advanced markets.

The challenge is building the valuation systems and legal frameworks necessary to support it at scale across Africa.

If successful, it could fundamentally alter how creative businesses access capital.

The implications would extend far beyond entertainment.

Creative entrepreneurs could scale faster.

Production companies could invest more aggressively.

Studios could expand operations.

Creators could retain ownership rather than surrendering rights for immediate cash flow.

The economic effects could be substantial.

Intellectual Property Is Becoming Strategic Infrastructure

There is another reason this conversation matters.

The future economy increasingly depends on intellectual property.

Artificial intelligence systems are trained on creative works.

Streaming platforms depend on content libraries.

Digital economies rely on proprietary data and original media assets.

Attention itself is increasingly monetised through intellectual property ownership.

This means intellectual property is no longer simply a cultural issue.

It is becoming strategic economic infrastructure.

Countries that own valuable intellectual property portfolios gain influence within global digital markets.

Those that do not risk becoming consumers rather than owners.

This raises important questions for Africa.

Who owns African stories?

Who controls African music catalogues?

Who benefits from future licensing revenues?

Who captures value when African culture travels globally?

The answers increasingly shape economic outcomes.

The Real Opportunity Is Institutional

The future of Africa’s creative economy will not depend solely on producing more artists, filmmakers, musicians, or creators.

The continent already produces extraordinary talent.

The larger challenge is institutional.

Building systems capable of recognising intellectual property as an asset class.

Creating valuation standards.

Improving rights management.

Expanding royalty transparency.

Developing financing vehicles.

Encouraging investment structures tailored to creative assets.

Supporting secondary markets for intellectual property transactions.

Transforming copyright from legal documentation into financial infrastructure.

That shift could unlock significant new capital flows into creative industries.

More importantly, it could allow creators to retain greater ownership of the value they generate.

Africa’s Next Investment Story May Already Exist

For decades, investors searching for African growth opportunities focused on commodities, infrastructure, banking, telecommunications, and natural resources.

Those sectors remain important.

But the continent’s economic future is increasingly being shaped by something less visible.

Ideas.

Stories.

Songs.

Films.

Characters.

Brands.

Audiences.

Culture itself.

The challenge is not whether these assets have value.

Global markets have already answered that question.

The challenge is whether African financial systems can evolve quickly enough to recognise that value, measure it, finance it, and scale it.

Because if intellectual property becomes fully integrated into Africa’s investment ecosystem, the continent may discover that one of its most abundant resources was never buried underground.

It was owned by its creators all along.

Written by Layo
Lead Editorial Writer, Creative Brief Africa

Outside of her editorial work, she writes Curious Health, a newsletter focused on everyday health questions, explored with clarity and care.

Subscribe to Curious Health for more

Connect with Layo on LinkedIn

One room discussed music exports, film industries, fashion ecosystems, creator monetisation, and cultural influence.

The other discussed software engineering, venture capital, cloud infrastructure, artificial intelligence, and digital transformation.

Today, those rooms are rapidly merging.

And nowhere was that reality more visible than at the recent Africa Soft Power Summit in Nairobi, where technology executives, investors, policymakers, and creative economy leaders repeatedly returned to a common concern: Africa must own more of the infrastructure powering its digital future.

On the surface, that conversation appears to be about artificial intelligence.

In reality, it is increasingly about creativity.

Because the same music, films, images, stories, languages, performances, and cultural archives that power Africa’s creative economy are also becoming the raw material powering the AI economy.

The future of African creativity and the future of African AI are no longer separate debates.

They are becoming the same conversation.

The Hidden Resource Fueling AI Is Creative Work

Much of the public discussion around artificial intelligence focuses on technology.

Large language models.
Data centres.
Cloud infrastructure.
Computing power.
Semiconductors.

But AI systems are not valuable because they can process information.

They are valuable because they learn from information.

And much of that information originates from creators.

Every article published online.

Every song uploaded to streaming platforms.

Every film placed on digital services.

Every image shared across the internet.

Every conversation written in African languages.

Every podcast.

Every script.

Every digital artwork.

Every cultural archive.

These become training material.

In other words, AI systems do not emerge from thin air.

They learn from creative output.

Without human creativity, there is no meaningful generative AI.

The technology sector increasingly depends on the creative sector for its most valuable resource: data.

That changes the relationship between both industries fundamentally.

Creators are no longer simply producing entertainment.

They are producing training material for future intelligence systems.

Why African Data Matters More Than Ever

This was one of the strongest messages emerging from discussions in Nairobi.

Google Africa Managing Director Alex Okosi argued that Africa must become part of AI’s architecture rather than merely its consumer, warning that if African languages and datasets are not embedded early enough into AI systems, the continent may struggle to capture long-term value from the technology.

That warning extends directly into the creative economy.

Africa possesses one of the world’s richest cultural datasets.

Thousands of languages.

Hundreds of music traditions.

Distinct storytelling structures.

Unique visual aesthetics.

Regional humour.

Historical archives.

Contemporary internet culture.

Creative expressions generated by millions of creators every day.

Yet much of that material currently exists on platforms owned elsewhere.

The concern is not simply representation.

It is ownership.

Who controls the information that teaches machines how African culture works?

Who benefits when those systems generate commercial value?

Who receives compensation when creative work becomes training infrastructure?

These questions increasingly sit at the intersection of technology policy and creative industry development.

Africa’s Creative Economy Is Already Producing AI Assets

Many creators may not realise it, but they are already participating in the AI economy.

Every YouTube video.

Every TikTok clip.

Every digital illustration.

Every podcast episode.

Every online article.

Every subtitled film.

Every music catalogue.

All contribute to the growing body of digital content from which future AI systems learn.

Historically, creators generated value through audiences.

A musician earned because people listened.

A filmmaker earned because people watched.

A writer earned because people read.

Now a second layer of value is emerging.

Creative works are becoming inputs for machine learning systems.

This creates an entirely new economic dynamic.

A song is no longer simply a product.

It is also data.

A screenplay is no longer simply intellectual property.

It is also training material.

A language archive is no longer simply cultural preservation.

It is also computational infrastructure.

That distinction may define the next decade of the creative economy.

The Infrastructure Conversation Is Really About Cultural Power

One recurring theme throughout the summit was Africa’s limited ownership of digital infrastructure.

Industry leaders highlighted the continent’s severe underrepresentation in global digital infrastructure capacity despite its demographic scale and energy potential.

At first glance, data centres appear unrelated to music, film, or creator economies.

But increasingly they are connected.

The countries that host infrastructure often gain greater influence over:

data storage,

AI development,

platform economics,

digital services,

and future innovation ecosystems.

Infrastructure determines where value accumulates.

That matters because cultural influence alone does not guarantee economic benefit.

African music already influences global culture.

African fashion increasingly shapes global aesthetics.

African creators command international audiences.

Yet cultural influence does not automatically translate into ownership.

The next phase requires infrastructure.

Not only cultural exports.

The Global Race Is Shifting From Content to Control

For much of the past decade, African creative industries focused on visibility.

The objective was clear.

Reach international audiences.

Grow exports.

Increase recognition.

Build global influence.

That strategy succeeded.

Afrobeats became a global force.

African filmmakers entered major streaming ecosystems.

African fashion gained international visibility.

Creators built audiences across continents.

Visibility is no longer the primary challenge.

Control increasingly is.

Who owns the platforms?

Who owns the datasets?

Who owns the recommendation systems?

Who owns the infrastructure that determines discovery?

Who owns the intelligence systems learning from creative work?

These questions are becoming central to both the AI economy and the creative economy simultaneously.

The competition is no longer only about producing culture.

It is about controlling the systems through which culture creates value.

The Stakes Are Larger Than Technology

The numbers alone illustrate why this matters.

Research from the International Finance Corporation and Google estimated that Africa’s internet economy could contribute approximately $180 billion to the continent’s GDP by 2025 and potentially exceed $700 billion by 2050 if supported by stronger infrastructure, talent development, and digital investment.

Artificial intelligence is expected to become one of the most important drivers within that broader digital economy.

But AI cannot grow independently from creativity.

It requires language.

Images.

Music.

Video.

Human expression.

Creative assets.

Which means creative industries are no longer peripheral to technological development.

They are increasingly foundational.

The future value of AI may depend significantly on who owns and governs the cultural material that trains it.

Why Creators Should Care About AI Governance

For many creators, discussions about AI regulation can feel distant.

Technical.

Policy-heavy.

Removed from everyday creative work.

That perception is becoming increasingly outdated.

Questions surrounding:

copyright,

licensing,

attribution,

data ownership,

creator compensation,

platform governance,

and AI transparency

are rapidly becoming creative economy issues.

If AI systems learn from creative work, then creators have a direct stake in how those systems are governed.

The debate is no longer simply about technology ethics.

It is about economic rights.

The same infrastructure decisions shaping AI’s future may ultimately determine how creative value is distributed in the years ahead.

Africa’s Next Creative Economy Challenge Is No Longer Visibility

For decades, African creative industries fought for recognition.

They wanted the world to see African stories.

Hear African music.

Celebrate African creativity.

Today, that visibility is increasingly arriving.

The challenge evolving beneath it is different.

Ownership.

Infrastructure.

Data.

Platforms.

Computing capacity.

Intellectual property governance.

Institutional power.

The future creative economy may not be defined solely by who creates culture.

It may be defined by who controls the systems learning from it.

That is why the conversations taking place in Nairobi matter far beyond technology circles. They signal a broader economic reality emerging across the continent.

The next chapter of Africa’s creative economy may not be written only by artists, filmmakers, musicians, and creators.

It may also be written by the people building datasets, data centres, AI models, cloud infrastructure, and digital governance frameworks.

Because increasingly, protecting creative value and building technological capacity are no longer separate ambitions.

They are becoming the same project.

Written by Layo
Lead Editorial Writer, Creative Brief Africa

Outside of her editorial work, she writes Curious Health, a newsletter focused on everyday health questions, explored with clarity and care.

Subscribe to Curious Health for more

Connect with Layo on LinkedIn

Not the kind that announces itself with headlines or policy papers.

It is happening inside payment dashboards, brand invoices, YouTube analytics pages, TikTok monetisation reports, and freelance contracts denominated in different currencies.

On the surface, Africa’s creator economy looks unified, millions of creators producing content daily, building audiences, and participating in a shared digital culture.

But beneath that surface, the system is splitting into two parallel economies.

One tied to local currency and domestic consumption.

The other tied to global platforms and foreign exchange earnings.

Same platforms. Same creators. Different economic realities.

This is Africa’s currency divide.

The Scale of the Creator Economy Is Real, But Uneven

Africa’s creator economy is no longer emerging, it is already structurally embedded in digital life.

Across Sub-Saharan Africa, internet penetration has crossed 40%+, with over 500 million internet users across the continent, and mobile-first platforms are the primary distribution layer for entertainment and information.

Nigeria alone accounts for one of the largest creator populations on the continent, driven by:

• skit-making ecosystems

• music and Afrobeats distribution

• influencer marketing

• digital media startups

• YouTube and TikTok content creation

• freelance digital services

The African creator economy is projected to grow into a multi-billion-dollar industry, with estimates ranging from $3 billion today to nearly $18 billion by 2030, depending on platform monetisation expansion and internet access growth.

But here is the structural contradiction:

Even as the ecosystem expands, most creators remain low-income earners.

Multiple industry reports suggest that a significant percentage of creators in emerging markets still earn less than $100–$500 monthly from content-related revenue, despite high engagement levels.

So the system is growing.

But the income distribution is not widening evenly.

This is where the divide begins.

Economy One: The Local Currency Creative System

The first layer of Africa’s creator economy is still deeply tied to domestic financial systems.

This layer includes:

• local brand sponsorships

• event-driven income

• domestic advertising revenue

• ticketed performances and shows

• local influencer marketing

• physical creative services (photography, videography, design)

This system is directly exposed to macroeconomic pressure.

In Nigeria, for example, the creative economy is operating inside a broader economic environment shaped by:

• persistent inflationary pressure (often exceeding double digits in recent years)

• significant naira depreciation against the US dollar over the past decade

• rising cost of production for events and media

• shrinking discretionary consumer spending

While Nigeria has experienced periods of GDP growth and economic reforms, inflation has remained structurally high and continues to affect household consumption patterns and business operating costs.

For the creative economy, this translates into a predictable pattern:

• brands reduce marketing budgets or shift to performance-based spending

• audiences reduce spending on entertainment

• event costs rise (logistics, security, venues, production)

• monetisation becomes inconsistent even for high-reach creators

The result is a paradox:

Creators can have attention, visibility, and virality, but still struggle to convert that into stable income.

In this economy:

Attention is abundant.
Liquidity is not.

Economy Two: The Global Currency Creative System

Parallel to this, a second economy is expanding rapidly, and it operates on fundamentally different rules.

This is the global monetisation layer.

Creators in this economy earn from:

• YouTube AdSense revenue (USD-based)

• TikTok monetisation programs (where available)

• international brand partnerships

• freelance creative services (design, writing, editing, strategy)

• digital products (courses, templates, assets)

• subscription platforms (Patreon, Substack, Gumroad)

• licensing deals and IP sales

• remote creative employment

The defining feature of this economy is not just access to global audiences, but exposure to hard currency earnings.

This creates a structural advantage.

A creator earning $1,000 monthly is not just earning more in nominal terms.

In many African economies, that income translates into disproportionately higher purchasing power due to exchange rate differentials.

For example:

A dollar-denominated income remains relatively stable while local currencies fluctuate.

This creates financial insulation from domestic inflationary shocks.

So while one creator is negotiating reduced local brand budgets, another is earning in a currency that strengthens their local economic position.

Same platform ecosystem.

Completely different economic exposure.

The Structural Cause: Platforms Are Global, Monetisation Is Not Equal

A major misconception in the creator economy is that the internet automatically equalises opportunity.

It does not.

What it equalises is distribution, not monetisation.

Platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and X distribute content globally by default.

But monetisation systems are still:

• geographically tiered

• advertiser-dependent

• policy-restricted by region

• uneven in payout structures

For example:

• YouTube monetisation eligibility and ad rates vary significantly by country

• TikTok monetisation programs are not uniformly available across African markets

• brand sponsorship markets depend heavily on local advertising budgets

• payment infrastructure varies widely across countries

This means visibility is global.

But income pathways are fragmented.

This is the root of the currency divide.

Nigeria as a Case Study: Two Creators, Same Country, Different Economies

In Nigeria, this divide is especially visible because of the scale of both local culture and global export.

Creator A: Local Economy Dependent

• earns primarily from Nigerian brand deals

• depends on local audience spending power

• participates in events, activations, influencer campaigns

• income fluctuates with marketing budgets

• exposed to naira volatility and inflation

Creator B: Global Economy Integrated

• earns from YouTube in USD

• works with international clients remotely

• sells digital products globally

• receives payments in stable currencies

• partially insulated from domestic inflation

Both creators may have similar audience sizes.

Both may be culturally relevant.

But their economic realities diverge sharply.

One operates inside a constrained liquidity system.

The other operates inside a globalised income system.

This divergence is becoming more pronounced each year.

The Hidden Transformation: Creators Are Becoming Export Workers

Historically, export economies were built around:

• oil

• agriculture

• minerals

• manufacturing

But digital platforms have introduced a new category:

attention-based exports

African creators are increasingly exporting:

• entertainment (videos, music, skits)

• digital services (design, writing, strategy)

• cultural content (memes, trends, formats)

• intellectual property (formats, characters, narratives)

Unlike traditional exports, these do not require physical infrastructure.

They require:

• internet access

• creative output

• platform participation

This shifts creators from being local entertainers to global micro-export economies.

The Emerging Risk: A Two-Speed Creative Class

The long-term consequence of this divide is not just inequality of income.

It is inequality of scalability.

Over time, two categories of creators are emerging:

Global-integrated creators

• scalable income

• foreign currency exposure

• cross-border opportunities

• compounding growth potential

Local-dependent creators

• constrained monetisation

• volatile income cycles

• limited scalability outside domestic market conditions

This creates a structural imbalance in:

• who builds sustainable media companies

• who attracts investment

• who expands into international markets

• who shapes global narratives about African culture

The divide is not artistic.

It is economic.

The Real Question: What Does “Success” Mean in a Split Economy?

In a unified economy, success was easier to define.

More views.
More shows.
More brand deals.

But in a currency-divided creator economy, success is no longer singular.

A creator with 10 million local views may earn less than a creator with 100,000 globally monetised views.

A viral skit may generate cultural relevance but minimal financial return.

A niche digital product may generate stable foreign income with small audience size.

This challenges traditional assumptions about virality and success.

Because visibility and income are no longer tightly linked.

Conclusion: Africa’s Creator Economy Is No Longer One System

The most important shift in Africa’s creative economy is not growth.

It is fragmentation.

A single digital ecosystem is now producing two fundamentally different financial realities:

One tied to local currency constraints and domestic consumption cycles.

The other tied to global platforms and foreign exchange stability.

And the gap between them is widening.

Not because creators are different.

But because their currencies are.

The question going forward is not simply how Africa grows its creator economy.

It is how it prevents that growth from becoming structurally unequal inside the same digital space.

Because the internet created one audience.

But it did not create one economy.

Written by Layo
Lead Editorial Writer, Creative Brief Africa

Outside of her editorial work, she writes Curious Health, a newsletter focused on everyday health questions, explored with clarity and care.

Subscribe to Curious Health for more

Connect with Layo on LinkedIn

Build airports.
Promote landmarks.
Protect heritage sites.
Attract visitors.

Culture existed within that equation, but often as a supporting feature rather than a central economic asset.

That logic is beginning to change.

This week, the Lagos State Government announced that it had supported 201 creative programmes, festivals, and cultural events within the last year, a significant increase from the 143 events supported during the previous period. The government also highlighted investments in cultural preservation, tourism development, heritage restoration, entertainment infrastructure, and creative industry support as part of its broader economic strategy.

At first glance, the announcement looks like another government update about arts and culture.

It is not.

It is evidence of a much larger shift taking place across Africa.

Governments are no longer treating culture primarily as heritage.

They are increasingly treating culture as infrastructure.

Not because festivals are inherently valuable.

But because cultural experiences have become economic assets.

And in a world where cities compete for attention as fiercely as they compete for investment, attention itself has become a form of infrastructure.

Tourism No Longer Revolves Around Landmarks

Historically, tourism was built around places.

A monument.
A museum.
A beach.
A national park.

People travelled to see something.

Today, they increasingly travel to experience something.

A music festival.

A fashion week.

An art fair.

A cultural carnival.

A film festival.

A major sporting event.

The experience has become the destination.

This is one reason governments around the world are investing more aggressively in cultural programming. Experiences generate movement. They create urgency. They give people a reason to book flights, reserve hotels, spend money locally, and participate in the life of a city.

A beach remains where it is.

A festival creates a moment.

And moments travel faster.

They circulate through social media.
Through influencers.
Through creators.
Through audiences.
Through global news cycles.

Increasingly, cities are discovering that cultural relevance can attract visitors as effectively as physical attractions.

Sometimes more effectively.

Why Creative Events Matter Beyond Entertainment

The economic value of cultural events is often underestimated because people focus on the performance rather than the ecosystem around it.

A festival is never just a festival.

A concert is never just a concert.

A film event is never just a screening.

Each event activates an entire chain of economic activity.

Hotels receive bookings.

Restaurants see increased demand.

Transportation providers move visitors.

Fashion designers gain visibility.

Photographers secure contracts.

Media companies generate content.

Vendors sell products.

Creators access audiences.

Sponsors access consumers.

Local businesses benefit from increased activity.

The event becomes an economic multiplier.

This is why governments are becoming more interested in creative programming.

The return is not confined to ticket sales.

The impact spreads across multiple sectors simultaneously.

One successful cultural event can create value far beyond the venue where it takes place.

For governments seeking job creation, tourism growth, youth engagement, and international visibility, culture increasingly looks like a strategic investment rather than a discretionary expense.

Lagos Is Building an Attention Economy

Lagos provides one of the clearest examples of this shift.

The state’s recent announcement was not limited to creative event support.

It included the revival of the historic Eyo Festival after a decade-long absence.

The successful staging of the Lagos Fanti Carnival, which attracted more than 40,000 attendees.

Support for creative entrepreneurs and cultural stakeholders.

Investment in heritage sites and cultural monuments.

The redevelopment of performance infrastructure such as the Oregun Theatre.

Training initiatives that reportedly reached more than 10,000 young creatives.

Taken individually, these projects may appear disconnected.

Collectively, they reveal something larger.

Lagos is actively investing in cultural visibility.

The city is strengthening the institutions, events, and creative experiences that reinforce its position as one of Africa’s most influential cultural capitals.

This strategy is not unique to Lagos.

But Lagos may be among the most aggressive in pursuing it.

Because the city understands something increasingly important about the modern economy:

Attention creates opportunity.

Creative attention attracts tourists.

Creative attention attracts investors.

Creative attention attracts talent.

Creative attention attracts media coverage.

Creative attention creates economic activity.

The cities that successfully concentrate attention increasingly gain advantages that extend far beyond tourism.

Kenya’s Grammy Ambition Revealed the Same Logic

Perhaps the clearest illustration of this trend emerged last year when Kenya announced its ambition to host an African edition of the Grammy Awards.

The proposal generated immediate debate.

Some viewed it as a bold statement about Africa’s creative future.

Others questioned the cost and priorities involved.

But regardless of where one stood on the proposal, the underlying logic was impossible to ignore.

Kenya was not simply bidding for an awards show.

It was competing for cultural relevance.

The government recognised that hosting a globally recognised cultural institution could strengthen Nairobi’s position within Africa’s creative economy.

The objective extended beyond music.

It touched tourism.

International visibility.

Investment attraction.

Brand positioning.

Soft power.

Global perception.

In many ways, Lagos’ investment in hundreds of cultural programmes and Kenya’s Grammy ambition stem from the same strategic realization.

Culture is becoming a development tool.

Not merely a cultural policy issue.

A tourism policy issue.

An economic policy issue.

A city-branding issue.

A competitiveness issue.

The Real Competition Is Attention

This is where the conversation becomes particularly important for Africa’s creative economy.

African cities are no longer competing only with neighbouring cities.

They are competing globally.

For visitors.

For investors.

For creators.

For businesses.

For relevance.

Every city wants to become a destination.

But destinations are increasingly built through narrative as much as infrastructure.

People travel toward places they find culturally compelling.

The cities generating the most cultural conversation often become the cities attracting the most curiosity.

This is why governments increasingly support festivals, cultural institutions, creative districts, fashion events, film markets, and entertainment experiences.

Culture helps cities tell stories about themselves.

And stories influence movement.

In an economy shaped by algorithms, social media, and digital visibility, cultural relevance has become a strategic asset.

The cities that successfully generate attention gain a competitive advantage.

Not because attention itself is the goal.

But because attention often becomes the pathway through which investment, tourism, partnerships, and economic activity arrive.

Culture Is Becoming Economic Infrastructure

For much of modern policymaking, infrastructure meant roads, bridges, ports, rail systems, and airports.

Those investments remain essential.

But increasingly, governments are recognising another category of infrastructure.

Cultural infrastructure.

The institutions that create experiences.

The events that generate visibility.

The festivals that attract audiences.

The creative ecosystems that make cities culturally magnetic.

These assets may be less tangible than highways.

But their economic impact is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

The most interesting thing about Lagos supporting 201 creative programmes is not the number itself.

It is what the number represents.

A growing recognition that culture is no longer sitting at the edges of economic development strategies.

It is moving toward the centre.

And that shift may become one of the defining stories of Africa’s creative economy over the next decade.

Because the question is no longer whether culture can support tourism.

The question is which African cities are building enough cultural infrastructure to make themselves impossible to ignore.

Written by Layo
Lead Editorial Writer, Creative Brief Africa

Outside of her editorial work, she writes Curious Health, a newsletter focused on everyday health questions, explored with clarity and care.

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