Abidjan Is Building Africa's First Animation Marketplace. The Continent Has Needed One for Decades
MAFA launches in November 2026. It is not a festival. It is infrastructure — the kind African animation has been trying to build around talent that has already proven it can compete globally.
In November 2026, Abidjan will host the inaugural African Animation Film Market — MAFA — at the Institut Coréen in Côte d’Ivoire. The announcement came on May 15, 2026, from Simon Adayé, secretary general of MAFA and president of the Fédération Africaine du Film d’Animation (FAFA), at a press conference in Abidjan. Organisers expect more than 10,000 participants at the first edition, with attendees drawn from across Africa and internationally: creators, producers, broadcasters, investors, digital platforms, television networks, animation studios, training institutions, and cultural bodies.
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.