On October 28, France’s development agency AFD signed a $30 million credit line with Nigeria’s Bank of Industry in Abuja. ThisDay reports it as AFD’s first credit line dedicated to cultural and creative industries anywhere in the world. On November 3, Ghana’s Minister for Tourism, Culture and Creative Arts, Abla Dzifa Gomashie, told a technical meeting of ECOWAS, WIPO and other stakeholders in Accra that creatives need fair remuneration. And in South Africa, a three-month plan to revive the stalled film incentive is due to report back to parliament this month.
Look at who is acting. A development agency. An industrial bank. A trade and industry department. Only one of the three was a culture minister, and she was talking about pay.
That shift matters. Culture ministries ask how to protect heritage. Trade ministries ask what a sector earns abroad. Africa’s creative industries are now being handed to the second group, who need numbers the first group never had to collect.
The number that is missing
UNCTAD’s Creative Economy Outlook 2024 gives the global picture for 2022. Creative services exports reached nearly $1.4 trillion. Creative goods came to $713 billion. Services are now almost double goods.
Africa’s share is small in both. UNCTAD puts the continent’s 2022 creative goods exports at $2.4 billion and creative services at $4 billion. Against the global totals, that works out to about 0.3 percent each.
Those figures are probably too low. UNCTAD itself says data availability and weak reporting may be part of the explanation, and names Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa among the economies lacking adequate services trade data. Those three are some of the continent’s largest creative economies.
The gap sits in exactly the place where creative money now moves. UNCTAD counts audiovisual services, software, advertising and the licences used to reproduce or distribute audiovisual products as creative services. A film licensed to a platform abroad belongs in that column. So does a track earning royalties through a foreign account. Whether it appears depends on whether anyone records it.
The African Union saw this coming. Its Plan of Action on Cultural and Creative Industries, revised in 2005, called for research on the economic impact of the sector and for a shared set of cultural indicators. Two decades on, UNCTAD is still citing gaps in the data.
The size problem
Take Nigeria, the continent’s most visible creative exporter. At a US-Nigeria Council breakfast during the UN General Assembly, Oando Group CEO Wale Tinubu put its creative economy at about $6.4 billion and urged the country to treat it as an export industry, not only as culture and entertainment. AFD’s announcement, by contrast, describes the sector as roughly 5 percent of GDP and the livelihood of more than 4.2 million people.
Now set the first figure beside Nigeria’s formal non-oil exports. The Nigerian Export Promotion Council reported a record $6.1 billion for 2025, up 11.5 percent on the year, across 281 products.
These numbers measure different things. One is an estimate of what a sector is worth. The other is a count of goods that crossed a border. They should not be subtracted from each other.
But the comparison shows the problem. A sector valued above the entire formal non-oil export bill has no export figure of its own. NEPC’s own release notes that informal cross-border trade stops Nigeria from fully capturing its export potential. Creative trade is more informal still. A producer who sells a licence from a laptop leaves no customs record.
Four ways to treat creativity as trade
Governments have started to respond, in four different ways.
Nigeria is betting on finance. The AFD facility is aimed at fashion, design, textiles, music, film, audiovisual production, video games and visual arts. At least 90 percent is earmarked for micro, small and medium enterprises, with priority for women-led and youth-led businesses and first-time borrowers. A €500,000 technical programme will train Bank of Industry staff to lend to creatives. The scale of the need is clear from a past experience. A 2025 allAfrica report noted that the earlier Creative Industry Financing Initiative, launched with N75 billion in 2020, had reached fewer than 0.01 percent of an estimated 4.2 million sector workers.
South Africa built a rebate, then stalled it. Its film and television incentive is a production rebate for local and foreign shoots. According to TimesLive, no new approvals have been made since March 2024. An August agreement between the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition and the Save SA Film and TV Jobs Coalition set out a three-month plan. It covers about R2 billion in allocations over this and the next two financial years, an independent facilitator to redraft the guidelines, and a clearing of a backlog that includes about R703 million in commitments for productions already under way. About R476 million of that has reached the claims stage, meaning the shows are finished and audited and waiting for a decision. Parliament’s trade committee will reconvene with the department and industry in November. A rebate only pulls investment when producers believe it will be paid.
Kenya is writing an institution. The Creative Economy Bill, 2026 is before Parliament. It would create a Kenya Audio-Visual and Cinema Commission, a regulatory authority and a school of film and creative arts, and repeal the colonial-era Films and Stage Plays Act. Critics argue it is narrower than its title. Alex Gakuru of the Center for Law in Information Technology wrote in May that musicians, fashion designers and visual artists would have no institutional home under it. The bill is a test of whether a creative law can cover more than screens.
Ghana is going after rights and pay. Gomashie’s call in Accra was for fair remuneration, stronger protection of intellectual property and working systems for private copying remuneration, alongside the return of African cultural properties held abroad. In an interview with Pulse Ghana she argued that creatives should keep earning from older work, and gave the example of comedian Akrobeto, whose laugh is widely used without payment. This is trade policy at its most basic, because it asks who is paid when a work crosses a border.
The continental layer
Under the AfCFTA, services are meant to move more freely across African borders. The AfCFTA Secretariat’s Director of Trade in Services, Emily Mburu-Ndoria, has said that 25 countries have submitted schedules of commitments, and Zimbabwe’s schedule covers its creative sector, according to ZBC News. Creative services are described as covered by the protocol, together with tourism and cultural services.
That is progress, with a catch. A schedule opens a market on paper. It cannot show whether any creative service has actually crossed a border, because nobody is counting. Without the data, the protocol is a promise that cannot be audited.
The next test is in Lagos. Nigeria signed the hosting agreement for the 2027 Intra-African Trade Fair with Afreximbank, the African Union Commission and the AfCFTA Secretariat, in March, at the Wole Soyinka Centre for Culture and Creative Arts. The venue is a creative institution. It is a reminder that the next trade fair will be judged partly by whether it can show creative deals in numbers.
What to scrutinise
The African Union’s old plan names the barriers, and they have barely changed. Finance, because cultural goods get little subsidy and access to credit is limited. Weak intellectual property protection, where piracy is described as one of the greatest challenges facing Africa. Small and fragmented markets, with limited access to wealthy ones. And thin production and distribution infrastructure.
The money gap is the clearest. BCG’s report on Africa’s creative economy, published this year, puts the sector at about $59 billion, less than 3 percent of a $2 trillion global creative economy. It projects that doubling that share to 6 percent by 2030 could lift creative exports to $150 billion to $160 billion. That is a projection, and it rests on the same weak data. The financing figures are not a projection. According to BCG, less than 1 percent of 2024 venture capital went to the creative sector, about $1.5 million in disclosed deals against $1.35 billion for fintech.
So the questions for the next ministry announcement are simple. What does the sector export today, in dollars, by category? How much of it comes back to the creator? And who will publish the number every year?
Until someone does, the loans, rebates and bills are being aimed at an industry nobody has measured. The continent has the culture. What it lacks is the ledger.
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.