Is the Tech Industry Part of Africa’s Creative Economy?
The African creative economy has long been associated with art forms that pulse with emotion and tradition: Afrobeats echoing from car radios, Aso Ebi patterns sashaying through weddings, animated storytelling in local dialects. But what happens when creation no longer requires a canvas, a microphone, or even a stage—just a laptop and a spark of curiosity?
If you're still asking whether tech is part of Africa’s creative economy, you're missing the plot. Not because tech supports the creative economy, but because tech is now the creative medium itself. And in a continent where innovation often emerges from limitation, this blending of bytes and brushstrokes is transforming what it means to be a “creative” in Africa.
Redefining the Creative Economy: Beyond the Aesthetics
Africa’s creative economy is in the middle of a quiet, code-driven revolution. For too long, creativity was defined through the lens of aesthetic output—music, paintings, clothes, dance. But creativity in the digital age is no longer defined by what you can see. It's about how things are built, connected, shared, and experienced. The medium is the message—and increasingly, that medium is digital.
Platforms like Figma are now as essential to African visual storytellers as traditional sketchpads. A mobile developer in Benin coding a virtual reality experience rooted in Vodun spirituality is telling a story just as rich—and perhaps more scalable—as a stage play in Accra. A Lagos-based AI engineer training a model to generate new Afrobeat melodies isn’t “supporting” creativity; they are the creative.
When a Ghanaian coder builds an AI-powered tool that converts Twi to French in real time for live-streamed gospel performances, it’s no longer just tech—it’s cultural preservation. It’s creation.
So, let’s make it clear: creativity is not just the output—it’s the process, the method, the disruption. And no industry embodies this shift better than tech.
The Numbers Prove It Too
The African Development Bank says the digital economy already contributes over 5% to Africa’s GDP and is expected to add a staggering $180 billion by 2025. At the same time, Africa’s creator economy is projected by Creative Brief’s own 2025 report to hit $17.84 billion by 2030. And here's the kicker—much of that creative value is built on platforms powered by tech, from marketplace engines to fintech rails.
In Nigeria, for instance, the creative sector contributes about $5.6 billion to GDP, with projections set to quadruple by 2027. But that surge isn’t just from record labels or art galleries—it’s coming from digital products sold on platforms like Selar, Gumroad, Patreon, and Afrikrea. These platforms are not just "tools for creatives"; they are creative ventures themselves, engineered with vision, design flair, and cultural insight.
A Selar engineer optimizing backend checkout processes for digital goods is no less creative than a screenwriter—they're building experiences that enable thousands of African creators to thrive globally. And this is exactly where our definitions need to evolve.
AI: Not Just a Tool, But an Artistic Medium
AI is not coming for Africa’s creative economy—it’s already here, shaping it from the inside out.
In Ethiopia, startups are developing AI tools to revive endangered languages like Ge’ez and Tigrinya. In Senegal, AI voice assistants are being trained on Wolof to support e-commerce customer care. In Kenya, engineers are working on machine learning algorithms that generate royalty-free beats in the style of Genge and Benga for content creators.
This is creative labor. This is art.
AI is no longer a cold, soulless machine—it is the palette. African technologists building with AI are artists of logic, weaving culture into data, emotion into algorithms, and storytelling into systems. Whether it's a generative AI model that remixes Kora music for TikTok virality or a script that translates Pidgin English for an indie film app, the line between engineer and artist is vanishing.
The African Creative is Now a Technologist
Let’s zoom into the reality of today’s African creative. A YouTuber in Nairobi now spends more time tweaking SEO metadata, analyzing click-through rates, and mastering editing software than recording the actual content. A fashion designer in Lusaka uses AI to auto-generate fabric prints inspired by indigenous patterns, uploads them to a virtual store, and sells NFTs of her designs to collectors in Berlin. A writer in Kumasi teaches short story structure via an automated email course built in Zapier and earns more than she would from traditional publishing.
These aren’t technologists helping creatives. These are creatives, who just happen to be engineers, coders, and marketers.
The economic autonomy technology affords African creatives isn’t optional—it’s critical. When traditional institutions gatekeep opportunity, digital tools unlock it. Creators can now bootstrap empires from dorm rooms, co-working spaces, or even low-bandwidth zones with nothing but an idea and access to Wi-Fi.
But here’s the twist: these creators aren’t just using technology. They’re building it. They’re iterating it. They’re infusing it with identity, language, nuance, and culture.
Creative Technopreneurs Are Building New Worlds
Gone are the days of the lone artist locked away in a studio. Enter the age of the African creative technopreneur—a polymath who wears ten hats, builds three apps, speaks four programming languages, and tells one powerful story: ours.
In Côte d’Ivoire, a young engineer has built a language-learning app gamified with Ivorian folklore. Each lesson unlocks a local proverb through animation. In Uganda, a startup has created a platform for digital comic books based on Luganda myths, developed with full-stack code, illustrated via AI, and monetized through crypto micropayments.
This isn’t niche. This is the new mainstream.
And in their own way, platforms like Selar are at the heart of it. With Selar, creators sell everything from digital albums to ebooks, online courses to photography packs. But beneath the clean UI is an infrastructure stack powered by code—code written by Africans, for Africans. Techies at Selar are creating pricing logic, local currency integrations, affiliate engines, and licensing structures that make digital entrepreneurship not just possible—but seamless.
They aren’t supporting creativity. They are creating the means for it to exist. That’s not backend engineering—it’s back-end artistry.
E-Commerce is the New Gallery
Once, galleries curated African creativity for elite audiences. Now, platforms like Afrikrea, Paystack Storefronts, Gumroad, and Selar are making creativity scalable, democratic, and lucrative. They’re giving creators the power to own distribution.
A makeup artist in Accra sells digital PDFs on contouring for dark skin tones. A saxophonist in Joburg teaches jazz improvisation via Notion dashboards. A poet in Gambia monetizes exclusive audio journals on Substack. This is what modern creativity looks like—it’s messy, modular, digital, and deeply African.
And the technology behind it? That’s the real canvas.
Infrastructure is the Art
If we insist on evaluating creativity by aesthetic output alone, we’ll miss the bigger picture: the invisible systems enabling those outputs. Today, creativity flows through codebases, interfaces, and APIs. Broadband streaming is as critical as a radio plug. Fintech rails are as vital as gig managers. Cloud storage is the new filing cabinet.
Let’s not forget: when the Nigerian government labels the creative industry its third-largest sector, it is—intentionally or not—acknowledging a deep fusion between tech and culture. Content isn’t just created on tech—it is processed, distributed, sold, consumed, and analyzed on it. From WhatsApp to Webflow, the tech stack is the creative stack.
You cannot separate the African creator from the African coder. They are merging.
The Politics of Platforms
Of course, there are pitfalls. If tech is now the skeleton of the creative economy, then the question becomes—who controls the bones?
Many African creators are still at the mercy of global platforms whose policies don’t reflect local realities. High transaction fees, demonetization, currency conversion issues, and algorithm bias disproportionately affect African creators.
That’s why conversations around a local tech stack—an Africa-first internet—are urgent. We need open-source design tools tailored to African aesthetics. Localized AI models trained on our languages, idioms, and cultural nuances. Payment systems that don’t depend on USD dominance. Platforms built with community values at the core.
In other words, we need tech infrastructure built by creatives who understand African needs. That’s not a luxury. It’s a creative necessity.
A Generational Shift in Thinking
More profound than the tools themselves is the shift in how African youth conceptualize creativity. For them, there is no line between code and content, between software and self-expression.
They see interface design as storytelling. Product features as character arcs. Viral growth as poetry in motion. They are building with beauty, and branding with code. From AI models trained on Afrobeats patterns to e-commerce dashboards styled like TikTok feeds, they are blurring every line that previously kept tech and art apart.
They’re not just making stuff. They’re remaking the world in their image.
Final Thought: This is the Masterpiece
So is the tech industry part of Africa’s creative economy?
Let’s reframe that question. The most potent artistic works of our time may not hang on walls or fill stadiums. They might be hiding in Python scripts, UI grids, or training data sets. They might be apps teaching Swahili to Gen Zers in Minnesota, or fintech APIs enabling dancers in Lagos to get paid in real time.
They might be in the blueprint of Selar, where a young engineer tweaks the checkout experience so a creator can sell an ebook from Aba to Auckland. Or in the data visualization dashboards that turn podcast listens into heatmaps of cultural resonance.
This is no longer a question of overlap. It’s a new genre altogether.
So the next time someone asks if tech is part of Africa’s creative economy, tell them:
Tech isn’t just a part of it—
It’s the frame, the brush, the pigment, the canvas, and the distribution channel.
It is the infrastructure of imagination.
And it might just be Africa’s most brilliant masterpiece yet.
A guest post by
A curious mind exploring the crossroads of creativity and insight.