On September 5 and 6, 2026, eight teams converged on the Los Angeles Event Centre in Abuja for the Grand Finals of the Carry1st Africa Cup.
They had come from five qualifying regions across 38 countries. The tournament was the official African qualifier for the Call of Duty: Mobile World Championship. The prize pool was $30,000, the largest for a mobile esports tournament in Africa and double what it had been the year before. The winning team earned the right to represent the continent at a global championship with a $500,000 total prize pool.
This is African esports at its most visible. A continental event, genuine regional breadth, growing prize money, and a pathway to global competition that did not exist three years ago.
Now pull back and look at who is paying for it.
The $30,000 prize pool comes from Carry1st and Activision, the publisher of Call of Duty: Mobile. The infrastructure that makes the tournament commercially viable, the payment system that allows African players to buy in-game items and battle passes in local currencies, is Carry1st’s Pay1st platform, which has seen Call of Duty Mobile transaction volumes increase six-fold annually since its launch. The tournament exists because a game publisher needs a healthy African player base, and a payments company needs transaction volume, and the incentives of both align around a competitive event that keeps players engaged and spending.
That alignment is not a bad thing. It has produced something real. But it is not the same thing as a self-sustaining industry.
The Funding Map
Draw the map of who pays for competitive gaming in Africa in 2026 and a pattern emerges quickly.
At the continental level, the Esports Nations Cup runs November 2 to 29 in Riyadh. The Esports World Cup Foundation has committed $45 million to the event, including a $20 million prize pool paid directly to players and coaches across 16 titles. African national teams will compete. The money comes from Saudi Arabia’s state-backed esports investment programme, the same infrastructure that has produced the Esports World Cup with a $75 million prize pool and made Riyadh the global capital of competitive gaming investment.
In South Africa, Telkom VS Gaming brought a combined prize pool of over R500,000 to Comic Con Africa in September, spanning Counter-Strike, Rocket League, PUBG, Tekken, and EA FC. The funding source is South Africa’s dominant telecommunications company. The event exists because Telkom has a consumer brand to build among the gaming demographic and Comic Con Africa provides the audience.
At the African Gaming Championship in Cape Town in July, Acer provided the hardware and backed a R150,000 prize pool across six titles at GrandWest. The funding source is a global PC and monitor manufacturer for whom African esports events are both a marketing vehicle and a demonstration of their grassroots investment narrative.
Four funding sources. A game publisher. Gulf sovereign capital. A telecommunications company. A hardware brand.
What is absent from that list is also worth naming. There are no major African media companies funding esports prize pools. No continental streaming platforms building esports broadcast rights. No advertising budgets from African consumer brands flowing into esports sponsorship at significant scale. No ticket revenue or broadcast rights model that would allow the events to exist without external sponsor dependence.
The Market Is Real. The Business Model Around It Is Not Yet.
Africa has 406 million gamers in 2026, according to Carry1st and Newzoo data. The continent’s gaming market is forecast at $1.98 billion, growing at 11.9% year on year, nearly twice the global industry’s growth rate. Mobile accounts for 81.8% of that revenue.
Those numbers describe an enormous audience. They do not describe a commercial esports industry in the conventional sense.
Africa accounts for roughly 11% of the world’s gamers and less than 1% of global gaming revenue. Average revenue per player across the continent sits below $5 a year, compared to approximately $55 globally. The audience is present. The monetisation infrastructure that would convert that audience into sustainable esports business has not yet been built at scale.
That gap explains the funding structure. When local advertising markets cannot price the African gaming audience at its actual cultural and commercial weight, the parties willing to pay for African esports events are the ones with non-advertising reasons to do so. Game publishers need active players. Telecom companies need brand relevance with young consumers. Hardware brands need market presence. Gulf sovereign capital needs soft power and a global esports narrative.
Each of those funders has something to gain from African esports that is not primarily about African esports itself. Which means the tournaments they fund serve their purposes as much as they serve the development of a continental esports economy.
The Dependency Question
The Carry1st Africa Cup is now in its third year. It has grown from six countries and a $15,000 prize pool in 2024 to 38 countries and $30,000 in 2026. That trajectory is real. Carry1st is building something with genuine scale and genuine regional coverage.
It is also, structurally, a marketing vehicle for Call of Duty: Mobile in African markets.
Activision benefits from the tournament because it keeps players engaged, produces content that travels on social media, and validates Call of Duty: Mobile as a serious competitive title in a region where mobile gaming dominates. Carry1st benefits because its Pay1st platform processes the transactions that active, competitive players generate, and transaction volume six times higher than before launch is a commercial result worth protecting.
The tournament is not a charity. It is a commercial structure in which Carry1st and Activision capture real revenue from a player base that competitive events help maintain. The prize pool is the cost of that maintenance.
The question is what happens when Call of Duty: Mobile’s African player growth plateaus, or when Activision decides a different game needs the marketing investment, or when Carry1st’s commercial priorities shift. The tournament infrastructure, the servers, the regional qualifying apparatus, the organiser relationships, the player community, does not automatically survive the exit of its primary funder.
The same question applies to every event in this ecosystem. Telkom’s esports investment at Comic Con Africa exists at Telkom’s discretion. Acer’s backing of the African Gaming Championship is described as a strategic partnership with long-term language, but it is renewed annually. The Esports Nations Cup’s $45 million is Saudi sovereign capital committed to a specific vision of Riyadh as the global esports capital. None of these funders are primarily in the business of building African esports.
What a Self-Sustaining Industry Would Need
The comparison point is instructive.
Korean esports did not become a self-sustaining industry because Samsung and SK Telecom decided to fund it. Corporate sponsors were part of the story, but the architecture underneath was broadcast rights, media coverage that treated esports as sport, government recognition that provided institutional legitimacy, and eventually a fan culture that would pay for tickets, merchandise, and subscriptions. The commercial infrastructure grew around the audience rather than being imported from outside it.
South African esports is the most commercially developed on the continent, and it illustrates both how far the ecosystem has come and how far it still has to travel. Telkom VS Gaming and Acer are real investments. The ACGL has built genuine competitive infrastructure. But the events still depend on corporate sponsors who could exit, and the broadcast and media rights model that would allow esports organisations to generate revenue independently of sponsor goodwill has not yet been established.
For the broader African esports ecosystem, the development path requires African media companies to price the gaming audience as an advertising target. It requires broadcasters and streaming platforms to bid for esports rights. It requires the advertising infrastructure that would allow Nigerian, Kenyan, and Ghanaian consumer brands to find esports a cost-effective way to reach young audiences. And it requires the fan monetisation tools, subscriptions, merchandise, live event ticketing, that would allow events to partially fund themselves.
Carry1st is building the payments layer. The Esports Nations Cup is building the competitive prestige layer. Telkom and Acer are building the visibility layer.
None of those are the same as building the business model layer.
The Honest Position
African esports is genuinely growing. The prize pools are larger. The competitive infrastructure is more developed. The pathway from regional qualifier to global championship is real in a way it was not three years ago.
And almost all of it depends on funders whose primary interest is not African esports development.
That is not a sustainable position for the long term, and the people building African esports know it. Carry1st’s own data shows a $1.98 billion gaming market growing at nearly twice the global rate. The audience exists. The commercial case for investing in its monetisation is not speculative.
The question is whether the organisations that currently fund African esports through prize pools and hardware will be replaced by business models that keep the value in the ecosystem, or whether African esports continues to exist primarily as a marketing vehicle for external interests until one of those interests decides the investment no longer makes sense.
One funder leaving would not end African esports. But it would reveal how much of what currently looks like infrastructure is actually a dependency.
The difference matters.
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.