April 1, 2024

HUSTLE & FLOW #54: Canal+ buys into Marodi; Anansi Fund launches; textile productions draws investment; and more

April 1, 2024

Canal+ acquires minority stake in Senegalese producer Marodi TV

Happy 🥚Easter and ☪️ Ramandan to those celebrating.

In March, Canal+ continued its African acquisition spree as it waited for Multichoice’s board to respond to its revised offer. The answer should come any day now - fasten your seatbelt.

In this edition of HUSTLE & FLOW, I also talk about Netflix’s 3rd African market: Kenya; Invention Studios and NISK Capital new film fund Anansi; how Portuguese-speaking content creators are looking for gold in Brazil; on-going investments in textile production; and leveraging the rare expertise of Africa’s Family Offices.

Read on 👇and don’t forget to subscribe 👉 https://lnkd.in/drBY8jnz

FILM

🇰🇪 I just came back from Nairobi where I was invited by the Kenya Film Commission (KFC) to speak at the 13th edition of the Kalasha International Film Market and Festival - an opportunity for me to spotlight a country that I called home for 10 years.

🎥 This year’s theme for the Kalasha was ‘Reel Money in the Business of Film’ under the tagline ‘Where Art meets Commerce’, and the message was clear: the only way for Kenya to develop a sustainable film industry is to produce creative content that sells.

This is quite a mindset shift in a country where media production was for a very long time largely bankrolled by international donors and NGOs. Indeed, when I launched ‘The XYZ Show’ in 2009, donor money was the only type of funding available for independent content production.

So, here’s what you should know about the Kenyan film industry in 2024:

🧐 In November last year, Kenya launched what I believe (and please correct me if I’m wrong) is Africa’s first Film Industry Satellite account (FISA). A satellite account isolates a certain sector of economic activity to measure its total economic output as well as total employment. Hard data on the Creative Industries is severely lacking in Africa, so FISA is positioning Kenya as a pioneer on that topic.

📊 According to the report, in 2022 the Kenyan film and broadcast industry contributed $659M Gross Output Value and $298M Gross Value Added to the country’s GDP (0.4%).

💼 It also employed 44,062 people (29,635 in film / 14,427 in broadcasting) in 2022.

🦓 Even without film incentives, Kenya has long been a top filming destination for Hollywood and foreign productions looking for an “African look”, such as ‘The Constant Gardener’ or ‘Out of Africa’.

🥉Despite being often overshadowed by the bigger and more dynamic markets of Nigeria and South Africa, Kenya is one of only 3 sub-Saharan African countries in which Netflix has started commissioning original content.

Netflix’s Kenyan originals include ‘Disconnect’ 1 and 2, and the recently-released ‘Volume’, all by Tosh Gitonga, and the series ‘Country Queen’, co-funded by Germany.

🏆 Other famous, award-winning Kenyan films include ‘Rafiki’ by Wanuri Kahiu, ‘Nairobi Half Life’ by Tosh Gitonga, ‘Kati Kati’ by Mbithi Masya, ‘Supa Modo’ by Likarion Wainaina, and ‘Softie’ by Sam Soko.

⚠️ Kenyan filmmakers are generally recognized for their technical skills, however Kenyan content struggles to draw large audiences locally - an anomaly mostly due to cultural and historical reasons (as well as to limited distribution options) that the Kenya Film Commission intends to address through audience-building initiatives.

💡Another initiative that is likely to impact the status of Kenya on the global film stage is the recent partnership announcement between Hollywood’s Invention Studios, run by high-profile writer-producer Nicky Weinstock, and Nairobi-based NISK Capital, to launch the Anansi Film Fund, a new vehicle that aims to finance premium African content for the world.

Several of the projects on Anansi’s development slate are set in Kenya, to be written and directed by Kenyan filmmakers.

😎 What distinguishes Anansi from other similar film funds is the profile of Nicky Weinstock himself.

Weinstock is a pure Hollywood Insider, with a 20-year experience working closely with A-lister Jude Apatow, Peter Chernin and Ben Stiller on movies such as ‘Bridesmaids’ and ‘Total Recall’.

But more surprisingly perhaps, Weinstock also has a deep personal connection with the continent through the years he spent living across West, East and Southern Africa as a young man.

🇺🇸 He seems uniquely positioned to do what no one has managed to do yet: bridge the gap between Africa and Hollywood.

CREATOR ECONOMY

🌍 Sixty million people live in the 6 countries that make up Portuguese-speaking Africa (Angola, Cape Verde, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Sao Tome and Principe, and, since 2011, mostly Spanish-speaking Equatorial Guinea).

And yet, they are rarely part of the conversation around the Creative Industries -- the language barrier is still hard to breach.

But of course, that doesn’t mean that nothing is happening in the Lusophone world.

🇧🇷 In a recent article, Rest of World highlights how Portuguese-speaking African creators are moving to Brazil, home to a thriving creator economy.

🤯 Rest of World found over a dozen African creators who are making content from Brazil — the largest Portuguese-speaking country in the world, with the fifth-biggest social media market of more than 165 million users, and a mind-blowing 20 million people making money in the creator economy.

Several factors explain Brazil’s attraction for African creators:

📊 With $1.92 trillion in GDP, Brazil is a giant by African standards. As a comparison, Angola, the largest Lusophone African country, has a GDP of $107 billion (18 times less).

📱The low cost of data in Brazil, where 1GB costs 40 cents (vs $1.01 in Angola and $2.72 in Guinea-Bissau), means that it’s easier for popular creators to reach a massive audience.

🛠 Higher CPM (cost per million views) in Brazil makes it easier to monetize that audience, combined with the broader list of monetizing tools which are available there compared to Africa.

These include Gifts, that allows fans to send money to creators’ Instagram reels; Stars, which are awarded by fans to creators and can be redeemed for cash; and Live Badges, which let creators receive money from their fans and communities during a live broadcast.

🤝 And finally, a bigger market also means more brand partnerships opportunities for more creators.

Angolan creator Baptista Miranda, who moved to Brazil in 2022, summed it up this way: “We think of Brazil as the country where things happen. I’ve always said it’s Hollywood for Angolan people.”

TEXTILE PRODUCTION

Limited local textile production capacity is a key bottleneck to the development of the African Fashion industry, as it forces African designers to import fabrics from abroad or even delocalize their entire production.

🧑🏿‍🌾This situation makes even less sense knowing that the continent is home to some of the world’s top cotton producers.

In fact, West Africa (more specifically the C4+1 Group: Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali, Chad + Ivory Coast) is the only region on the continent that is NOT a net exporter of textiles.

If the region could transform its raw products into processed and finished garments, it could become a production hub for the rest of the continent.

However, there are some bright spots. Birimian Ventures recently highlighted some projects that are moving the industry in the right direction:

🏭 Panafrican group Arise Integrated Industrial Platforms (Arise IIP) is building local industrial zones that include textile parks in Togo (PIA - Plateforme Industrielle d'Adétikopé, the biggest West African textile park and garment training center), Ivory Coast and Benin.

🧵In Rwanda, Pink Mango Group and C&D Products Rwanda Co. Ltd partnered to build a 24,000-square-foot factory producing for high street retailers such as DKNY, Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, and supermarkets Aldi and Tesco. The facility, which opened in 2019 with the support of the Rwandan government, already employs 4,600 people.

⚽️ These new production hubs create unprecedented market opportunities. A few weeks ago, FIFA announced its decision to outsource the supply of some 2026 World Cup's jerseys to the C4+1 group in partnership with the World Trade Organization.

According to FIFA president Gianni Infantino, global football sales exceed $270 billion, 70% of which come from Europe alone. With Africa stepping up, global sales could hit $500 billion. "We need to bring some of this money back to Africa”, said WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.

PAY TV

French operator Canal+ continues its Africa expansion by acquiring a stake in Senegalese production company Marodi TV.

💡Founded by Serigne ‘Mass’ Ndour, a former IBM engineer trained at Telecom Paris, Marodi is one of the most interesting success stories in African media. And it took Mass 12 years to get there.

Here’s how:

Mass initially launched Marodi TV in 2012 as a VOD platform hosting local content sourced from Senegalese TV stations.

💸 The content quickly proved popular, and by 2015 the platform was racking up 1M views per month. However, due to bandwidth, software development, maintenance and content costs, Marodi was losing money.

🌐 So in 2015, Mass made the decision to migrate the Marodi community to YouTube. At the time (and still today), Senegal was one of only a few African countries were YouTube monetization was enabled - and this proved a key determinant in Marodi’s ability to independently finance its content.

Indeed, in the same year Marodi also started investing in the production of original series, leveraging the user data collected over its first few years of operation to tailor the content to the tastes of the Senegalese audience.

Marodi’s first original series, which quickly gained a strong following, were distributed both on television and on YouTube and financed through two main sources: direct brand sponsorship or product placements, and YouTube advertising.

🤯 In 2018, Marodi’s series ‘Maîtresse d’un homme marié’ became a smash hit in Senegal and beyond, gaining more than 4.8 million subscribers on YouTube.

Canal+ licensed the series for its local channel A+, opening a third revenue stream for Marodi and dubbing the content to facilitate its distribution across the region. Amazon Prime also acquired the series. Marodi started its own in-house advertising agency, which became the business’ 4th source of revenue.

📈 Since then, Marodi has perfected its model. In 2023, the company produced 4 to 5 series in parallel, reaching 5,3M subscribers on YouTube, and employing 150 staff and 200 actors per month.

The new investment by Canal+ will allow Marodi to continue to expand the quality and volume of its productions, and to venture into regional and international co-productions.

🇫🇷 Over the years, Vivendi-owned Canal+ has developed an interest in Africa and has ever since been expanding. For the French pay TV operator, Africa is the future and home to 8.1M of its 26.4M global subscribers.

The group recently acquired production companies like Rok Studios in Nigeria, Plan A in Ivory Coast, and Zacu in Rwanda, as well as Ethiopian channel Kana TV. All together, Canal+ now produces 4,000 hours of African content every year, distributed across 30 channels dedicated to the continent in 10 languages.

🦍 The next step is for the group to confirm its acquisition of the remaining shares it doesn't already own in 500-pound gorilla Multichoice, and its 21.6M subscribers.

Canal+, which started building a position in Multichoice in 2020, is now the company’s largest single shareholder with just over 35% ownership -- triggering a mandatory takeover offer.

After its first proposal was rejected by Multichoice, Canal+ upped its price to $1.77B, for a total valuation of about $33.7B.

As Multichoice’s board is reviewing the new offer, the African audiovisual industry is holding its collective breath.

🤼 A takeover of the South African pay TV operator and its streaming service Showmax by Canal+ would mean that the number of solid buyers for African content would dwindle from an already paltry 3 to only 2 - leaving the combined Canal+Multichoice to battle it out with Netflix.

But in reality, it’s a matter of when, not if.

Sure, Multichoice’s shareholders can still reject the offer. But the absorption of Multichoice is a key step in the international expansion strategy of Canal+’s owner Vivendi, a media group known for its mastery of corporate tactics such as mergers, acquisitions, but also… hostile takeovers.

FINANCING THE CREATIVE INDUSTRIES

Late last February, I attended and spoke at the Alea Africa Family Office Summit in Cape Town.

✈️ I am very selective with my travel and speaking engagements these days, so why did I choose to cross the entire continent for this event?

Because if there is one group of people that definitely knows how to make money in Africa, it’s the entrepreneurs running family-owned businesses (FOB).

🥇And it’s not just me saying it. According to research from McKinsey, family businesses outperform all other types of businesses globally.

Some of Africa’s best known family businesses include Nigeria’s Dangote Industries and Conoil (Glo, Sterling Bank), South Africa’s Pick n’ Pay, or Tanzania’s MeTL Group.

Many others are not on your radar - companies such as Egypt’s Orientals Weavers Group, one of the largest carpet manufacturers in the world with revenues of $600 million/year.

💡McKinsey identified 4 key mindsets that distinguish the highest-performing FOBs:

They put purpose beyond profits
They have a long-term view and emphasis on reinvesting in the business
They take a conservative and cautious stance on finances
They have processes that allow for efficient decision making

They are also great at diversifying their portfolio, are excellent operators, and have a relentless focus on talent.

📈 Once FOBs decide to launch their own Family Office or Fund, the same values typically also make them very astute investors. Ones that, contrary to many VC firms, are actually able to help with operational expertise and not just money. They don’t always need to exit, and they keep value and ownership on the continent.

💫 Many FOBs have portfolios that include hospitality, consumer products manufacturing and distribution, media, or telecom assets that they have scaled across the continent. Many have mentoring programs for young entrepreneurs. And many are already ardent supporters of the arts through their philanthropic foundations.

It doesn’t much to imagine the wealth of knowledge that they could bring to Creative Sector companies.

Marie Lora-Mungai

March 1, 2024

HUSTLE & FLOW #53: UMG acquires Mavin, Ghana announces film incentives, “Iwájú” is out on Disney+, and more

Marie Lora-Mungai

March 1, 2024

February: a short month, but full of wins for African Sports and Entertainment, from AFCON, to the Grammys, the Super Bowl, the Berlinale Film Festival, the Annie Awards and even the Michelin restaurant guide.

But the biggest winners might be Mavin Records’ investors, who have arguably achieved the biggest exit in African entertainment history when Universal Music acquired their majority stake earlier this week

If you are not one of the 180,000 people 🤯 who read my viral story, you get a second chance below 👇

INVESTMENT

I spoke to Jeune Afrique (in French) and The Africa Report about the recent interest from large development banks (such as IFC, Afreximbank or Proparco) for the African Creative Industries.

Both articles are behind a paywall, but here’s an extract for you, readers of HUSTLE & FLOW:

🤔 “Why did these large institutions wait so long to support sectors which, according to IFC, currently represent $4.2 billion on the continent?

For Frenchwoman Marie Lora-Mungai, founder of the consulting company Restless Global and specialist in the Creative Industries in Africa, the relatively recent enthusiasm of investors is the product of two factors.

On the one hand, "over the last two or three years, the world has discovered great English-speaking or French-speaking artists from the continent who have made it on their own and have proven that their activity can generate significant income", explains the one who accompanies large development finance institutions such as IFC or Proparco, to better understand the Creative Industries and to imagine suitable financing mechanisms.

On the other hand, around 2013, the rebasing of the Nigerian GDP (from $270 to $510 billion) raised awareness that an industry like film, accounting for 1.3% of national wealth, was likely to provide a significant contribution to the economy."

Development institutions have also become aware of the capacity of the Creative Industries to create numerous jobs, particularly for young people and women.

Click here to read the full article in English, and here for the French version.

FILM

🇬🇭 Ghana’s President Nana Akufo-Addo has announced plans for the West African country to introduce a new tax incentives package for film productions.

Ghana is set to offer a 20% tax rebate for strategic film productions, alongside other supportive measures such as exemptions on import duties for film production equipment, port taxes and other cash levies. Local corporate entities that financially back the sector will also benefit from these incentives.

Over the past 20 years, tax incentives have become a popular and effective way for governments to attract lucrative foreign film shoots.

🌍 Today, dozens of countries or territories (from obvious ones such Canada, France, Germany and the UK to less-obvious ones like Saudi Arabia, Malta, Trinidad or Fiji) compete to offer the most attractive packages and capture the interest of the world’s biggest film studios and producers.

For a country, the benefits of such schemes are many: direct forex inflows, capacity building for local film technicians, development of a local film servicing industry (equipment rental, catering, transportation, etc), country brand awareness and increased tourism.

But African governments have been slow to seize the opportunity. Prior to Ghana’s announcement, only 3 other African nations - South Africa, Morocco and Mauritius - offered film incentives.

💪🏿 The news is a big win for National Film Authority CEO Juliet Yaa Asantewa Asante, who has been pushing hard to establish Ghana as a regional and continental film hub since she took office 3 years ago.

🏈 Even without incentives, the NFA’s “Shoot in Ghana” campaign had already started garnering attention. Earlier in February, the NFL unveiled its Super Bowl spot ‘Born to Play’, which was shot in Ghana by renown Nigerian director Andrew Dosunmu and produced by Ghanaian production company TD Afrique Films (‘Beasts of No Nation’) led by Danny Damah and Tony Tagoe.

STREAMING

🤔 Will Showmax maintain its lead on Netflix as the competition heats up on the African streaming market?

💡I shared my thoughts with dámiláre dòsùnmú for Rest of World:

"Showmax’s biggest advantage is parent company MultiChoice’s vast network: It runs a cable TV business and has been building TV channels across Africa since 1995, Marie Lora-Mungai, founder of consulting firm Restless Global, told Rest of World.

“MultiChoice’s level of commitment to building the African video-streaming business from the ground up is a lot deeper than the global players’ need for expansion,” Lora-Mungai said.

“The African market is essentially MultiChoice’s to lose … It has teams on the ground in most countries, constantly taking the pulse of what audiences want to see. In some places like Zambia, MultiChoice even single-handedly props up the entire audiovisual sector.”

[On the other hand] Lora-Mungai said Showmax needs to carefully navigate the risk of its partnership with Comcast not working out well in the long term.

“In practice, this type of global partnership can be tricky,” she said, adding that differences in work culture could lead to disagreements.

“Whether Comcast has fully grasped the complexities of doing business in Africa and the patience needed to overcome this market’s challenges remains to be seen.”

ANIMATION & GAMING

We’ve been waiting for it since it was announced in 2020: “Iwájú” is finally out on Disney+.

🌆 Created by Pan-African, British-based entertainment company Kugali Media and directed by Olufikayo Ziki Nelson Adeola, the highly anticipated series is set in a futuristic Lagos (“iwájú” means “the future” in Yoruba).

But not only is “Iwájú” the first Disney animated series set in Nigeria, it is also the Hollywood studio’s first game tie-in on the continent.

🍲 Developed by Nigeria-based Maliyo Games over just 14 months, “Disney Iwájú: Rising Chef” is a casual mobile game similar to “Cooking Madness” and “Cooking Fever”, but with jollof and pepper soup thrown in. It was released on Google Play and the Apple Store on the same day as the series.

"It's Disney's first time working with a studio in Africa, so we wanted to pick a project that was achievable with the time we had, because the goal was always to release this alongside the show," said Maliyo’s founder Hugo Obi.

Maliyo Games was formed in 2012 but struggled to find the talent needed to scale up. In 2021, it partnered with Google to create GameUp Africa, an animation training program. The investment paid off: 3 out of the 4 engineers who developed “Rising Chef” are graduates from the program.

🧐 Besides the lack of both funding and trained talent, other challenges slowing the growth of African games are distribution and discovery.

African games sometimes struggle to get access to the Google and Apple Stores, leading to the development of African platforms such as Gara. In a context where 10,000 new games are released every year, it’s also extremely difficult for African games to break through the noise to get noticed.

The Disney collaboration will be a great case study in that regard.

MUSIC

🔥 This might be the biggest exit ever in the history of African entertainment: Universal Music has acquired a majority stake in Nigerian record label Mavin, founded by Don Jazzy and home of Afrobeats superstar Rema.

💵 Although the terms of the deal were not disclosed, Billboard previously reported a likely sales price of around $125 million, with the company being valued in the region of $150 million to $200 million.

Whatever the exact amount, this means a healthy return for Mavin’s previous majority investor, PE firm TPG Growth, which has now fully exited the business.

💡But what’s even more interesting is how Mavin got there:

In 2006, Nigerian music producer Don Jazzy launches Mo’ Hits Records with artist D’banj. However, Mo’ Hits is not successful and the label dissolves in 2012.

Undeterred, Don Jazzy immediately starts another label, Mavin records. He brings onboard a young brand and marketing exec called Tega Oghenejobo.

🧐 In 2017, Don Jazzy is approached by investor Bobby Pittman of Kupanda Capital. Bobby sees the opportunity in the growth of Afrobeats, but believes Mavin needs to strengthen its internal capacity and processes in order to capture it.

In an unusual but inspired move, Kupanda joins as founding investor and takes a very hands-on approach, sending its own team members from the US to Lagos to help Don Jazzy structure his business. Quick learner Tega rises fast and becomes COO of the company.

🎰 In 2019, Kupanda Capital and PE mastodon TPG create the joint-venture Kupanda Holdings and make a big bet by investing $10 million in Mavin. The TPG partner leading the deal tells Don Jazzy and Tega: “I’m investing in you because you have failed.”

Don Jazzy and Tega get to work doing what they do best: signing and developing new talents.

📉 In 2020, the pandemic hits and revenue from live concerts suddenly hits zero around the world. Kupanda Holdings puts more money in to allow Mavin to survive.

💥 In 2023, Mavin artist Rema breaks the internet with his hit song ‘Calm Down”, remixed with Selena Gomes. The song becomes the first track by an African artist to reach 1 billion streams on Spotify.

By now, Mavin has a solid roster of talents, which also includes Ayra Starr (most viewed music video by a female Nigerian artist on YouTube for “Rush”), Crayon, Ladipoe, Johnny Drille and others.

🤝 In 2024, after the customary 7 years investment period, TGP exits to Universal after a competitive bidding process.

As part of the deal, Don Jazzy and Tega will remain at the helm with Kupanda as strategic advisors, and they have no intention to calm down.

Tyla just showed the world that there’s more to African music than Afrobeats.

🏆 The 22-year-old South African sensation bagged the Grammys’ first ever “Best African Music Performance” award, beating not one but 5 seasoned Nigerian artists.

Davido, Burna Boy, Ayra Starr, Asake and Olamide all went home empty-handed.

After this unexpected turn of events, the silence from the Nigerian side has been deafening 🦗🦗🦗 Nigerians are not used to being humbled o.

Tyla’s rise to stardom has been meteoric to say the least.

🇿🇦 She was born and raised in the eastern parts of Joburg, into a Coloured family of Zulu, Indian, Mauritian and Irish descent.

At 17, she has her first local success with her debut single “Getting Late”. Two years later, at 19, she signs with Epic Records.

🌪 And then, in early 2023, things start to snowball.

In the span of just a few months, she places on the Billboard Mainstream R&B/Hip-Hop chart, performs for the first time in public at Milan Fashion Week, opens for Chris Brown during his Under the Influence Tour, and releases a single with Nigerian singer Ayra Starr.

In May, she is selected by Spotify for RADAR Africa, the platform’s program dedicated to driving the discovery of emerging artists across the world.

🚀 In July, Tyla releases “Water”, the song that will change her life. After a video taken at the Giants of Africa festival in Kigali spuns a viral dance challenge on TikTok, the song enters the top 10 in 16 countries including the United Kingdom and United States. Tyla becomes the youngest-ever South African and the first South African soloist in 55 years to enter the US Billboard Hot 100.

Tyla is invited to appear on TV shows in Europe and the US, including The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and The Voice.

📈 In parallel, Spotify continues to push Tyla, placing “Water” on more than 200 of the platform’s editorial and algorithmic playlists, including some of the most popular ones. Fans add the song to 8 million of their own playlists.

In October 2023, “Water” reaches 100M streams. It has now over 300M.

In December, Tyla finds herself at the center of her first controversy as a public figure, when a TikTok video in which she refers to herself as Colored shocks some American fans. Americans see the word as a slur, while in South Africa, it is a distinct identity that is officially recognised.

😎 Tyla survives this rite of passage with grace, and goes on to win her Grammy.

SPORTS

🇨🇮 🎉 Once in a while, the stars align to turn the collective efforts of many into not only a great moment, but also possibly a historic one. This year, the Elephants, Ivory Coast, and CAF president Patrice Motsepe delivered an exceptional AFCON.

So what went right?

💼 Professional, business-focused leadership from South African billionaire Patrice Motsepe, who took over the role of CAF president in 2021.

🏗 Solid Investment by Ivory Coast, on and off the pitch. The country reportedly spent as much as $1.5 billion on hosting the tournament, including the construction of 4 new stadiums.

💵 Strong sponsors. This year’s AFCON had 17 commercial partners including title sponsors TotalEnergies, 1xBet, Orange and Unilever. My guess is that they’ll be very happy with their ROI.

⚽️ The teams came prepared. From big football countries such as Ivory Coast and Nigeria to underdogs like Cape Verde and Equatorial Guinea, AFCON came with the right type of surprises and upsets that make a great tournament.

😎 Star power: Some of the biggest names in global football, such as Mohammed Salah, Sadio Mane, Victor Osimhen and Andre Onana, were on the pitch, while icons like Didier Drogba, Emmanuel Adebayor and Samuel Eto’o were cheering in the bleachers.

📺 A wide media reach. Despite the initial drama over Pay TV rights, AFCON ended up being broadcast across 180 countries (up from 157 in 2022) on Sky, Canal+, beIN Sport, BBC and MultiChoice as well as 45 Free-to-Air channels and on CAF’s Youtube page. And the audience turned up: nearly 2 billion people watched the competition, according to Patrice Motsepe.

🤳🏿 The power of social media was unleashed. Give African content creators a big cultural moment, and they will turn it into viral gold. Even the official CAF accounts outperformed expectations, gaining a whopping 3.3M followers on Tiktok and 1.3M on Instagram.

🌍 An enthusiastic involvement from the African diaspora, including in the US and UK, which turned AFCON from an African into a global event.

⚠️ Of course, there are areas of improvement, such as accessibility for fans (ticketing, unaffordable intra-African plane tickets), and business opportunities that remain largely untapped, in particular streaming rights and entertainment/lifestyle tie-ins.

But, as Pulse’s James Torvaney said, AFCON feels like the platform on which African sports can finally, properly be built.

All eyes will be on Morocco, host of the next edition, scheduled for 2025.

MORE WINNING (ALL BY AFRICAN WOMEN) THIS MONTH

🎬 French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop won the top prize at the Berlinale International Film Festival for her film ‘Dahomey’, a docu-fictional essay on the first major return of looted treasures from Europe to Africa. She received the Golden Bear for best film from the hands of Kenyan actress Lupita Nyong’o, the first Black person and first African to chair the Berlinale Jury.

🇰🇪 Animator Ng'endo Mukii is the first Kenyan to win an Annie award, the most prestigious prize in animation, for her film "Enkai". "Enkai" is one of the 10 short films that comprise the groundbreaking African sci-fi anthology 🔥"Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire" produced by South African studio Triggerfish for Disney+.

👩🏿‍🍳 Nigerian Adejoké Bakare, founder and head chef of Chishuru in London, becomes UK’s first black female Michelin-starred chef.

⚽️ Twenty-three year-old Zambia forward Racheal Kundananji becomes the most expensive female footballer in a $788,000 transfer from Spanish club Madrid CFF to US side Bay FC.

Marie Lora-Mungai

January 31, 2024

HUSTLE & FLOW #52: AFCON dazzles while Amazon fizzles; Canal+ offers to buy Multichoice; Nigerian Creators come out, and more

Marie Lora-Mungai

January 31, 2024

(c) Reuters and Amazon

January 2024: A Tale of Two Africas.

This past month, AFCON dazzled in Abidjan as Amazon Prime Video fizzled, announcing a surprise exit from the market.

Amazon Prime’s exit is a boon for the new Showmax - and not an insignificant time for Vivendi's Canal+ to finally make an official offer to acquire MultiChoice (we’ve been waiting for it).

But also, the Nigerian Creator Economy came out of stealth in Lagos, showing its true potential for the first time - and it’s bigger than you think.

For the full gist, plus more stories on gaming, gastronomy, and sports, read on below!

SPORTS

AFCON feels different this year.

🎉 The 34th edition of the African Cup of Nations - AFCON or CAN for short - kicked off in January in Abidjan. Although it was six months late on the original schedule, it was worth the wait: Africa’s biggest sports competition is bold, it is shiny, and the game itself has been full of thrilling twists and turns.

It is also generating an unprecedented amount of media coverage, especially on social media. According to Nineteen31, the Confederation Africaine de Football (CAF) itself has gained 1 million new followers on TikTok and 500,000 on Instagram so far!

That is A LOT of eyeballs. And the industry is waking up to the full commercial potential of this event.

Here’s a few numbers, courtesy of Africa Sports Unified (download their full report here):

✅ Investment by host nation: Ivory Coast has spent $1 billion on hosting the tournament. The country built 4 new stadiums, renovated 2, and also constructed or upgraded airports, roads, hospitals and hotels in Abidjan, Bouake, Korhogo, San Pedro and Yamoussoukro.

✅ Stadium audience: 600,000 reported so far, despite issues accessing tickets to the games.

✅ Prize monies: $7M for the winning team. This compares solidly to the Asian Cup ($5M), the Copa America ($10M) and the UEFA ($9.8M).

✅ Sponsors: TotalEnergies (Title sponsor: $250M for 8 years), 1xBet ($64.5M for 10 years), Visa, Orange, Unilever + a raft of regional and local sports.

✅ Apparel: Puma(6 teams), Umbro (2 teams), Adidas, Kappa, Le Coq Sportif and Nike (1 team each). Interestingly, local brands and new labels are also represented, such as Lacatoni (for Angola), One All Sports (Cameroon), Guisport (Guinea-Bissau), or Airness (Mali).

✅ Media rights: So, this was a mess. If you haven’t followed the drama, the exclusive rights for 46 Sub-Saharan countries were acquired last year by mysterious newcomer New World TV from Togo, which later sold Pay TV licenses to Azam TV and StarTimes. Multichoice’s SuperSport initially turned down a deal, before settling (presumably for a hefty chunk of cash) under customer pressure. AfroSport, NTA, and SuperSport Nigeria also bagged the rights for the Nigerian market.

⚠️ No streaming platform secured the rights for the AFCON games this year. But judging by the enormous popularity of AFCON-related content online, one can bet that streaming rights will be a hot topic for the next edition.

While the spotlight was on Ivory Coast, another unique sports event took place deep in northern Nigeria.

👶🏻🥊 👨🏿 For the first time, a White fighter competed in a Dambe competition in Katsina, northern Nigeria.

British professional wrestler and boxer Luke Leyland became the first European to venture on a Dambe sandpit, according to the organizers of the event, the African Warriors Fighting Championship.

He faced - and lost, but with his dignity and body parts intact - Garakuwar Bahagon Yansanda, a boxer from Plateau State. “I am thrilled to be in Nigeria, representing the UK in the ancient art of Dambe. This marks a historic moment for the sport, and I am honored to be part of it,” said Leyland.

😁 A white lad from Liverpool taking on a battle-tested Nigerian Dambe warrior? That’s what I call a great entertainment proposition.

💡This cheeky stint is another smart way in which Maxwell Kalu and his African Warriors Championship are bringing global attention to the traditional sports of Dambe.

Back in July last year, the promoter inked a landmark sponsorship deal with leading crypto betting platform Stake.com. Already a sponsor of the UFC and Nigerian UFC Champion Israel Adesanya, the partnership is Stake’s first sponsorship deal in Africa.

FILM

🥇Meanwhile, another record was broken in Nollywood.

It came from serial record-breaker and multi-hyphenate Funke Akindele.

🚀 A few weeks ago, ‘A Tribe from Judah’ passed the N1 billion Naira at the Nigerian box office and became the highest-grossing Nollywood film of all time.

🤯 A feat made even more remarkable by the fact that Akindele is also responsible for Nigeria’s number 2 and 3 highest-grossing films, ‘Battle on Buka Street’ and ‘Omo Ghetto: The Saga”.

Akindele produced, co-directed, and starred in all 3 films.

Akindele has been a star in Nigeria for at least 15 years, since her 2008 breakout hit ‘Jenifa’. Throughout her career, she’s established herself as a master creator of popular local comedies centered around societal issues. She is, by all accounts, a major content powerhouse.

🤔 And yet, Akindele doesn’t own a house in Malibu or a villa in the South of France. She is not being inundated by offers from Hollywood.

🇳🇬 A major reason for this is that her audience - although massive - is deeply Nigerian, and that most of her revenue comes from Nigerian sources priced in Naira (cinema ticket sales, sponsorship deals, etc).

📉 The reality is that, in USD equivalent, Nollywood’s impressive growth of the past few years has been wiped out by the continuous downfall of the Naira, which lost 55% of its value in 2023, making it the worst performing African currency of the year.

Today, “A Tribe from Judah”’s N1 billion represents $1.2 million. Ten years ago, it would have translated to $2.8 million.

💸 On this one movie, Akindele and her team effectively lost a staggering $1.6 million to Nigeria’s economic mismanagement.

Nigeria’s macroeconomic woes and currency issues have been a big deterrent to foreign investment, with many international investors adopting a “wait and see” approach.

This means two things:

🌍 In order to survive, Nigerian entrepreneurs (in Creative and other fields) need to focus on products and solutions that can attract a global customer base and generate revenue in forex. License deals from Netflix and Amazon, which are priced in USD, have become lifesavers for many Nigerian filmmakers. By the way, a note to Hollywood: I personally believe that, in the hands of the right producer, Akindele definitely has cross-over potential.

💪🏿 Nigerian investors able to transact in Naira should step up. Not only as a matter of national pride, but also because this challenging state of affairs represents an opportunity for them to access opportunities before the Americans come in... or return 👇

VIDEO STREAMING

👋🏾 So long, Amazon Prime. It was nice knowing you for a couple years.

The streaming giant announced that it was restructuring its business model and retrenching its Africa and Middle East operations to focus on the European market.

🤩 Amazon had ambitious goals when it landed in Africa in December 2021. It did not spare any expense setting up teams for its first target markets, Nigeria and South Africa, and signing high profile content partnerships with local production studios.

In fact, it one-upped Netflix by landing ground-breaking multi-year partnerships with Nigerian producers Anthill, Inkblot, and Jade Osiberu’s Greoh. Osiberu’s long-awaited movie ‘Gangs of Lagos’ was released with great fanfare in April 2023, officially launching Amazon in Nigeria. Within two months, ‘Gangs of Lagos’ became the 9th most watched non-English title on Prime.

That was just 9 months ago.

⛔️ Now, the streamer has announced that it would stop commissioning African originals, and its African staff has been let go.

So, what happened?

⚠️ First, the going got tough for global tech companies, who had hired massively during the pandemic and are now facing macroeconomic headwinds. Amazon’s Prime Video Africa layoffs represent just a few of the 27,000+ jobs that the online retailer has cut over the past 12 months.

⚠️ Second, the video streaming business presents additional challenges. It necessitates huge investments in content while ARPU (average revenue per user) is low. The global platforms, which had been on a spending spree for years, have all recently cut down on content costs.

⚠️ Finally, the reality is that Africa is not yet a profitable market for these companies. When they do make money (which is not the case for Amazon Prime or Netflix) it is peanuts compared to the billions that move around in developed markets like the US or Europe.

In this context, Amazon’s decision seems like a no-brainer.

Amazon Prime’s exit is certainly not good news for the African film industry, but it is a boon for the “new Showmax”.

🚀 Ten months after MultiChoice Group announced a partnership with US media giant Comcast (owners of NBCUniversal) and UK’s Sky to create “Showmax 2.0”, the new service is ready.

The revamped Showmax app will be available for download on January 23rd, while the full service will officially launch in February.

Comcast and Sky took a 30% stake in Multichoice as part of the overall deal, whose objective is to combine top local and international assets to birth a “Netflix killer” (my words) on the African continent.

📈 Multichoice reportedly invested some $40 million* - excluding content costs - to relaunch and position Showmax for the future. In exchange, the company is targeting 50 million subscribers and $1 billion in revenue in the next five years.

Late last year, new data from Omdia showed that Showmax had edged over Netflix to become Africa’s first VOD platform, capturing 1.8M subscribers and 40% of the continent’s streaming market, while Netflix accounted for 35%.

But 1.8M is a long way from 50M. So how does Showmax intend to get there?

✅ By proposing attractive, low-cost mobile packages, including the highly anticipated standalone Premier League bundle, which offers all 380 games live for just $3.69/month, ten times cheaper than the premium subscription for DStv. Considering the popularity of the Premier League on the continent, this in itself is a game changer.

✅ By doubling down on local content. Multichoice already owns what is likely the largest library of African original content, including the mega hit Big Brother Africa franchise. In 2023, it dedicated $1 billion to African content production and acquisition. Showmax will be releasing more than 1,300 hours of new Originals in 2024, including 21 new African originals in the month of February alone.

✅ By getting its tech ready for scale. Showmax 2.0 was rebuilt using the technology behind NBCU’s streaming service Peacock, which Multichoice is paying $13 million to license for 7 years.

✅ By leveraging its new relationship with Comcast to bring top international content, such as the latest Mission Impossible or Spiderman movies, to African audiences.

“Nobody understands Africa like we do,” said MultiChoice Group CEO Calvo Mawela. That might very well be true. Let’s see if the company can keep its edge as competition intensifies.

*My estimation, adding the $13 million Peacock tech license to the other $27 million Multichoice said it invested into the Showmax relaunch.

BROADCAST

This new rejiggling of the African streaming space is not an insignificant time for Vivendi’s Canal+ to make an official offer to acquire Multichoice.

Indeed, it better make a move now, just in case Showmax is about to explode.

🤑 Canal+, already the top shareholder in MultiChoice with a 31.67% stake, sent a non binding offer letter based on a 40% premium on MultiChoice's closing share price. This offer values the South African Pay TV giant at $1.7B.

This new development is not surprising. Vivendi had already offered to acquire Multichoice several years ago, but that offer had been rejected. Then in 2020, the French company started buying Multichoice’s shares, slowly making its way towards an acquisition - or a hostile takeover (a tactic Vivendi is well known for).

🌍 Canal+ has been increasing its focus on Africa in the past decade, growing from just 1M African subscribers in 2016 to 7.6M in 2023. In 2019, it bought Nigeria’s ROK Studios to secure a pipeline of fresh Nollywood content. In 2021, it entered Ethiopia and acquired local channel Kana TV. It has also made several smaller acquisitions, bringing into the fold a couple West African production companies (Plan A in Ivory Coast, Marodi in Senegal).

Canal+ said it was planning a stock market listing in South Africa. This could potentially help the French entity overcome regulatory hurdles that include a law that restricts foreign companies from holding more than 20% of the voting rights of a South African broadcaster.

CREATOR ECONOMY

🚀 Meanwhile, Nigeria’s Creator Economy is booming, and the world doesn’t know it yet.

Last week, I had the pleasure of being invited to give the keynote speech at the inaugural African Creators Summit in Lagos.

The convenor of the event was Apollo Endeavor, a company headed by Oladapo Adewunmi that currently represents 300+ of Nigeria’s top Content Creators.

👑 You may have never heard of them, but they reign over legions of fans: Mark Angel has 39M followers across platforms, Lasisi Elenu and Josh2Funny each have 9.2M and Kiekie 7.7M, for example.

The African Creators Summit - one full day of panels attended by 1,000 creators, and a VIP dinner for 150 guests - was free and fully funded by Apollo Endeavor.

There, I learned that:

🤯 Hundreds of creators in Nigeria make more than $100,000/year. A few of them, like Mark Angel, make millions. This means that the Nigerian Creator Economy already is a multi-million dollar industry.

📱This money mostly comes from ads placed on Creators’ video content on YouTube and Facebook, as well as from direct brand deals.

⚠️ Facebook currently limits monetization to a select number of “partner” Creators, while monetization is not yet enabled on Instagram and Whatsapp. But it’s coming. In fact, TikTok is about to launch its Creator program. As monetization options expand in the next months and years, Nigerian Creators’ revenue is going to explode.

💵 This revenue is made in USD (and not in Naira) - the holy grail.

🤳🏿These Creators are multi-talented. They act, they sing, they write, they teach, all the while being enormously charismatic and entertaining. Their skills are easily transferable to many other creative sub-sectors such as film, music and fashion, but also to the education sector.

🌐 They create jobs. They employ videographers, editors, photographers, stylists, makeup artists, lawyers, accountants, and managers.

In a market where disposable income is very low and global streamers are struggling to gain subscribers, Content Creators have found the gold mine: a business model that works.

Highly entertaining content, available to very large audiences for free, with ad inventory and delivery managed automatically by the world’s best advertising companies (Google and Meta).

At the event, one Creator asked this question: “What do we need to do for people to take us seriously?”

The answer: Show them the numbers.

GAMING

🎮 Carry1st becomes the first African startup to receive investment from the recently launched Sony Innovation Fund: Africa.

Late last year, the Sony Corporation Venture arm launched its first African investment vehicle - a $10M seed fund - to invest in early stage Entertainment African startups.

💰 South African mobile games publisher Carry1st is the continent’s largest Creative startup, having raised more than $60 million so far from blue chip investors such as Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), BITKRAFT, Google, Riot Games, and the rapper Nas.

Founded in 2018, Carry1st works with international gaming companies such as Activision, Supercell and Riot Games to bring global game franchises like “Call of Duty: Mobile” and “Valorant” to Africa.

📱 Carry1st specializes in developing social and casual puzzle-based mobile versions of these games for the African market, enabling monetization through its localized payment service Pay1st. Next, the company is planning to develop its own original titles, with development underway on three new games.

🚀 This business model has been successful so far: Carry1st says its revenues grew by 9x between 2021 and 2023.

Sony is coming in as a strategic investor. Among other things, it will leverage its expertise in gaming to help Carry1st develop new products and access new opportunities on the continent.

Sub-Saharan Africa’s gaming industry is expected to generate over $1 billion for the first time in 2024, according to research from Carry1st and venture capital firm Konvoy.

GASTRONOMY

🇪🇹 World renowned Ethiopian-born chef Marcus Samuelsson has opened his first Africa-based restaurant in Addis Ababa.

🗽 Samuelsson, who lost his mother during Ethiopia’s 1970s civil war, was adopted by a Swedish couple and raised in Sweden. At 23, he moved to New York where he became a celebrity chef, eventually opening restaurants in Harlem (the famous Red Rooster), Montreal and London.

His new eatery, named Marcus Addis, combines flavors from Ethiopia and the rest of the world and is located on the 47th floor of the nation’s tallest building, the headquarters of the Ethiopian Commercial Bank.

👨🏿🍳 🍳 Although Samuelsson’s journey is unique, he is also part of a new generation of chefs promoting and developing a new identity of African cuisine.

Long relegated to the realm of comfort food (jollof and plantain, anyone?), African cuisine is now earning its stripes in the elite world of global fine dining.

Here are some other names you should know:

🇸🇳 The pioneer of this new wave is without a doubt the Senegalese Pierre Thiam, Executive Chef and co-founder of Teranga, a fine-casual food chain in New York that sources ingredients from farmers in West Africa. Thiam is also the Executive Chef of Nok by Alara in Lagos and the Signature Chef of the five-star Pullman Hotel in Dakar.

🇲🇱 🇸🇳 Last month, French-Malian-Senegalese culinary wunderkind Mory Sacko opened Lafayette’s, his second restaurant in Paris. The 30-year-old chef’s first venture, MoSuke, earned him a Michelin star just months after opening in 2020. Despite my best efforts, I never managed to snag a reservation there, but I enjoyed a meal at Lafayette’s a few weeks ago.

🇳🇬 In London, Nigerian-inspired Ikoyi was launched in 2017 by friends Jeremy Chan and Iré Hassan-Odukale. It has since gained 2 Michelin stars and reached the #35 spot in The World’s Best 50 Restaurants’ ranking.

🇨🇬 Born in Congo-Brazzaville and educated in Germany, chef Dieuveil Malonga is the owner of Meza Malonga, a culinary lab in Kigali, Rwanda, and the founder of Chefs in Africa, a social enterprise committed to shedding light on Africa and diaspora gourmet rising stars.

Marie Lora-Mungai

December 3, 2023

HUSTLE & FLOW #51: Afreximbank's $1B Film Facility, NBA Africa expands its footprint, my 2024 predictions, and more

Marie Lora-Mungai

December 3, 2023

🎅🏿 Welcome to this year’s last edition of HUSTLE & FLOW.

In November, Afreximbank announced the 2024 launch of its $1 billion Film Finance Facility, the NBA opened new offices in South Africa and Kenya, and Ghana hosted the first Africa Cinema Summit. Click and read on for more 👇

2023 was the year where the Creative Industries officially landed on the radar of institutional investors. Besides Afreximbank, other financiers such as IFC, AFD Group, AfDB, Sony, Orange Bank, and Birimian Holdings also made big moves. All combined, these investors are now sitting on some $2.5 billion of funds committed to the African Creative sector, which they are itching to deploy.

As these investors prepare to put their cash to work, next year promises to be particularly interesting. Scroll to the end of this edition to discover some of my 2024 predictions 👇

Finally, before we wrap 2023 up I wanted to thank you, HUSTLE & FLOW readers. On Linkedin or directly through my website, you are now 6,253 subscribers to this newsletter.

🌍 Over the course of the year I had the pleasure of meeting many of you in real life in Nairobi, Accra, Lisbon, Casablanca, Paris, Cannes, Marrakech, London and Dakar. I loved hearing that you find my writing useful. Thank you very much for your enthusiastic support and your continued readership.

Happy Holidays to all!

FILM & AUDIOVISUAL

The lack of data on the Creative Industries has long been a serious hindrance to the design of government interventions and to private sector investment. But now, an increasing number of government agencies, development organizations, and industry practitioners are coming together to publish sector-specific reports.

🔎 Last month, the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) and the Kenya Film Commission released the Film Industry Satellite Account Survey (FISA), tracking the contribution of Kenya’s film industry to the economy for the first time.

It’s an enlightening read for those who are not afraid of numbers, and the picture it paints of the Kenyan Film and Broadcast sector is quite vibrant.

A few highlights (2022 data):

📊 0,4% - Contribution of Film and Broadcasting activities to the Kenyan GDP

$570 million (Ksh 86.9 billion) - Gross output value of Film and Broadcasting activities

$250 million (Ksh 38.1 billion) - Gross value added by the sector

$162 million (Ksh 24.7 billion) - Gross output generated by Production activities only

And also:

💪🏾 42,823 jobs created

📃 866 Film licenses issued

📽 39 cinema screens and 14 theaters

📺 6.3 million digital TV subscriptions

🎥 Afreximbank will be launching its $1 billion film fund next year, and that's a game-changer for the African film industry.

Until now, only a few countries - such as South Africa, Morocco, Senegal or Ivory Coast - had access to structured finance for film, mostly through small national funds with very limited budgets.

Overall though, African films are still mostly financed informally through personal funds, corporate sponsors, and a smattering of foreign grants targeted at "festival" films only.

The lack of access to structured, specialized finance has stifled the growth of the African film industry in several ways:

👉 African filmmakers have had to limit their creative ambitions to match the level of funding they could raise through their personal networks, negatively impacting production values.

👉 Many have been forced to work on "commissioned" projects, perpetuating a system in which the buyer (a TV station or a streaming platform) covers the budget plus a production margin, in exchange for all rights to the content.

👉 This means that many African filmmakers don't actually own the IP on the content they created. After the one-off payment from the buyer, these filmmakers are also locked out of any additional revenue resulting from the further distribution or exploitation of their content.

👉 African producers are vastly disadvantaged compared to foreign ones when it comes to securing and developing high-profile IP into films or series. Even if an African producer manages to partner with an international company to co-produce the future "Black Panther", for example, the fact that this producer cannot contribute any substantial funding to the project robs them of their negotiating power, and they are likely to end up owning a tiny fraction of the IP - if any at all.

Afreximbank's film fund aims to change all that.

🚀 Afreximbank's mission is to finance and promote intra-and extra-African trade. In 2020, it identified the creative industries as a new sector with high-growth potential. Indeed, Africa is projected to produce up to 10% of global creative goods exports by 2030, which will amount to roughly $200 billion or 4% of Africa’s GDP.

🏦 Filmmakers seeking to access funding will have to show a solid finance plan, and present supporting documents like pre-sales or distribution agreements.

This film fund will not magically solve other challenges faced by the African film industry, such as the lack of distribution or of professional training programs. But it will make financing available for entrepreneurs with plans to tackle these issues in a sustainable way - and that's progress.

(Disclaimer: Afreximbank is one of my clients).

🇬🇭 🎥 I’m glad to have participated (albeit remotely) in the first edition of the Africa Cinema Summit, taking place mid-November in Accra, at the initiative of the National Film Authority of Ghana.

🎤 I had the privilege of speaking about Investment in the African cinema space, alongside my good friend Moses Babatope of Filmhouse Group and Motheo Matsau of Ster-Kinekor.

I made the following points:

📍Institutional investors are still very reluctant to invest in the movie theater business, which they perceive as a dying, capex-heavy industry. In reality, it seems that cinema keeps refusing to die: it was already supposed to perish decades ago with the advent of television, then again more recently with the arrival of the global streaming platforms, and then yet again with the Covid pandemic. But 2023 gave us Barbenheimer and the highest global box office on record.

📍Nevertheless, the movie theater business needs to adapt to new technologies, new trends and the audiences' changing tastes in order to survive. Two viable models are emerging for Africa. First, a high-end, rich entertainment proposal mixing cinema with other attractions for the entire family (restaurants, gaming arcades, beauty and wellness salons, etc) in the same location. Second, affordable, low-cost community cinemas servicing the enormous peri-urban and rural audiences who have so far been unable to access this type of entertainment.

📍Industry operators need to continue to collect data, document their activities, and communicate about the business models that work. As Motheo said, they also need to learn how to speak the investors' language in order to become more convincing.

📍Governments have a huge role to play in creating an enabling environment. The first step is to appoint experienced industry practitioners in key positions, so that cinema professionals have a knowledgeable person to talk to. Other measures that work: passing creative bills and film incentive packages, streamlining complex tax frameworks and removing red tape, offering tax breaks or holidays, and availing land for the development of film infrastructure.

📜 During the Summit, Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo announced a set of measures going in the right direction. However, Ghana’s economic situation is dire at the moment, which might impede the country’s ability to support its film sector.

MUSIC

🎧 The competition for music streaming domination is heating up on the continent.

📱To reach customers, music platforms need telco distribution.

Homegrown service Mdundo, for example, has access to a customer base of 185 million people (and 26.6 monthly active users) through its partnerships with Vodacom in Tanzania, Airtel and MTN in Nigeria, and MTN in Ghana, and South Africa.

Meanwhile, the Chinese Boomplay comes embedded in Transsion phones (sold under the Tecno or Infinix brands) and works with 9Mobile in Nigeria, its largest market. These deals were instrumental in getting Boomplay its 100 million monthly active users.

🦍 But in the world of music, the 500 pound gorilla is Spotify. The streaming giant entered Africa in February 2021, by launching into 39 countries simultaneously. And now, it has picked Orange to launch its first mobile offer in Africa.

🍊 Spotify and Orange Middle East & Africa have partnered to offer all Orange mobile customers complimentary data bonuses to access to Spotify’s service, starting with the Democratic Republic of Congo, Madagascar, Mali, and soon Guinea. Millions of mobile users in these countries will be now able to access Spotify for free when subscribing to an Orange mobile offer.

There is a lot of room for this partnership to grow after this initial phase: Orange is currently present in 17 countries in Africa, serving more than 140 million customers.

GAMING

🎮 Nigerian Game studio Maliyo will be releasing its “2024 Africa Games Industry Report” on December 5th.

I was lucky to get early access to the document. It is a useful tool for those new to the space, especially as it clearly illustrates the budding African games value chain.

SPORTS

🏀 NBA Africa is ramping up its activities on the continent.

🇿🇦 Last month, the world’s leading basketball league chose South Africa as the fourth location for the expanded 2024 season of its Basketball Africa League (BAL) due to the nation's strong infrastructure.

Johannesburg will host the Kalahari Conference in March 2024, before the BAL moves on to the already-established Nile Conference in Cairo (April), the Sahara Conference in Dakar (May) and the seeding games and playoffs in Kigali (May - June). South Africa’s team, the Cape Town Tigers, made it to the playoffs in the past two seasons.

NBA Africa will also open two more stores in Cape Town and Durban, in addition to the one that already exists in Johannesburg.

🇰🇪 In Kenya, NBA Africa announced the establishment of a new subsidiary, which will support all of the league’s business and basketball development initiatives in the country. This Nairobi outpost marks NBA Africa’s fifth office on the continent, after Cairo, Dakar, Johannesburg, and Lagos.

🇸🇸 And finally, NBA Africa also announced yesterday a new junior league in South Sudan, which will kick off in early 2024.

WHAT TO LOOK OUT FOR IN 2024

2023 was the year when the Creative Industries started being taken seriously by investors, and this momentum is bound to accelerate in 2024.

Here are my 3 predictions for next year (or the next 5 - I have a tendency to be early):

🔮 Sony’s Innovation Fund: Africa, Silverback Holdings, Birimian’s Fashion debt facility with Orange Bank Africa, and Nollywood-focused funds such as the VEMA Fund from Volition Capital all emerged in 2023. In 2024, we will see the launch of more investment and financing vehicles specialized in the Creative, Sports or Entertainment sectors.

🔮 The worlds of Tech, Media and Sports will become increasingly intertwined. They will share founders and investors. Interesting companies leveraging tech to distribute and monetize high-value sports media properties will be born. The confluence of Sports and Gaming will become increasingly hot for private investors.

🔮 Good ol’ debt will become the financing tool of choice for Fashion houses and Production companies that are profitable but lack working capital to scale. This will be made possible by new programs that will teach bankers about the Creative sector, while providing risk-sharing facilities. In return, creative MSME entrepreneurs will learn how to structure themselves properly, and the industry will finally start to mature.

What other big trends do you see? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

HUSTLE & FLOW will be back next year!

Marie Lora-Mungai

October 31, 2023

HUSTLE & FLOW #50: Fashion data galore, Ngannou's Riyadh stunt, Sony's new Africa Fund, & more

Marie Lora-Mungai

October 31, 2023

(c) UNESCO, "The Fashion Sector in Africa: Trends, Challenges and Opportunities for Growth"

🏈🏆 In October, South Africa’s Springboks became rugby’s World Champions, again. They made history by being the first team to win the Rugby World Cup for the 4th time - and that’s a win for the entire continent.

🥊 Meanwhile in Riyadh, Cameroonian MMA star Francis Ngannou faced boxing legend Tyson Fury for an epic fight. Although Ngannou officially lost, he is the real winner - read why below.

In this new 50th 🤯 edition of HUSTLE & FLOW, you’ll also find more on:

👉 How Editi Effiong’s The Black Book became Netflix’s first African global hit.

👉 Why Mr Eazi, who just released his debut album “The Evil Genius”, is not your regular Afrobeats superstar.

👉 What we can learn from UNESCO ’s and ANKA ’s fresh off-the-press treasure-troves of data on the African Fashion and Crafts sectors.

👉 Why Sony launched a new fund to invest in African Entertainment.

As I sit at my desk writing this, I have major FOMO about missing the Lagos Art Season this year.

The pictures from the just concluded 2023 edition of Lagos Fashion Week are gorgeous. Congratulations to Omoyemi Akerele and team! Feast your eyes here.

Also, Art X Lagos is opening today. If you’re in town right now, head over Federal Palace to experience this new tour-de-force by Tokini Peterside-Schwebig & co.

↪️ If you enjoy HUSTLE & FLOW, don’t keep it to yourself. Subscribe and share!

FILM

🌟 Editi Effiong’s The Black Book, which premiered in September, has become “Nigeria’s first runaway Netflix hit”, according to Wired. Three weeks after its release, the movie had been watched more than 70 million times, even reaching number 1 in aspirational South Korea.

In the last edition of HUSTLE & FLOW, I talked about Editi’s innovative financing strategy. What I didn’t say is that Editi also took an enormous risk by spending $1 million on his passion project two years ago, at a time when neither Netflix nor any other buyer had ever spent that kind of money to acquire a Nigerian film.

🏅Thankfully, it all worked out for him, for his investors (Netflix reportedly spent $1.5 million on The Black Book) and ultimately, for Netflix. After a lackluster first few years, the platform may have finally hit gold - its first Nigerian crossover film.

“When [Netflix] started investing in its own slate of original content, Nollywood hoped that it would spur a creative boom, as well as a financial one, giving filmmakers the opportunity to explore new ground,” writes Wired. “But Netflix’s early titles were broadly similar to what came before them, in similar genres, albeit with slightly more elevated production values. And the money wasn’t great either. Reports have shown that Nigerian filmmakers are paid a lot less compared to their counterparts in countries with significantly smaller markets.”

The Black Book is a good illustration of what can happen when the right filmmaker is liberated from creative or budget shackles.

🤼 But it is also key to note that the competitive environment has evolved since Netflix’s early Nigeria days. Earlier this year, Amazon’s Prime Video entered the market with a splash, spending more than $1 million to secure the rights to Jade Osiberu’s Gangs of Lagos.

The Black Book and Gangs of Lagos share more than a few characteristics beyond their sticker price. Both films explore the Nigerian underworld and are ambitious in scope, ramping up their production value with numerous action scenes. But more importantly, they were made by creatively gifted and business-oriented producer-directors, who are only at the beginning of their careers.

In a few years, we might look back at 2023 as the year Nollywood turned a corner.

⛏ Still in Nigeria and also setting the stage for a grander future Nollywood, the groundbreaking ceremony for the $100 million Lagos Film City, which was presided over by Lagos State Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu, also took place last month.

The project, which will be built on a 100-hectare plot of land in the Epe Local Government district's Ikosi-Ejinrin district, is structured as a Public Private Partnership and is being developed in collaboration with industry players Ebonylife Academy, Delyork, and Ogidi Studios.

🧐 The announcement was short on details but I’ll be keeping an eye on it and reporting back as more information emerges.

DIGITAL CONTENT DISTRIBUTION

Telco-owned African streaming services are struggling to compete with Netflix, Prime Video and Showmax, writes dámiláre dòsùnmú in Rest of World.

⚰️ The African market is a graveyard for mobile video apps: RIP Vodacom’s Video Play (2022), Telkom’s TelkomOne (relaunched as SABC+ in 2022), Econet’s Kwese TV (2019), Cell C’s Black (2019) and MTN’s Vu (2017).

💸 Indeed, scaling a video streaming business requires spending mountains of capital upfront and enduring significant losses for years - a business model that quickly looks unappealing to telcos used to making good money through voice, data, and mobile money services.

According to Iroko TV founder Jason Njoku, to grow a streaming platform “you need hundreds of millions of dollars and lots of patience. I don’t think I have seen a telco-first model work anywhere. The DNA of the company needs to be content. Live, breathe, and market it.”

🤝 So rather than “owning the entire pipe” as they once dreamed, telcos are going back to a model they’re a lot more comfortable with: working with specialized content partners to offer value-added services to their customers. Yes, the good ol’ call back ringtone or premium SMS model.

⭐️ One of the companies taking advantage of the situation is Starnews Mobile, a mobile video network that allows African creators and celebrities to monetize their content directly from their fans. (Disclaimer: I am an early investor in Starnews).

Despite the current VC funding winter, Starnews just raised a $3 million pre-series A led by Janngo Capital. Interestingly, other investors in the round also included football players Aurélien Tchouaméni of Real Madrid, Jules Koundé of Barcelona and Mike Maignan from AC Milan, all affiliated with athlete representation agency Excellence Sport Nation.

📈 Launched in 2017, Starnews Mobile works with more than 120 creators and boasts an active subscriber base of over 4 million through its partnerships with MTN and Orange across Cameroon, Nigeria, Ghana, Congo, Benin and Ivory Coast. Starnews CEO Guy Kamgaing said that the platform distributed $1 million to content creators last year.

Most of the content available on Starnews is organized into topical, hyper local channels, such as local celebrities lifestyle feeds, or channels on motorbike taxis in Cameroon or food recipes in Ivory Coast. For this type of content, YouTube or Instagram don’t provide real monetization options, while Starnews is able to leverage its telco partnerships to push these videos to the right audience and monetize through airtime micro-payments.

FASHION

🧥 UNESCO 's new report on the African Fashion sector is out and it's a must-read.

Entitled "The Fashion Sector in Africa: Trends, Challenges and Opportunities for Growth", the UNESCO study shows that the continent holds all the cards to become a global fashion leader.

A few key insights stuck out for me:

💰 The market value of clothing and footwear in sub-Saharan Africa was estimated at $31 billion in 2020 - but this includes foreign imports. In fact, Africa's textile, clothing, and footwear trade deficit stands at roughly US$7.6 billion. This represents a huge opportunity to redirect some of this consumption towards local brands, especially with the growing appetite on the continent for fashion Made-in-Africa.

🧑🏿🌾 Africa is a major producer of raw materials - 37 out of 54 countries produce cotton. However, while African cotton fiber accounted for 7.5% of global production in 2022, sub-Saharan countries exported more than 81% of their raw cotton rather than transforming and using it locally.

🏗The lack of industrialization and the resulting high production costs impede the growth of the African ready-to-wear segment, as many designers are forced to focus on a niche, luxury clientele who can afford their products. How to scale up production capacity is a major challenge for most of the small and medium-size enterprises that make up 90% of the Africa fashion sector.

🏭 A few countries (Egypt, Ethiopia, Lesotho, Madagascar, Mauritius, Morocco, and Tunisia) do have a significant manufacturing sector geared towards outsourcing for major global brands such as Guess, H&M, Levi’s, Mango, Zara, Chanel, Dior, and Hermès.

💃 Despite all these challenges, African haute couture is particularly vibrant, with 32 Fashion Weeks taking place annually across the continent and an increasing number of African brands being recognized internationally. A 42% increase in demand is expected in that segment over the next 10 years.

📝 The report also makes recommendations for decision-makers to tackle weak points of the ecosystem such as legal frameworks, skills and capacity building, investment, and environmental standards, in order to unleash the full potential of the African Fashion sector.

E-COMMERCE

📊 Another new great source of market insights is the white paper that was just released by sales platform Anka.

ANKA, which started out 7 years ago as Afrikrea, a marketplace for made-in-Africa fashion, design and crafts, has since transformed into an Africa “Paypal and Shopify” hybrid that helps aggregate shipping services to reduce costs. The company raised a $5 million extension round in September, and says it has more than 20,000 sellers in 100 countries (45 in Africa) -- providing it with scores of precious data points on how small African brands sell online.

A few elements stand out:

🤳🏿Social media (especially whatsapp, Facebook and Instagram) is the leading online sales channel for independent retailers - not dedicated e-commerce websites or apps.

🏬 In fact, social media accounts for 43.6% as the largest point of sale for retailers, while ‘physical shops’ are a distant second at 20.9%.

🇫🇷 France has Anka’s highest number of online shops with over 4,000, while Nigeria is second with 3,549.

🇳🇬 Nigeria has the highest seller average annual volume in the top 10 countries coming in at over $11,000 — more than three times the next country, Ghana.

💵 The average seller on Anka earns around $185/year.

Anka concludes:

“In our humble opinion, rather than pushing people to buy what they can’t, we should also empower them to sell what they do have, especially through export. Exporting is not a panacea but a real remedy for the many difficulties that African economies suffer from, such as trade deficits, currency instability and chronic unemployment.”

MUSIC

🔥 😈 After a decade of attention-grabbing singles and high-profile collaborations, global Afrobeats artist Mr Eazi has just released his own debut album entitled “The Evil Genius”.

🎧 Mr Eazi reached global stardom with his mixtapes and cross-genres hits featuring other big names, such as “Don’t Jealous Me” with Beyonce, Tekno and Yemi Alade, “Como Un Bebé,” with Bad Bunny and J Balvin, “Miss You Bad” with Burna Boy, or “Oh My Gawd” with Diplo from Major Lazer and Nicki Minaj.

🎨 But for all the music that he had made until now, Eazi had not yet produced his own album. This is now done. More than a music project (which features signature collabs with Angelique Kidjo or the Soweto Gospel Choir), the 16-track “The Evil Genius” takes Eazi’s taste for breaking boundaries further by matching each song with a specially commissioned work from a leading African visual artist.

Many things distinguish Eazi from the other Nigerian superstars (Davido, Burna Boy, Wizkid) whom he’s often bundled with.

🕵🏽 Here’s why I’ve been closely tracking Eazi’s moves for the past few years:

🎓 He graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering at the age of 19, and at just 32 years-old today, he already has a 13-year career behind him. He’s more than a fine boy no pimple.

😎 He’s an entrepreneur who then became a music star, not the other way around.

🔮 He opted to stay independent instead of signing with a major music label, trusting his ability to stir and develop his own career, but also recognizing early on the true value of the Afrobeats cultural movement. “I was like ‘Nah, this thing we’re holding is going to be big and it’s happening in our very own hands,’” he said.

🤝 He’s a master at cross-cultural partnerships. He is the creator of “Banku music”, a fusion of Nigerian Afrobeats and Ghanaian highlife. His collaboration with reggaeton superstar J Balvin won him a Latin Grammy earlier this year. His band ChopLife Soundsystem with Kenyan-born DJ Edu mixes South African amapiano influences with Afrobeats and Jamaican party culture.

💪 He supports emerging artists from across the continent - such as breakout star Joeboy - by providing mentorship and distribution through his emPawa Africa initiative.

💵 He is an astute investor and the founder of Zagadat Capital. His areas of interest include fintech, betting, and sports.

😇 Despite his own financial successes and his upcoming marriage into a billionaire family, you won’t see him chopping money on Hennessy.

🦆 Instead, he is a “duck”, according to DJ Edu. “You see a duck flowing, floating on water. Yet there’s a lot of stuff going on underneath the surface. That is exactly what he is.” Hard working with a smooth exterior.

SPORTS

🥊 💫 On October 28, Cameroonian Mixed Martial Arts star Francis Ngannou faced British Boxing champion Tyson Fury in an epic match in Riyadh, in front of a celebrity-studded audience which included Cristiano Ronaldo, Sadio Mane, Kanye West and Eminem.

🏆 Although Ngannou officially lost to Fury, for many observers the Cameroonian fighter is the ultimate winner. Why?

👉 Fury was granted the victory after a controversial split decision by the judges, despite the fact that Ngannou dominated the fight overall. It could have easily gone the other way.

👉 Ngannou went into the match as the clear underdog. Thirty-five-year-old Tyson Fury is a World Boxing Championship heavyweight champion on a 34-bout winning streak. In contrast, 37-year-old Ngannou, despite his status as former UFC heavyweight champion in Mixed Martial Arts, had never boxed professionally. The Cameroonian came into the challenge still recovering from an injury and his training camp - with Mike Tyson - only lasted 3.5 months.

👉 But more importantly, Ngannou used the highly publicized fight to quietly revolutionize the sports content market in Africa.

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ "The Battle of the Baddest" was promoted as a premium Pay-Per-View event in the US, where fans could stream it live for $79.99 on ESPN+ PPV, and in the UK, where it was available for £21.95 through TNT Sports Box Office.

But that was leaving Ngannou's legions of African fans off the table.

💡 So Ngannou's teams at 3points0Labs, Gimik Fights and AMDM Africa came up with a solution to turn the Riyadh match into the first major Pay-Per-View sports event at affordable prices for Africa.

📲 By leveraging Africa's widespread mobile money services and some strategic partnerships, they made the fight accessible to African fans across the continent for just $3.99-$4.99 per view, and even as low as $0.80 for airtel customers. Awareness of the event was pushed through SMS marketing and collaborations with local social media influencers.

🌍 Although audience numbers are unknown at this point, it is easy to see how this type of approach could unlock massive revenue from the continent. Considering the 287 million mobile internet users in Sub-Saharan Africa, if 1% of those paid for the cheapest access package (airtel at $0.80), that would already represent close to $2.3 million.

And this doesn't include additional revenue such as booking fees (estimated at $50 million for Fury and $10 million for Ngannou) or sponsorship deals.

Ngannou, we see you 😎 🤑

CREATIVE INDUSTRIES FINANCING

🔥 African Entertainment is getting a new, high profile investor.

🇯🇵 Japanese behemoth Sony has announced the launch of a new $10 million fund to support the growth of entertainment businesses in Africa.

🎮 More specifically, this new Sony Innovation Fund: Africa will focus on early-stage startups in gaming, music, film and content distribution.

Through its other global funds, the tech and media giant's venture arm has made more than 100 investments in sectors like entertainment, robotics, AI, mobility, fintech, healthcare, logistics and SaaS.

💴 In Africa, SIF will take a more focused approach by targeting creative businesses only, starting with South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana and ticket sizes ranging from $250,000 to $1 million.

It plans to not only invest in creative startups but also in infrastructure and even to build an animation school.

One thing that will differentiate Sony from other investors is that the Group also intends to leverage its expertise in areas such as film and music production, distribution and marketing, to facilitate the access of its future African portfolio companies to global markets.

🤝 SIF also enters the African market with the backing of IFC - International Finance Corporation (World Bank Group) which will provide financing, market expertise, and the ability to fund larger or follow-on rounds.

IFC itself is a new entrant in the small club of institutional investors in the African Creative space. (Disclaimer: IFC is one of my advisory clients).

🎯 In the last edition of HUSTLE & FLOW, I talked about how IFC, the largest development institution focused exclusively on the private sector in emerging markets, was now throwing its weight behind the African Creative Industries. In its 2022 fiscal year, IFC invested a record $32.8 billion across all sectors in developing countries, and now, the Creative Sector is in its bullseye.

Mid-October, IFC hosted the first Creative Industries event to ever take place during the World Bank-IMF general meetings in Morocco, an exclusive annual gathering of global world leaders.

🎤 I had the pleasure of moderating an insightful panel on private investment in the Creative Industries, during which panelists William Sonneborn (IFC), Moulaye TABOURÉ (ANKA), Antonio Avitabile (Sony Innovation Fund) and Laureen Kouassi-Olsson (Birimian Ventures) discussed the need for institutional investors to adapt their frameworks to better service this emerging sector.

💰 IFC took the opportunity of this panel to announce its ambition to invest $2 billion per year in the Creative Industries in emerging markets, both directly and through partnerships with other financial institutions and funds (such as Sony Innovation Fund). That is a substantial pile of cash.

Gone are the days where African creative entrepreneurs were shouting alone in the wilderness. Investors are now paying attention - time to step up the game.

Marie Lora-Mungai

September 30, 2023

HUSTLE & FLOW #49: Nigerian Film Finance revolution, Tongoro at Renaissance, ANKA raises $5M, and more

Marie Lora-Mungai

September 30, 2023

(c) The Black Book, Editi Effiong / Netflix

September was a winning month for African creative entrepreneurs.

In this edition of HUSTLE & FLOW, Nigerian filmmaker and entrepreneur Editi Effiong revolutionizes African film finance with The Black Book (now streaming on Netflix), Global superstar Beyonce wears Senegalese brand Tongoro on her Renaissance tour, Rema and Selena Gomes’ “Calm Down” reaches 1 billion streams on Spotify, and Ivorian ecommerce startup ANKA raises $5 million.

But there is more, a lot more. Read on!

FILM

Editi Effiong’s The Black Book, which premiered on Netflix last week and is already breaking records, is not only a showcase for star Richard Mofe-Damijo (aka RMD), it is also an important milestone in Nigerian film finance.

💻 🎥 Backed by some of Nigeria’s most prominent startup founders and VC investors, the $1M budget thriller illustrates the growing convergence between the worlds of African Tech and Entertainment.

Among the film’s financiers are Kola A. (Ventures Platform), Olumide Soyombo (Bluechip Technologies), as well as the cofounders of Flutterwave, Piggyvest, Paystack, and Eden Life.

I met Editi in 2021 and had the privilege of reading an early draft of The Black Book. Although the film would become Editi’s first feature as a director, he had already shown a lot of potential with his short film Fishbone and as a producer on Up North.

🤑 Still, it was clear that The Black Book was going to be expensive.

Most Nigerian films that make it to local cinemas have production budgets in the $150,000-350,000 range, while the most ambitious ones can reach up to $500,000-750,000.

💪🏿 In an environment where public funding is not available, Nigerian producers have become skilled at pooling resources together - proceeds from previous films, equipment, locations, sponsorships - to finance increasingly ambitious movies in cash and kind.

Despite the hype, The Black Book is not Nigeria’s most expensive film. The award goes to the 2011 adaptation of Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, which was produced on a staggering $9M budget.

💸👋🏿 Financing for the film was raised by investment banker Yewande Sadiku, who was the first person to bring organized financing to a Nigerian movie. But Yewande was way ahead of her time. Sadly, the movie was not a commercial success, and Nollywood producers’ ambitions were knocked down a notch.

📈 Fast forward 10 years and new experiments in film finance have taken place, including the launch of FilmOne Studios’ $1M film fund with China’s HuaHua. Nigerian films’ production value has noticeably increased. Netflix and Amazon Prime have entered the market, providing substantial new revenue opportunities for filmmakers. And the country known for its oil billionaires has minted a new class of High Net Worth Individuals - startup founders and tech investors.

💡 To finance his $1M production budget, Editi reached out to his personal network in tech, and convinced his connections to take a bet on film - a class of assets that is, in fact, no riskier than most startups. He made sure to follow a thorough process, delivering regular updates to his investors

The acquisition of The Black Book by Netflix validated the model, prompting Volition Cap, one of the film’s investors, to launch the Volition Entertainment, Media and Art (VEMA) Fund, an investment club focused on this “new” sector.

If The Black Book was the Beta version of this new Nigerian film finance model, the next logical steps are for its KPI-focused investors to pour over the data, analyze the results, and iterate. It’s clear that we will see a lot more venture-backed Nollywood films in the near future.

MUSIC

💥 New level unlocked: Rema's version of Calm Down featuring Selena Gomez becomes the first Afrobeats song in history to reach 1 billion streams on Spotify.

In fact, it is the first track led by an African artist to ever reach this milestone.

🦄 Calm Down joins the extremely small club of songs to reach unicorn status on the platform, where more than 100 million tracks compete for the audience's attention.

🌍 Calm Down's appeal is truly global, gathering the highest number of streams from large markets such as the US, India, Mexico, Brazil and the UK.

According to Spotify's Sub-Saharan Africa MD Jocelyne Muhutu-Remy, Calm Down's success can be attributed to "the power of cross-cultural fusion in our ultra-interconnected world: the blend of catchy afro-fusion rhythms, [Rema]'s unique and soulful singing and - of course - the unexpected addition of youth icon Selena Gomez on an Afrobeats song."

😎 A couple months ago, the American pop star shared her gratitude for being invited to feature on the song: "This man has changed my life forever. Rema, thank you for choosing me to be a part of one of the biggest songs in the world."

😉 This is also the only time in history where a woman has responded positively to a man telling her to calm down.

Congratulations to Rema and to his labels Mavin Records and Jonzing World Record 🎉

🎧 Africa-focused music streaming platform Mdundo’s annual report is out, and it is full of interesting stats.

Established in Kenya in 2013 by Danish founder Martin Nielsen, Mdundo took an unusual path when it was listed on Denmark’s stock exchange (Nasdaq First North Growth Market exchange) in September 2020. This also explains why the company’s results are public - a very rare occurrence for an African music startup.

💡 Contrary to premium services such as Spotify, Mdundo is targeting the African mass market through localized features and partnerships with telcos such as Vodacom in Tanzania, Airtel in Nigeria, and MTN in Nigeria, Ghana, and South Africa.

The streaming service is now approaching 500,000 African songs directly uploaded by more than 140,000 creators.

📈 Key highlights from Mdundo’s 2023 annual report (fiscal year ending in June 2023) include:

26.6 million monthly active users, exceeding the company’s target of 25 million
74% growth in revenue year-on-year from $1.02 million to $1.78 million
35% of total revenue ($620,000) was generated from paying users, representing a 239% growth year-on-year
Meanwhile advertising revenue grew 37% to reach $1.2 million

The company recorded an EBITDA loss of $1.08 million, a 3.5% improvement from the prior fiscal year. It aims to become EBITDA positive by 2025, with 50 million monthly active users.

“I’m confident that in the future 15%-20% of all music on the global charts will be by African artists,” said. “The music industry is going through a massive democratization.”

E-COMMERCE

Ivorian SaaS e-commerce platform ANKA has raised $5 million in equity and debt in a pre-series A extension led by IFC, alongside Proparco and BPI France.

💰 Last January, ANKA (then still called Afrikrea) raised $6.2 million. In total, the seven-year-old startup has secured $13.5 million from investors since its inception and is emerging into one of the few success stories in the African creative tech space.

👗 Until 2021, the company operated solely as Afrikrea, a marketplace for African clothing, accessories, arts, and crafts. It rebranded to ANKA in order to become a one-stop shop for merchants, consolidating their other sales channels (websites, social media), onto a single platform. Thanks to its partnership with DHL, ANKA allows its users to dispatch packages from Africa to other countries for less than $30 in under 72 hours.

🤩 According to ANKA, the company now receives one million visits per month, generating $50 million in annual transactions across 175 countries for a turnover of about $3.8 million.

Interestingly, although it is headquartered in Ivory Coast, most of ANKA’s 20,000+ vendors (80% women) are in Nigeria and Kenya. Meanwhile, its largest markets in terms of terms are the US and France, countries that boast a significant African diaspora who shop online.

FASHION

🎤 🌍 Beyoncé's highly instagrammable Renaissance World Tour was, without contest, one of the main events of the summer.

Since the tour started in May, the singer has worn dozens of striking custom bodysuits from major global brands such as Alexander McQueen, Gucci, Valentino, Balmain, Louis Vuitton and Mugler.

🔥 And then last week, Senegalese label Tongoro entered the room.

Founded in 2016 by Sarah Diouf, Tongoro's trajectory is intrinsically linked with the megastar.

😎 The brand, known for its long, fluid and graphic silhouettes, first caught the world's attention when Beyoncé appeared in one of its outfits while on vacation in Italy in 2018.

Then, in July 2020, the singer released her iconic feature-length musical 'Black Is King', in which she was seen wearing a Tongoro ensemble -- and the brand's significance was cemented in cultural history. It's since been worn by other celebrities, such as Solange and Naomi Campbell.

✂️ For the Renaissance Tour, Diouf created a series of custom looks for Beyoncé and her entire team of dancers of thirty men and women.

Styled by Shiona Turini, the custom NARI bodysuit, including the hand gloves and the thigh-high boots, were all handmade in Dakar. On Instagram, Diouf shared behind-the-scenes pictures of herself working around the clock (and in secret) alongside her master tailors to finish the outfits on time.

💰 With a media impact value estimated at $187 million so far for the brands showcased during the Tour, it's clear that there will be a before and after Renaissance for Tongoro.

💫 Tongoro - which means "star" in Sango, the language of the Central African Republic, where Diouf's mother is from.

📖 Birimian Ventures’ CEO Laureen Kouassi-Olson is sharing her hopes for African Fashion in a new book, entitled “Iconic Africa: La mode de demain sera africaine ou ne sera pas”. (The fashion of tomorrow will be African or it will not be.)

Here’s what she had to say about the book: “For decades, international fashion has been inspired by African creation. Even if this is a tremendous recognition for our continent, this inspiration does not contribute to the emergence of an African fashion industrial sector.

💡 Ensuring that African creation is at the origin of a creation of economic value “made in Africa” requires developing innovative financial mechanisms as much as bringing about a real cultural change in the minds of African creators.

This work is an activist work, a plea for the recognition of creators and for African countries to take control of the creation of value in the fashion and creative sector. At a time when the challenges of development and climate come together, the African continent is today more legitimate than ever to transform on-site the raw materials that it already produces.”

SPORTS

Investors' interest in traditional African sports is ramping up.

🥊In July, leading Dambe promoter African Warriors Fighting Championship (AWFC) signed a groundbreaking sponsorship deal with gambling service Stake.

AWFC will now have to reckon with a new competitor as the Africa Fighters League (AFL) has launched Dambe Warriors League (DWL) in Nigeria.

🇳🇬 Similar to boxing (but using only one striking arm, called “the spear”), Dambe is a traditional martial art which originated among the Hausa people in northern Nigeria.

AFL and DWL were co-founded by businessmen Hugh Guill and Kingsley Pungong (Rainbow Sports Group), following their purchase of a majority stake in Lost Child Media, a Dambe sports promotion company started by Chidi Anyina and Anthony Okeleke.

With Circuit Fights scheduled approximately every two weeks, DWL aims to produce a variety of live and recorded content, to be distributed widely through live online streaming, social media, and eventually television.

COMING UP THIS OCTOBER

Two major events to put on your calendar (or at least on your radar) this October:

🎮 Between October 6 and 8, some 300 young creators from across Africa will take over the iconic La Gaite Lyrique venue in Paris to showcase the continent’s most cutting-edge initiatives in TVseries animation, comics, gaming, esports, AR, VR and digital entrepreneurship.

🙏🏽 I will have the privilege to serve as the MC and moderator for this first edition of the Creative Africa Forum, organized by the French Ministries of Culture and Foreign Affairs, at the initiative of the French Presidential office.

🎤 Among the headliners of the Business Day on October 6 are Lesley Donna Williams (Tshimologong Digital Innovation Precinct), Sidick Bakayoko (Paradise Games), Séraphine Angoula (Dakar Séries Festival), Sebastien Onomo (Special Touch Studios), Brian Afande (Blackrhino VR), and Joachim Landau (Federation Studios Africa).

💰 On the financing side, we will hear from investors George Gachara (HEVA Fund), Ketevan Liparteliani (IFC) and Farrukh Hussain (Sony Innovation Fund), and unveil the winners of the AFD Digital Challenge, which focused this year on the Creative Industries.

🇫🇷 France has a long and complicated history with Africa, and diplomatic relations can sometimes be tense or challenging.

🌍 But everywhere you go on the continent, from Dakar to Nairobi, from Casablanca to Cape Town, France is also recognized as the most ardent and steadfast supporter of arts and culture.

💡 The Creative Africa Forum is one more step on the journey, impulsed by President Macron, towards reinventing the relationship between France and Africa by focusing on creativity, technology, and entrepreneurship, areas in which both regions have much to share.

Although the Business Day on October 6 is fully booked, the exhibition will be open to the general public on October 7 and 8.

💪 Meanwhile, IFC (member of the World Bank Group), the largest development institution focused exclusively on the private sector in emerging markets, is throwing its weight behind the African Creative Industries.

In its 2022 fiscal year, IFC invested a record $32.8 billion in developing countries. And now, the Creative Industries are in the bullseye 🎯.

👉 As mentioned earlier, IFC announced its first investment in an African Creative sector company, leading the $5M extension round of creative ecommerce startup ANKA (owner of the Afrikrea marketplace).

👉 Back in July, IFC also extended a risk-sharing facility to support the Orange Bank x Birimian Ventures debt program, providing loans to Fashion MSMEs in Ivory Coast.

And there is more where that came from.

📆 On October 14, IFC will host a high profile event dedicated to the Creative Industries during the World Bank Group-IMF Annual Meetings in Marrakesh.

Endorsed by IFC Managing Director Makhtar Diop, this will be the first time that the Creative Industries are showcased during this exclusive gathering, attended by thousands of global leaders from the public and private sectors.

💵 I’ll have the pleasure of moderating a panel on “Investing in the Creative Industries - What are the bankable business models” with Bill Sonneborn (IFC), Moulaye Taboure (ANKA), Laureen Kouassi-Olsson (Birimian) and Stuart Forrest (Triggerfish).

We’ll also discuss how governments can help ignite growth in the sector through smart policy and the development of an enabling environment (spoiler alert 🤫 - there's a lot African governments can do without spending actual cash).

Maiko Miyake (IFC) will lead this conversation focused on the audiovisual sector with Professor Kenneth Kim (South Korea/Hallyu expert), Jonathan Olsberg (Olsberg•SPI), Stan McCoy (Motion Picture Association) and Isioma Nnenna Alexis Idigbe (PUNUKA Attorneys & Solicitors).

🇲🇦 Finally, we'll also highlight our host Morocco, which is graciously maintaining this event despite the terrible earthquake that took place earlier this month.

Morocco is emerging as an African champion in many sectors including in the Creative Industries. On October 14, top personalities from the highest levels of government and the art world will be taking the stage.

The event will take place in the brand new UM6P - Mohammed VI Polytechnic University auditorium, and the best news is that you are all invited to attend 🙌.

(Shuttles will be provided between Marrakesh and the University.)

Marie Lora-Mungai

July 31, 2023

HUSTLE & FLOW #48: Africa's $1B Gaming sector, African Animation continues to shine, traditional sports attract sponsors, and more

Marie Lora-Mungai

July 31, 2023

In this new edition of HUSTLE & FLOW, we'll dig into two high-growth, big-potential African creative sectors: Gaming and Beauty. These markets are ripe for the taking, if you know where and how to look (read on for some tips).

Meanwhile, African animation continues to shine, with the back-to-back releases on 'Supa Team 4' on Netflix and 'Garbage Boy and Trash Can' on Cartoon Network, and African traditional combat sports such as Nigeria's Dambe are finally starting to attract the attention they deserve from key industry players.

And finally, are Africa's creative entrepreneurs ready to reconsider their aversion for bank loans as a source of finance? Birimian and Orange Bank may have found a way to make it work in Ivory Coast.

Scroll down for more!

GAMING

🎮 🤑 Sub-Saharan Africa’s gaming industry is expected to generate over $1 billion for the first time in 2024.

That's according to new research compiled by Newzoo for leading African gaming startup Carry1st.

🚀 Despite the current slowdown in the world's economy and in the global gaming market (partially due to a post-Covid correction), games sold in Africa generated $862.8 million in revenue in 2022, up 8.7% compared to the previous year.

According to Jackson Vaughan from VC firm Konvoy, “these initial numbers for gaming on the continent are promising, but the longer-term trends of population growth, internet penetration, and smartphone adoption paint a picture of incredible growth for gaming on the continent.”

Now, this is exciting, but these juicy numbers don't tell the whole story.

💸 Right now, 99.9% (my own guesstimate) of these hundreds of millions spent by Africans on video games are not going into African companies' or developers' pockets. Instead, they flow back into the balance sheets of global giants like Electronic Arts (FIFA, Sims), Riot Games (League of Legends), Ubisoft (Assassin's Creed), Gameloft (Disney games) or Zynga (Words with Friends, Farmville).

🤔 So how can Africa benefit from its young population's appetite for gaming?

✅ Partner with the big game publishers to adapt, distribute, and monetize their top sellers across the continent, then plough back the cash into growing the local ecosystem -- that's the Carry1st playbook.

✅ Invest seriously into video games development training programs. They don't need to be free. Connect graduates with remote game development or game design jobs to start.

✅ Game design is a hit-driven business. Gaming studios have to survive many failures on their way to success. African video games creators can increase their chances of commercial profitability by 1) focusing on casual and social mobile games, where they have an edge in terms of user experience and 2) targeting the global - not local - market from the get-go.

✅ Develop play-to-earn games to service brands, companies (such as FMCGs) or institutions (governments, NGOs) looking for hard-to-access, on-the-ground data across Africa.

✅ On the e-sports side, get global gaming companies to invest in local servers, like Electronic Arts just did in Nigeria, to reduce the latency and enable African gamers to compete in global tournaments. This will unlock new revenue streams around the organization of local gaming events, such as ticket sales, vendor services, sponsorships, and merchandising.

❓ Finally: African telcos potentially have a huge role to play, and massive upside to make, from investing in the local gaming industry. Where are they?

ANIMATION

🤩 South African studio Triggerfish has made African animation history for the second time in two months.

Just a few weeks after the release of its ground-breaking scifi anthology series 'Kizazi Moto' on Disney+ comes 'Supa Team 4', the first ever African orignal animation series to hit Netflix.

🦸Created by Zambian writer Malenga Mulendema and aimed at kids ages 6 to 11, 'Supa Team 4' follows four undercover teen superheroes on a quest to save the world after being recruited by an ex-spy, while juggling the many challenges of attending secondary school in a futuristic Lusaka, Zambia.

👩🏿 The first animated series to emerge from Zambia, the 8-part 'Supa Team 4' was written by eight African women screenwriters and voiced by five African women actors - a remarkable feat in itself. The theme song was composed by Zambian rapper/singer Sampa the Great.

The making of this show - which took 8 years - is also an example of persistence on the part of Mulendema, Triggerfish, and everyone involved. Mulendema originally pitched the concept for 'Supa Team 4' during Triggerfish's Story Lab organized with Disney in 2015. In 2017, Triggerfish and UK-based producer and distributer CAKE began developing the series under the working title 'Mama K’s Team 4'. Two years later, Netflix acquired the series and took it to the finish line.

The emerging Zambian animation community is feeling energized by the 'Supa Team 4' spotlight, writes Semafor, so we hope to see more stories coming from the Southern African nation in the years to come.

🗑️ Meanwhile, in (another!) African animation first, Cartoon Network also released the long-awaited series 'Garbage Boy and Trash Can' by Nigerian creator and director Ridwan Moshood.

Just like the teen girls of 'Supa Team 4', Garbage Boy is a super hero, except that, in this case, he does not actually have any super powers.

🍋 “The inspiration for creating the lead characters came from the derogatory name bullies used to call me in school,” explained Moshood, who said he created the characters to help children experiencing the same mistreatment. Talk about making lemonade with the proverbial lemons.

The 10-episode series was commissioned by Cartoon Network after Moshood won the Cartoon Network Creative Lab initiative 4 and a half years ago -- a sprint compared to 'Supa Team 4's marathon. It was co-produced in collaboration with Pure Garbage, a South African company which was founded specifically for this project, and Nigerian animation studio Magic Carpet.

BEAUTY

💄 The African beauty market has the potential to become one of the most lucrative in the world.

🚀 According to Statista, the African beauty industry currently grows by 8-10% per year against a global market growth rate of 4%. It is projected to be worth $77.81 billion by 2028.

💸 Black women spend a lot more on hair care than white or Asian women. In fact, in the US Black women spend 4 times more on their hair than white women -- and that amount represents more than 25% of their monthly budget!

Although there's been much progress in the Black beauty market in the past few years, in a large part thanks to the spotlight (and FOMO) effect created by the launch in 2017 of Rihanna's Fenty line, there is still a lot of space for growth.

Here are some of the opportunities I see in the beauty space:

✅ Modern, branded chains of beauty salons that leverage tech to make the (very long) experience of getting one's hair done smoother, more enjoyable, and more affordable for both women and men.

✅ Tech and scientific innovation around natural or synthetic hair for weaves or extensions, focused on avoiding damage to the skin or scalp.

✅ Innovation around some of Africa's natural, indigenous ingredients such as shea butter and baobab, moringa, marula and argan oils and their transformation into cosmetics. There is no reason why Africa couldn't become a center for organic, sustainable cosmetics development for the world.

⚠️ For all of the above, a strong focus on branding, marketing, and distribution will be key to success. Too many young brands are thinking too small and not projecting enough cool to break through in the beauty space.

Who will be the entrepreneur who will convince Lupita to launch her own, Africa-sourced brand?

SPORTS BUSINESS

💪🏾 The African Warriors Fighting Championship (AWFC), a leading promoter of traditional African martial arts, has signed a landmark sponsorship deal with crypto betting company Stake.

🇳🇬 AWFC has been working to modernize and standardize Nigeria's traditional combat sport Dambe, which is very popular in the north of the country, and to introduce it to international audiences.

Its new agreement with Stake is a significant step towards reaching that goal.

🔥 A major online gambling company and a big sports sponsor, Stake already supports the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), one of the biggest Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) leagues in the world, as well as Nigerian middleweight world champion Israel Adesagna.

The deal - the first in Africa for Stake - will see the crypto company branding appear on African Warriors uniforms, events and digital content. It is also likely to generate a lot of visibility for Dambe internationally.

I first became aware of the world of African traditional combat sports in 2007, during my past life as a journalist. Stuck in Khartoum waiting for an elusive visa to Darfour, I decided to go film a story about traditional Nubian wrestling (which I had read about in my Lonely Planet guide!) rather than sit in my hotel room.

The circular sand pitch, the charisma of the fighters, the passion of the audience -- It felt like stepping into the movie 'Gladiator'.

Indigenous African martial art forms exist all across the Sahel. Senegalese wrestling is probably the best-known one - it's more popular locally than football. Meanwhile, Maxwell Kalu, founder of AWFC, describes Nigeria's Dambe as “ancient, intense and steeped in tradition”. AWFC's Instagram account already counts more than 212,000 followers, many from Brazil, Canada, and the US.

🥊 However, Dambe or Senegalese wrestling are not currently recognized by the MMA ecosystem, which combines fighting techniques from various combat sports such as Brazil's jiu-jitsu, Muay Thai, kickboxing, Japan's karate, or Korea's taekwondo.

But the concept of MMA is quite new. It was first introduced in the United States in the 1990s by... the UFC. It was then regulated and standardized in the 2000s.

🚀 So, in 2023, as world-famous sports enthusiast Shakira once said, "tsamina mina, eh, eh, waka waka, eh, eh, tsamina mina zangalewa, this time for Africa."

FINANCING THE CREATIVE SECTOR

🤔 Can debt be an appropriate tool to finance the Creative Industries in Africa?

This debate has been going on for years.

💰 Most investors currently active in the Creative space are Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) -- essentially very large, multinational banks. They have many financial tools at their disposal, but debt is the less risky one as the lender's expected return is directly baked into the price of the loan (the interest rate).

😱 On the other side are creative entrepreneurs who, for the most part, are small business owners extremely vulnerable to the vagaries of their home market -- currency devaluations and forex risk, political instability, unpredictable taxation, rising interest rates, and value chain disturbances. They don't want to be burdened by a loan when the path ahead is so unclear.

When I was running my first business, a company in Kenya called Buni Media, my year was consumed by finding work and raising money to sustain our 80-person team. And every year, it almost felt like starting from scratch. That was pressure enough -- I would have never taken a loan I wasn't sure how to repay.

💡 But a recent partnership between Orange Bank and Birimian Ventures is showing that debt facilities geared towards the creative sector can work, if they are thoughtfully designed and managed.

🎉 In September 2022, Orange Bank and Birimian launched a $167,000 pilot debt program targeted at fashion companies in Ivory Coast. As of July 2023, 21 companies had been financed, with a repayment rate of 100%.

🚀 Last week, the two partners announced a new $836,000 fund, which will expand its reach to other sub-sectors of the creative industries. This time, the program is backed by IFC (International Finance Corporation)'s guarantee facility, which means that Orange and Birimian can take more risks.

So what did Orange and Birimian do to generate such positive results?

✅ They focused on one sub-sector in which Birimian had deep expertise.

✅ Birimian used its sector knowledge to pre-select companies and prepare them to apply for a loan. Out of 80 submissions, they selected 21 (26%).

✅ The product was packaged as a short-term loan to assist designers with the production of their next collection, so the loan had a clear and concrete purpose: to purchase raw material, lease equipment and pay for labor costs over a defined period. It would also be immediately repaid from the sales of the products. The short duration of the loan limits the impact of the interest rate on the borrower.

✅ Birimian then continued working with the selected companies throughout the period, providing coaching, access to markets and visibility.

The same model could be applied to finance the creation of other products that have a short route to market: TV series, music album, art exhibition, and more.

FOR THE CULTURE

🍦 And I'll leave you today with a cool Africa Special to dig into on these long days of summer, bought to us by none other than Teen Vogue.

The boundaries-busting youth magazine has published a juicy "Africa New Wave package" of articles that "celebrates the rich culture and impact of the globe's demographically youngest continent. Through a series of visual stories, [Teen Vogue] is unpacking the gravity of Africa's history and influence on the world and why it needs to be looked to as a source of inspiration for radical youth-focused change."

Check out in particular:

📱 "What Young People Are Wearing in Lagos" -- Using an iPhone Pro Max 14, photographer Stephen Tayo (one of my personal favorites) captured the incredible street style of Lagos.

👗 "The Folklore Is Putting African Fashion and Beauty Brands on the Main Stage" -- Founder Amira Rasool talks about her mission to make the work of African designers and creatives available around the world.

🎤 "Amaarae's Sophomore Album Fountain Baby is the Baddie's Manifesto" -- The Ghanaian American singer-songwriter is on her journey to self-discovery through music, fashion, and beauty.

Marie Lora-Mungai

July 3, 2023

HUSTLE & FLOW #47: African animation's watershed moment, African CreaTech, and podcasts galore

Marie Lora-Mungai

July 3, 2023

Disney+ / Kizazi Moto - Cartoon Network / Garbage Boy and Trash Can / Netflix - Supa Team 4

African culture shone bright like a diamond this past weekend.

Forty thousand people gathered in Portimão, Portugal for the Afro Nation festival, while Nollywood was celebrated at the Essence Fest in New Orleans, which devoted an entire day to Nigeria's thriving film industry.

A suitable ending to a month of June in which the impact and influence of African creativity extended way beyond its natural borders.

Read on for more 👇

ANIMATION

The biggest news of the month was the buzz created by the premiere of 🔥'Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire'🔥, which comes out this Wednesday on Disney+

As I told Variety, I believe that this stunning project represents a watershed moment for the African animation industry.

💫 An anthology of 10 short films created by animators from 6 different African countries, 'Kizazi Moto' offers a 'dizzying blend of mythology, science fiction and Afrofuturism, presenting 10 bold, wholly original visions of the future from a distinctly African perspective (...) Collectively, they present a portrait of the continent that’s never been seen before', according to Variety's Christopher Vourlias.

❤️ This anthology is the result of a true labor of love from South African studio Triggerfish, who initiated the relationship with Disney and shepherded this project over many years.

💪🏾 It illustrates what African creators and animators can achieve when given the proper resources in terms of training, time and budget, and will without any doubt inspire and energize many young animators from across the continent.

Triggerfish presented a sneak peek of 'Kizazi Moto' earlier in June during the Annecy Animation Festival. With many African animators present at the screening, the buzz in the room was palpable.

Unfortunately I arrived in Annecy too late to live this moment, but I was able to see the 'Kizazi Moto' posters prominently displayed across the festival site.

🧐 'Kizazi Moto' executive producer and Oscar winner Peter Ramsey (“Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse”), hinted at potential follow ups for the project:

“There is stuff floating out there that could very well happen. I really hope it does,” he said. “I’m hoping we can do another ‘Kizazi Moto’ anthology or two, because there’s so many talented people here … There’s a lot to explore. A lot to tell.”

⛰ Besides the teasing of 'Kizazi Moto', this year's Annecy International Animation Festival was notable for its strong African contingent.

🚡 Over the last few years, Africa has been steadily building its presence at what is globally recognized as the largest and most prestigious animation event in the world, gathering some 15,000 animation professionals from 100+ countries.

🔦 In 2021, Africa was even given the 'Spotlight' at Annecy. Unfortunately, this coincided with the pandemic and the impact of the distinction was subdued.

💪🏿 But this year, animators from the continent came out in force:

✅ La Grotte sacrée (The Sacred Cave), directed by Daniel Minlo and Cyrille Masso will be representing Cameroon in Official Selection.

✅ 'Kizazi Moto' was showcased with the screening of several of its short films: 'Enkai' by Ng'endo Mukii (Kenya), 'Moremi' by Shofela Coker (Nigeria), and 'Surf Sangoma' by Nthato Mokgata (aka star musician Spoek Mathambo!) and Catherine Green (South Africa).

✅ Nigerian and Ghanaian animation studios joined forces to represent the West African ecosystem, with 11 projects slated to pitch during the festival. Among the studios in attendance were Magic Carpet Studios, Basement Animation, Smids Animation Studios, Jolly Squid Media & Animation, Folktail Studios, AnimaxFYB Studios and Leti Arts.

✅ Also pitching were filmmaker Mbithi Masya (Kenya) with 'Papo Hapo', Gisaburo Sugii and Arthell Isom (DRC) with 'Mfinda', animation studio Diprente with 'Junk Pilots' and I'm sure many more.

This solid and diverse contingent illustrates without a doubt that Africa's animation sector is gaining in strength and credibility.

As always, the talent is there. But much work remains to be done:

❌ We are still lacking large-scale, up-to-date, affordable and sustainable training programs to build and up-skill local technical capacity. Many actors are getting their hands dirty to solve this problem, including Triggerfish, Nuno Martins, Mounia Aram, Ferdy 'Ladi Adimefe, Francis Y. Brown, Sebastien Onomo, and Africa Digital Media Institute (ADMI).

❌ Disney and Netflix have been the first to give real production budgets to African animation projects. But beyond that, the number of buyers remain scarce. The links between African animation and the international markets still need to be strengthened.

❌ The African animation space is mostly comprised of small studios of 5-15 people operating independently. This is not the most efficient set-up to develop and produce world-class IP. The winners will be the ones who will build alliances and trade some control in exchange for a more diversified skill set, wider networks, and ultimately, increased revenue.

The month of July will bring more African animation firsts, with the release of Ridwan Moshood 'Garbage Boy and Trash Can' on Cartoon Network and Triggerfish's (them again!!) 'Supa Team 4' on Netflix.

Stay tuned.

MUSIC

🏆 Get ready to see more than Afrobeats win big at the next Grammys, as the famous music awards ceremony has just announced a new, wide-ranging African Music category.

🌍 Officially titled 'Best African Music Performance award', this new category will "recognize recordings that utilize unique local expressions from across the African continent," according to the Grammys website.

🎶 "Highlighting regional melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic musical traditions, the Category includes but is not limited to the Afrobeat, Afro-fusion, Afro Pop, Afrobeats, Alte, Amapiano, Bongo Flava, Genge, Kizomba, Chimurenga, High Life, Fuji, Kwassa, Ndombolo, Mapouka, Ghanaian Drill, Afro-House, South African Hip-Hop, and Ethio Jazz genres."

👌🏽 Well, first off, looks like the Grammys have caught the drift and are well aware of the diversity of contemporary African sounds.

📦 Some critics have warned that the inclusion of an Africa-focused category may put African artists in a box.

But can we agree that it's a big step up from the dusty 'World Music' label?

🤯 Between +500% and +900% in 5 years -- that's how much Afrobeats streams have increased on Spotify in lands as far removed from Africa as Australia, The Netherlands, or Mexico.

This remarkable growth has led the music platform to launch 'Afrobeats: Journey of a Billion Streams', a dedicated website serving as a comprehensive hub for all things Afrobeats.

😵 💫 On my side, I cannot seem to get Rema's 'Calm Down', the second most streamed Afrobeats song of all time (after CKay's 'Love Nwantiti'), out of my head.

🇹🇿 Meanwhile, Tanzanian musicians are also breaking records, even though they haven't really appeared yet on the radar of Western audiences. TZ superstar Diamond Platnumz's YouTube channel has now reached 7.7M subscribers and 2.2B views. As a comparison, Burna Boy's own channel has 3.92M subscribers and 2.1B views.

🏔 But this is just the tip of the iceberg.

🚀 According to IFPI, the music industry's annual source of data, Sub-Saharan Africa became the fastest growing music market in 2022 (+34.7%), largely driven by a significant revenue boost in South Africa (+31.4%).

This means that African artists will start to see a growing portion of their revenue coming from their own continent -- despite the glaring lack of proper music venues - rather than from 'the abroad'.

CREATECH

Vivatech, one of the world's largest tech events, also took place in Paris in June, and the numbers are in:

🎫 150,000 attendees

🌍 174 countries

🚀 2,400 startups

🏄🏻 1 President Macron crowd-surfing

😎 1 Elon Musk show

🔥 And also an extremely dynamic AfricaTechLab pavilion and AfricaTechAwards 2023, recognizing the top startups in the ClimateTech, HealthTech, and Fintech sectors, both sponsored by IFC.

🧐 I was there, with a mission to meet with African Creative Tech entrepreneurs and investors.

Although the concept of CreaTech is still extremely new and confusing for many, a significant number of today's biggest tech companies operate in that space -- think of streaming platforms like Netflix or Spotify, marketplaces like Etsy, fashion e-commerce sites like Farfetch, creator funding solutions like Patreon, design tools like Canva, or publishing solutions like Substack.

If we extend the concept to tech-enabled creative companies, then it's almost endless. Technology is now powering the production of most creative endeavors, especially in film, animation, gaming, and music.

But how does this sector translate to Africa? A few take-aways:

❌ First, a reality check: too many entrepreneurs are still trying to build the 'African Netflix' or 'African Spotify'. Take it from somebody who's been there -- you can't compete against the GAFAMs. If you are building a content platform, the only edge you may have is if you a) target the mass market/bottom of the pyramid and b) are embedded with one or several telco(s) and/or phone manufacturer(s) -- they are the ones who own your customers.

✅ There are opportunities in facilitating or driving the creation of premium IP at scale.

✅ There are opportunities in getting African creative products ready for export, and in connecting African brands to global markets.

✅ There are opportunities in facilitating cross-border payments in various currencies to creators or freelancers.

✅ There are opportunities in training African creatives to global standards and connecting them with global remote jobs.

⚠️ Be aware that the VC funding model might not be the right one for your company. VCs are looking to make a 10x return on their investment over 5 years. If you cannot realistically paint such a scenario for your company, you can still be very successful, but you should be approaching other types of investors (angels, impact funds, PE or micro-PE, banks, etc).

PODCASTS

And finally, looks like June was also podcast month for me, as I was privileged to be given space to share my thoughts in not only one, but TWO leading African business podcasts.

🎙First, I spoke with Terser Adamu in his Unlocking Africa Podcast about Africa's on-going Cultural Renaissance.

👀 The world's gaze is now turned towards the continent in search of creative inspiration. How can African artists, talents and creatives take advantage of this moment?

We spoke about:

✅ How, after starting out as a journalist some 20 years ago, I came to see my role as a connector, facilitator and catalyst, serving as a link between the continent and global investors

✅ Why I believe that African music, film, fashion and sports are the continent's biggest exports

✅ How governments can harness the soft power of their creative and sports industries to propel their countries and the continent forward

✅ More specifically, what are some of the strategies that could be applied to Africa's film sector

✅ Actionable advice to aspiring filmmakers and content creators who want their work to reach a global audience

I was also invited to chat with Isaac Aboah and Daniel Merki, co-hosts of the Change Africa Podcast.

The main question I asked was: Are African artists benefiting from the arrival of global entertainment companies on the continent or are they falling into an exploitative model?

📢 I also discussed today's multi-faceted African Creative and Sports landscape - challenges, triumphs, and potential - as well as my personal journey from journalist to entrepreneur and investor:

✅️ How I co-created The XYZ Show, a groundbreaking political satire show in Kenya

✅️ How I survived launching a video streaming platform when the African tech scene was still more a concept than a reality

✅️ The exciting growth of the African Creative industries over the past 15 years

✅️ The pivotal role played by the digital platforms as catalysts for the global reach and visibility of African content

✅️ The importance of nurturing African talent and investing in developing quality IP

✅️ My widely shared UNESCO report on the African audiovisual sector

✅️ The industry 's need for more large-scale educational initiatives and physical infrastructure

Let me know what you thought about both episodes - would love to get your feedback.

Marie Lora-Mungai

June 2, 2023

HUSTLE & FLOW #46: African films shine at Cannes, African Soft Power, and an 🔥exclusive event list 🔥

Marie Lora-Mungai

June 2, 2023

This month of May has been filled with travels, talks and events, and June is shaping up to be much of the same.

In May alone, events relevant to the African creative industries have included:

📆 16-27 May

🇫🇷 Cannes, France

👉 Festival de Cannes, with The African Pavilion, Pavilion Afriques and AfroCannes, 3 separate initiatives to support African cinema

📆 18-21 May

🇲🇦 Rabat, Morocco

👉 The MOCA, Movement of Creative Africas, the forum of African cultures and Diasporas

📆 20 May

🇳🇬 Lagos, Nigeria

👉 The Africa Magic Viewers Choice Awards (AMVCA), MultiChoice Group's annual event recognizing outstanding achievement in television and film

📆 23-27 May

🇷🇼 Kigali, Rwanda

👉 Basketball Africa League (BAL) Finale

👉 BAL Innovation Summit (May 25), bringing together leaders from business, technology, sports and entertainment

👉 Annual summit of The Africa Soft Power Project, premier event for Africa’s creative and tech industries

📆 24-26 May

🇸🇳 Dakar, Senegal

👉 FORAFRICC Summit, Forum African pour les Industries Culturelles et Creatives (Youssou Ndour Foundation)

📆 25 May

🌍 Worldwide

👉 Africa Day celebrations

📆 27-28 May

🇺🇸 Miami, USA

👉Afro Nation Miami, annual three-day music festival

🤯 There's just too much going on right now in the African creative and sports space for anyone to keep track. It was time to curate a list of the most relevant events, so I stepped up to the plate.

🔥 Here's a first draft 🔥

Hopefully this can become a collaborative project - you should be able to comment directly in the document to let me know if anything is missing. Or just sent me a DM or an email, and I'll add your event to the spreadsheet.

In other news this month:

FILM

✨ The 76th edition of the Cannes Film Festival turned out to be the best vintage yet for Africa.

First, a record number of African films premiered at the festival, including two titles in the main competition. Read about the full list here.

Then, a total of four African films bagged awards in the 'Un Certain Regard' category: Les Meutes by Kamal Lazraq (Morocco) won the Jury Prize, Kadib Abyad by Asmae El-Moudir (Morocco) got the Directing Prize, Belgian-Congolese musician and actor Baloji won the New Voice Prize for Augure, and Goodbye Julia by Mohamed Kordofani (Sudan) received the Freedom Prize award.

💵 But this Cannes Film Festival was a great one for Africa also because, suddenly, there is money willing to back African projects.

Key financiers for African film include the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) and its $1 billion creative fund, which I had the opportunity to help design, and Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea Fund, which last year provided $14 million in financing to films from Africa and the Arab world.

International film financing companies, such as Creative Wealth Media and Convergent Media Capital, are also now starting to put African films on their radar.

🤔 Why now?

✅ Sata Cissokho, head of acquisitions at Memento International, attributes this shift to the emergence of a new generation of African filmmakers, "who grew up having access to what the world had to offer in terms of filmmaking and who are now using this to complement what their cultural heritage gave them.”

“It’s no longer about making the films that are expected from the continent but making the most of the richness of their cultures, combining the African art of storytelling with the Westernized codes of narration.”

🙌🏿 The creative holy grail that the industry has been chasing for years might finally be in sight.

✅ African storytelling is benefiting from the growing diversity push in Hollywood, initially spurred by the 2018 success of the first "Black Panther" movie and the Black Lives Matter movement.

✅ Finally, the arrival of Netflix and other streaming platforms on the continent has been and continues to be instrumental in offering "new horizons" to filmmakers, both literally and metaphorically.

SOFT POWER

The buzz surrounding the success of African filmmakers at Cannes showed us that African governments should prioritize having a robust soft power strategy.

🤔 Why, when there are so many other pressing problems to address, such as electricity, infrastructure, education, or health?

💰 Because having a strong national narrative based on a country's most inspirational assets - its nature, culture, artists, and athletes - can help unlock the resources needed by all these other sectors.

🌟 The more Africa will shine on the global creative scene, the more investors will line up to finance roads, schools and hospitals.

As Kelis famously said, "my milkshake brings all the boys to the yard".

👉🏾 Hollywood successfully sold the American dream for decades -- it is only now starting to crumble faced with the rough reality of the country's decline.

👉🏾 Over the past 30 years, South Korea masterfully transformed itself into a beacon of global pop culture by investing strategically into its creative industries, now known as the 'K Wave' or 'Hallyu'. In 2021, Hallyu had an estimated $12.45 billion boost on the Korean economy.

👉🏾 Colombia achieved a tricky rebranding from a dangerous narcostate to "the most welcoming place on earth", and is now well on its way to becoming a significant tourism destination. The country was named one of "52 places to love in 2021" by The New York Times.

In Africa, major results could be achieved by pushing through key measures at a very low cost:

✅ Name a culture minister who actually knows about culture

✅ Pass a creative bill that sets a clear ambition and agenda for the country

✅ Partner with development organizations to gather and track data on the country's creative sector

✅ Get serious about film incentives and co-production treaties - they matter very much

✅ Instead of putting money in, just avoid taking money out - establish tax moratoriums on creative activities, make investments in the creative sector tax deductible

✅ Organize a world-class festival in an area the country is particularly strong in

✅ Sponsor artists and athletes to attend events abroad

✅ Leverage the power of the diaspora

Then sit back, and see what happens.

CONTENT PRODUCTION

🇫🇷 While African filmmakers shine in the South of France, French media companies are continuing their expansion into Francophone West Africa. And now they're getting increasingly involved in content production.

After acquiring 🇸🇳 Senegal-based Keewu Production a couple years ago, French content behemoth Mediawan has now taken a majority stake in Bernard Azria's distribution and production outfit Côte Ouest, based in 🇨🇮 Ivory Coast.

To give you an idea of how big and influential Mediawan is: last December, the French group acquired Brad Pitt's prestige production company Plan B 🤯

💃 Meanwhile, among other feats, Côte Ouest is known to industry insiders as the entity responsible for bringing Latin American telenovelas to the African market in the 1990s. Telenovelas, both foreign and locally-produced, have since become one of the most popular genres of entertainment across the continent.

French operator Canal+ International, which holds a de facto monopoly on Pay TV in Francophone Africa, will also hold a minority stake in Côte Ouest.

Back in 2019, Mediawan and Canal+ had already partnered on an African project -- launching a joint venture to develop and produce original African content in the French language.

In Francophone Africa, all content roads lead to Canal+.

SPORTS BUSINESS

🥊 The Professional Fighters League (PFL) is coming to Africa, and the league has unlisted former UFC heavyweight champion Francis Ngannou as its Africa Chairman.

Ngannou made the switch to PFL from competing league UFC, with whom he controversially parted ways last year. He will fight in PFL's nascent Super Fight division, which was created to attract fighters to sign deals with more favorable terms.

🤝 This time, Ngannou positioned himself more strategically. For PFL, he will not only be a fighter, but also a business partner. The Cameroonian champion will advise the league on its expansion to Africa, which is slated to start in 2024.

🌍 The process includes scouring the continent for fighters and for countries to host fights. According to Ngannou, Cameroon, Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa are early targets.

Africa has been on the radar of the Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) world for some time.

🥇 Until August 2022, all 3 major UFC titles were held by African champions: Ngannou (heavyweight), Israel Adesagna (middleweight) and Kamaru Usman (welterweight).

Recently valued at $12.1 billion, UFC is considered the most valuable MMA promotion company. Its charismatic president Dana White has publicly said that expanding to Africa was a priority and that, in addition to hosting events, the league planned to bring a UFC Performance Institute to the continent.

🤜🏿🤛🏿 It seems that UFC and PFL are ready to take their rivalry to Africa.

Meanwhile, other operators such as Bellator MMA, Vivendi's ARES Fighting Championship, Singapore-based ONE Championship, as well as emerging local ones, are also gearing up to enter the ring.

This is shaping up to be a properly stacked fight card.

PODCAST

📢 Finally, I'm very glad to be featured in the new season of the Change Africa Podcast alongside 11 other inspiring and insightful thought leaders, including Ken Agyapong Jr, co-founder and CFO of AfroFuture Festival (Formerly Afrochella); Benny Bonsu, Director of Content at the International Olympic Committee; Anita Erskine, CEO of Anita Erskine Media; Ashleigh Moolman Pasio and Xylon Van Eyck, Olympian and founders of Rocacobra Collective; Paul Ninson, Founder of Dikan Centre; Daniel Damah, Film Producer; Adora Mba, Founder and director of ADA \ contemporary art gallery; Addy Awofisayo, Head of Music, Sub-Saharan Africa at YouTube; and Joshua Buatsi, 2019 British Light Heavyweight title holder and Olympian.

Listen to the first episode with Lucy Quist, Managing Director, Morgan Stanley & author of the ‘The Bold New Normal’, and watch out for the others -- mine will be out on June 22nd!

🎧 Change Africa on Spotify: https://lnkd.in/eXut5A-3

🎧 Change Africa on Apple: https://lnkd.in/dAykvMpR

Marie Lora-Mungai

May 1, 2023

HUSTLE & FLOW #45: Netflix's $175M Africa investment, African talents go to Hollywood, the NFL goes to Africa

Marie Lora-Mungai

May 1, 2023

(c) Netflix, Africa socio-economic report 2016-2022

The biggest news this April was the release by Netflix of a report analyzing the impact of their investments in Africa in the past 6 years (read more below). The reveal that the platform had spent $175 million on the continent got the industry buzzing.

That's certainly not nothing, but... last week the streamer announced that it planned to invest $2.5 billion in South Korea over the next 4 years. If we compare these numbers to both regions' populations, they represent a $12 investment per person in South Korea versus $0,025 per person in Sub-Saharan Africa. There is a long way to go.

Last month also saw the announcement of two ground-breaking deals between African talents and Hollywood studios. Both partnerships took years to materialize and were shepherded by CAA's Head of Africa Ozi Menakaya, who has more of that good stuff up his sleeve.

On April 18, I attended MIPTV in Cannes and had the opportunity to speak about new opportunities in African film finance at the event's co-production breakfast. I was also lucky to get a sneak peak of South African animation studio Triggerfish's 'Kizazi Moto' (Generation Fire) scifi anthology project for Disney, which will be released on Disney+ over the summer. You won't want to miss that one.

Before I roll out the rest of this newsletter, let us bid farewell to Calypso singer, actor and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte, who died on April 25 at 96 years old. In the 1960s, Belafonte used his wealth and fame to bring American attention to the apartheid regime in South Africa, playing a crucial role in promoting the careers of the South African musicians Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela.

Off we go for HUSTLE & FLOW #45:

STREAMING

💡 Six years after making its grand entrance in Africa, Netflix released an enlightening report about its socio-economic impact on the continent.

The 44-pages document zooms in on Netflix's 3 focus markets so far: South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya.

Here's the gist:

💵 Netflix invested a total of $175 million in South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya combined between 2016 and 2022. That's about $29 million per year of operation.

🇿🇦 South Africa received the bulk of this investment ($125 million), with 173 titles licensed and 16 originals commissioned.

➡️ The single largest investment so far has been in 'One Piece', a live-action adaptation of the Japanese manga and anime series by the same name, which is set to be released this year. Netflix brought the project to South Africa and fully financed the $54 million production budget.

🇳🇬 In Nigeria, Netflix invested $23.6 million to license 283 titles and commission 3 originals.

🤔 We can assume that the remaining $28.4 million were spent on licensing content from the rest of the continent, producing 2 originals in Kenya, supporting various capacity building initiatives, and on other operational or overhead costs for their Africa operations.

🚀 Netflix estimates that its activities over the past 6 years helped create or sustain 12,000 jobs and generate $218 million in GDP revenue.

🌍 Netflix has been instrumental in bringing international exposure to African filmmakers and their stories. Out of the 9 local titles that were the most watched outside of Africa, 6 were from South Africa, 2 from Nigeria and 1 from Kenya.

➡️ The above list is yet to be updated with the recent South African hit series 'Unseen' from Gambit Films. Gambit is also behind the 3 seasons of 'Blood and Water' which currently hold the top 3 spots on the list.

🎓 Netflix also invests seriously in capacity building through training workshops, donations to industry bodies, mentorships, on-the-job training, and educational grants.

➡️ In particular, the $1 million Netflix Fund for Creative Equity provides grants for students across Southern, East and West Africa to pursue film studies.

🔥 Finally, another important takeaway that comes up a few times in this report:

The streaming giant remarks that the current media production incentives across the continent are not enough to stimulate the creative sector, and that financial constraints limit the industry's evolution.

If Netflix says it...

👋🏿 Meanwhile, Mansa, a new free, ad-supported streaming platform focused on global Black culture, also launched last month.

🚀 Co-founded by actors David Oyelowo, Nate Parker and Chiké Okonkwo, alongside tech entrepreneur and film financier Zak Tanjeloff, the new platform is launching with $8M in seed funding.

💵 Investors include MaC Venture Capital, WndrCo, Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Investment Partners, Base Ventures, and other big names such as NBA star and Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson, and Wemimo Abbey, co-founder of the Softbank-backed unicorn Esusu.

🤔 Mansa is not the first streaming platform to focus on Black content in the highly competitive VOD space: BET+, ALLBLK, Black Cinema+, Brown Sugar, Black Box Movies, Black & Sexy TV, kweliTV and AfroLandTV are just a few examples of services targeting this audience.

⏱ But Mansa's co-founders hope that their free, ad-supported model will make the difference. According to Nielsen, Black audiences make up nearly 40% of the view time on major ad-supported streaming services like Tubi (39%) and Pluto TV (36%).

🎞 Mansa is launching with some 1,500 hours of content, including longform and shortform film and TV shows, free ad-supported streaming (FAST) channels and video podcasts.

🤳🏿 Targeting Gen Z and younger millennials, Mansa also incorporates features that showcase user-generated content, such as a feed of trending videos from YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, and another one called “Watch Out Loud,” which lets users join a watch party (or “Room”) and stream movies and TV shows alongside creators and independent filmmakers.

The company is also working on original titles through its Mansa Originals division, and plans to eventually launch original short-form content made by smaller creators.

💪🏿 David Oyelowo has been a long-time advocate of Black and African ownership of their own stories, platforms, and audiences. “We aim to change the paradigm around creator fairness, solving to address long felt challenges in the industry through addressing ownership, transparency and community on a foundational level," he said.

🌍 Mansa plans to launch in the US during the second quarter of 2023 before expanding internationally, first into Africa and then throughout the diaspora.

COMIC BOOKS

🦸🏾A home-grown Nigerian superhero universe is getting the Hollywood treatment.

🔥 Universal Studios Hollywood's TV arm UCP has signed with Nigerian online comic book company Comic Republic to develop a slate of TV series based on characters from its popular Vanguards Universe.

⚡️ Founded in 2013 by Jide Martin, Comic Republic is the creator of the Vanguards Universe, which revolves around what happens when members of the first race — humanity’s self-proclaimed gods — reunite to punish the people of Lagos for the sins of the Guardian. Those who have decided to be heroes and protectors are forced to become humankind’s first line of defense, to serve and to protect, to be Vanguards.

🤝 The deal, which gives UCP access to 14 Vanguards Universe characters, has been more than one year in the making and was brokered by CAA's Ozi Menakaya. Ozi spotted Comic Republic 4 years ago.

💡 I often get asked what advice I would give to aspiring writers and filmmakers on the continent. That is my answer:

✅ Spend time crafting your characters and storylines, and building your IP. Go deep into your characters' psychology and narrative arcs. Make them real and relatable.

✅ Share your work with the world, even if it is in-progress.

⛔️ Don't keep it for yourself. Don't be scared of having your idea stolen -- ideas have no real value, execution over the long term is what matters.

✅ Gather feedback, learn, improve and iterate, building an engaged audience as you go.

✅ When your work is good enough, you will get noticed.

Jide Martin and his team have spent 10 years building their Vanguards Universe, and now they have a deal with Universal. Congratulations to them!

ANIMATION

🔥The teaser for Disney's animated anthology project 'Kizazi Moto' (Generation Fire) is out.

👏🏼 An impressive kick-off for this labor of love by South African studio Triggerfish Animation, who sourced, developed and produced these 10 wholly original scifi short films by 10 filmmakers from across the continent.

🤩 I was lucky to get a sneak peak and this is one very rare case where the full-length films are better than the trailer.

In case you had any doubt, this is what can be achieved when the proper resources are given to a well thought-out African project.

'Kizazi Moto' will premiere on Disney+ over the summer. Prepare to be amazed by how much African animation has progressed in such a short time.

FILM

🇨🇮 Started from Abidjan, now he's here.

🎥 French-Ivorian filmmaker Philippe Lacôte has signed on to direct "Killer Heat", a thriller starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Shailene Woodley and Richard Madden, for Amazon Prime.

🎞 Born in Abidjan, Lacôte is a veteran of African cinema. He started his career in the mid 1990s, directing and producing several projects between France, Ivory Coast, and Burkina Faso.

His first fiction feature film, "Run", premiered as part of the 'Un Certain Regard' selection at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014.

🏆 But it's his latest film, “Night of the Kings", which propelled him on the global stage in 2020. The film premiered at the 2020 Venice Film Festival and went on to win the Amplify Voices Award at the Toronto Film Festival.

😎 On the back of this success, Lacôte was signed by CAA's Ozi Menakaya, who helped him perform this very rare transition to Hollywood -- and to be tapped to direct a non-African-focused project.

Lacôte joins the very small circle of African directors to have achieved such a feat, and which includes:

🇰🇪 Kenya's Wanuri Kahiu ("Look both Ways" for Netflix)

🇳🇬 Nigeria's Akin Omotoso ("Rise" for Disney)

🇿🇦 South Africa's Neill Blomkamp ("Elysium" for TriStar and Sony Pictures) and

🇿🇦 Gavin Hood ("X-Men Origins: Wolverine" for Marvel).

"Killer Heat" begins production in May in Crete.

HERITAGE

✈️ 🌍 Africa's stolen artifacts are slowly making their way back to the continent. And that's a great opportunity for some countries' tourism industry.

Today, the majority of African artifacts in museums are held outside Africa. The most well-known of these artifacts are the Benin Bronzes, which were looted from Nigeria's Benin City by British soldiers in 1897. To learn more about this, I recommend reading Barnaby Philipps' great book 'Loot'.

Now, 88 years after Nigerian traditional ruler Oba Akenzua II championed the cause in 1935, former colonial powers are finally heeding the call for restitution.

🇳🇬 Last year, the United States, United Kingdom and Germany transferred the ownership of about 121 Benin artifacts to Nigeria.

🇧🇯 In the nearby Republic of Benin, 26 artifacts looted by France’s colonial troops were returned in November 2021.

💰 The impact of the restitution movement is not only important from an ethical, historical and cultural perspective - it also presents potentially huge economic benefits for African countries.

➡️ In parallel to the transfers, Nigeria and Benin have negotiated capacity building support from the returning countries to train local staff in museum management and conservation.

➡️ The return of the artworks is also attracting substantial investment in the countries' heritage and tourism infrastructure.

🏗 In Nigeria, Edo state is building a cultural district in Benin City, which will eventually include the Edo Royal Royal Museum, the Edo Museum of West African Arts (EMOWAA), a research and educational facility, and a mall.

The project is part of Edo state's tourism master plan, which sets the road map for the development of a tourism corridor connecting 72 different tourism sites including a wildlife park as well as cultural and natural sites. The Edo government is targeting $4.3 billion of tourism revenue in the next 10 years.

🏗 Meanwhile, the Republic of Benin has announced the creation of the Museum of the Epic of the Amazons and Kings of Dahomey in Abomey. The project includes the rehabilitation of four royal palaces that attracted $38 million in financing from Agence Française de Développement. Last year, a free exhibition in Cotonou of the returned artifacts attracted more than 200,000 visitors.

And this is just the beginning. An estimated 500,000 African artifacts are still held by museums and institutions in Europe alone.

MUSIC

🇳🇬 Burna Boy will make history once again when he becomes the first Nigerian artist to headline a U.S. stadium in July at New York's city Fields.

🌍 The global appeal of the 'African Giant' is taking Nigerian music further than ever before:

🗽 Just last April, be became the first Nigerian act to headline Madison Square Garden.

🏀 In February, he, Tems and Rema became the first artists to perform an all-Nigerian halftime show at the NBA All-Star game in Utah.

📈 Burna's most recent album, 'Love, Damini' peaked at No. 2 on Billboard‘s World Albums chart.

🌟 It also received a 2023 Grammy nomination for best global music album.

🥇 In total, Burna Boy has racked up 6 Grammy nominations and 1 win since 2020.

✈️ Later this year, besides New York his 'Love, Damini' world tour will also take him to Paris La Defense, London Stadium and Gelre Dome in Amsterdam.

⚽️ In June, the superstar is slated to co-headline the 2023 UEFA Champions League Final Kick Off Show in Istanbul.

The majority of Burna Boy's global fans probably do not understand his lyrics.

🎤 But interestingly, the 31-year-old Burna Boy is achieving this massive success while being the most outspoken of Nigeria's top music stars - openly criticizing the Nigerian government and sharing his pan-Africanist views:

“It has always been my vision to build a bridge between all Black people in all parts of the world through the music and performance. Music is the No. 1 messenger.”

SPORTS BUSINESS

🇺🇸 Can American football make headway in Africa?

🏈 The National Football League (NFL) traveled to Kenya in April to host a talent identification camp and an NFL Flag football showcase in Nairobi.

🏃🏿Twenty-nine prospects aged 16-21 from Cameroon, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria and Senegal are taking part in a three-day NFL Combine-style camp with the hope of being spotted.

The best young players stand to win invites to join various NFL development programs and academies.

🚩 In parallel, the league is holding a Flag Football Showcase to introduce the game to young people from 10 schools across Nairobi and train local teachers.

So far unknown in Africa, flag football is a variant of American football where instead of tackling players to the ground, the defensive team must remove a flag or flag belt from the ball carrier.

🇬🇭 The NFL's Nairobi showcase is the second such event held in Africa by the American football league since the launch of its "NFL Africa" program last year in Ghana.

The league's development efforts in Ghana have led to the first Ghanaian youth NFL Flag football team competing in the NFL International Flag Football Championships in 2023 in Las Vegas. The Ghanaian team, despite only having learned the game a few months earlier, made it to the semi-finals.

🚀 Growing the NFL globally is a major strategic priority for the League, and with more than 125 players of African descent from 15 countries across the continent currently playing in the NFL, it is clear that Africa is a key source of talent.

However, whether the NFL will manage to build a homegrown audience for the sport in the land of football (soccer) and rugby remains to be seen.

Marie Lora-Mungai

April 1, 2023

HUSTLE & FLOW #44: Nigeria's new $600M initiative, Idris Elba and Mo Abudu partner up, Africans make boss moves in football

Marie Lora-Mungai

April 1, 2023

(c) Financial Times’ Africa Special, March 2023

This month of March has been almost as busy as Idris Elba making deals across the continent.

🇺🇸 US VP Kamala Harris is just wrapping up her week-long Africa tour that took her to Ghana, Tanzania and Zambia. Besides announcing various measures in support of conflict prevention or climate resilience, Harris also toured Vibrate Studio, a community recording studio for young creatives located at Freedom Skatepark in Accra. The space opened in 2022 and is a partnership between Kendrick Lamar’s company pgLang, Spotify, and local sports NGO Surf Ghana.

Last year, the United States joined the growing list of countries and institutions suddenly interested in the African Creative sector, notably through their program Prosper Africa.

👩🏾 March being Women's Month, Harris also had the topic of investing in women as part of her agenda. Scroll through for my take on the place and role of women in the Creative sector on the continent, and some myth busting about African men.

🇳🇬 In March, Nigeria also completed its disputed general polls with the election of its state governors, which followed Bola Tinubu's victory as President in February. According to many observers, these elections, which have been marred by ethnic tensions, have been the nastiest since Nigeria's independence. Nevertheless, the country's many supporters - including myself - are now rooting for Nigeria to get back to business.

📆 Looking ahead, I will be attending MIPTV on April 17-19 in Cannes, and hosting a table on "How to produce with and in Africa" at the event's co-production breakfast on Tuesday March 18th at 8:30am (ouch, the pandemic is definitely over). In particular, I will share details about Afreximbank's $1 billion Film Fund, which types of projects qualify, and how to apply. Space is limited so arrive early!

Here we go for the rest of HUSTLE & FLOW #44:

MY TAKE ON WOMEN'S MONTH

I often get asked (by Westerners) how challenging it has been making my way as a woman in business in Africa these past 17 years.

🙄 They expect me to validate their assumptions about how biased or discriminatory African societies and cultures are towards women.

There is nothing furthest from the truth.

👧🏽 From the moment I stepped foot in Nairobi in 2006 as a rookie 24-year-old journalist to today, I have only encountered respect, kindness and support from African men across the continent - and this includes your garden-variety warlords and area boys.

😖 In fact, the place in the world where I feel the less secure as a woman, both professionally and physically, is France. The country where I'm from.

💯 Of course, I very much acknowledge my privilege as a white, educated, and assertive woman in Africa -- it certainly has been easier for me than for many.

📢 But in a month where we all get reminded of the massive gender gap that exists worldwide, I wanted to share another perspective:

🌟 As I wrote back in 2017 in an op-ed for Le Monde entitled "What can Africa teach the West in these times of trouble?", women actually do BETTER in Africa than in any other region of the world when it comes to executive positions both in the private and the public sector (click here for the English version).

🔥 In the Creative Industries in particular, many sub-sectors (film and television, broadcast, fashion, visual arts and publishing) are mostly run by women. They are the CEOs, the MDs, the creative directors, the designers, the senior producers, the content programmers, the gallery owners, the editors, the writers.

Head over to my original Linkedin post for the names of top women creative leaders to follow, and supportive men to emulate.

DIGITAL AND CREATIVE ECONOMY

Nigeria's ambitious $600+ million I-DICE program, which aims to support the country's Digital and Creative Enterprise sectors, was launched in March in Abuja.

🙏 I am proud to have contributed to I-DICE's feasibility study and program design as Creative Sector Expert.

🤔 However, there's been a lot of confusion in the press about I-DICE, which has been wrongly reported as a "tech fund for young investors" (Reuters, what happened?).

So here's the correct gist:

💡The program was initiated a couple years ago by the Federal Government of Nigeria, and more specifically by the Office of Vice-President Professor Yemi Osinbajo.

🤝🏾 It was developed and is being implemented in partnership with the African Development Bank.

💻 I-DICE aims to support young people in the digital innovation and creative spaces across all 36 Nigerian states, with a focus on entrepreneurship.

📍 The program tackles 4 main pillars: Policy and Enabling environment, Infrastructure, Human Capital, and Financing.

✅ It does include provisions to create a venture capital outfit.

❌ But I-DICE itself is not a fund, and the entire $600 million is not the amount that will be dedicated to VC investment. A lot of that money will go towards the other pillars, especially infrastructure (bringing proper internet to the entire country, for example) and both broad and specialized technical training programs in a variety of cutting-edge areas.

💰 Funding commitments include $170m from the African Development Bank Group, $116m from Agence Française de Développement (AFD), and $70m from the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB). The Federal Government of Nigeria will contribute $45m in loans to qualifying start-ups through the Bank of Industry (BOI).

Another $200 to 300 million is expected to be raised from the private sector and other institutional investors.

🥇 This is not the first time I have done work for the government of Nigeria. Despite what might sometimes appear from the outside as unbridled chaos, there are some really smart people in there who understand that they are sitting on gold (their young people).

FILM

💪🏿Two African giants 💪🏿have joined forces to support talents and storytelling on the continent.

🌟 Hollywood actor Idris Elba and Nollywood mogul Mo Abudu have announced a new partnership between their two production companies, Green Door Pictures and EbonyLife Media to provide training and development opportunities to a new generation of creatives from Africa and the diaspora.

🎓The capacity building part of the partnership will be led by EbonyLife's Creative Academy in Lagos.

📽Elba and Abudu also plan to create a new joint development slate of TV and film projects.

🔥This is one more notch in Abudu's belt, who has already racked up development or coproduction deals with several international studios including Netflix, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Westbrook, BBC Studios, Starz and Lionsgate.

The first products of this long list of partnerships have been the Netflix coproductions 'A Sunday Affair'', 'Blood Sisters' and The King's Horseman'.

Developing films and TV series takes years, and not all announced projects will see the light of day. But these partnerships are definitely instrumental in bringing the culture of content development to an emerging market such as Africa, and in slowly building cohorts of skilled local filmmakers and content executives.

📢 'African Folktales' are out on Netflix.

📅 The six short films that were selected by the platform and UNESCO for their joint 'African Folktales, Reimagined' anthology project were released on 29 March 2023.

🤗 This first-of-its-kind collaboration between Netflix and UNESCO is a direct result of the publication of my 2021 report on the African Film Industry.

😎 The six selected emerging storytellers were granted a $90,000 production budget and creative guidance by established filmmakers.

🎉 Congratulations are in order for: Mohamed Echkouna (Mauritania) - Enmity Djinn, Walt Mzengi Corey (Tanzania) - Katope, Korede Azeez (Nigeria) - Halima’s Choice, Voline Ogutu (Kenya) - Anyango and the Ogre, Loukman Ali (Uganda) - Katera of the Punishment Island, and Gcobisa Yako (SouthAfrica) - MaMlambo.

ANIMATION

🥇 In a big win for African storytellers and animators, the new kids series 'Kiya & the Kimoja Heroes' has premiered on Disney Plus & Disney Junior, as well as on YouTube.

🇿🇦 The show, which is based on an original concept by Robert Vargas ('The Smurfs', 'Spidey & His Amazing Friends'), was adapted from characters created by South Africans Marc Dey and Kelly Dillon.

🤝 It was developed and produced by leading South African studio Triggerfish Animation in partnership with eOne Hasbro, Walt Disney Animation Studios, Frog Box and France Télévisions.

🏩The richness and diversity of storytelling is on full display on the show, which features a landscape and culture inspired by Southern Africa, with both African and Asian heroes moving to music from around the world.

SPORTS BUSINESS

🏀 The third edition of the Basketball Africa League (BAL) kicked off on March 11 with the Sahara Conference in Dakar, Senegal. It will be followed by the Nile Conference in Cairo, Egypt from April 26-May 6, while the playoffs and finals will take place in Kigali, Rwanda from May 21-27.

🤝 BAL was launched in 2019 as a partnership between the NBA and the International Basketball Federation. The league is headed by Amadou Gallo Fall, a former Senegalese player and long-time NBA executive who spent 15 years building sports-for-development programs.

⛹🏿 However, BAL is first-and-foremost a commercial enterprise: as it is the case for most sports, Africa presents a deep well of potential recruits for the NBA. At the start of the 2022-2023 season for example, NBA rosters included 16 players born in Africa, while 35 players had at least one African parent.

👊🏾 Africans are also making boss moves in the international football space.

🇳🇬 Nigerian co-founder and CEO of Paystack, Shola Akinlade, bought a 55% percent stake in 2nd Division 🇩🇰 Danish club Aarhus Fremad Fodbold.

💰 Paystack was acquired by payment giant Stripe in 2020 for $200 million, giving Akinlade the means to pursue other ventures.

⚽️ Just a year ago, Akinlade launched Sporting Lagos Football Club, stating his ambition to use the new club as a way to deepen his community involvement and vowing to bring modern, professional management to Nigerian football.

🏃🏾The acquisition of Aarhus Fredmad will allow Akinlade and his team to create pathways for young Nigerian football talents to get training and exposure in Europe.

Akinlade joins the small circle of African business people taking ownership of the future of African football by tackling structural challenges.

🌍 Another example is KINGSLEY PUNGONG's Rainbow Sports Global, whose player identification and development program for African talents leverages its network of clubs and academies across Africa, the Middle East, Europe and North America.

📈 Referring to the music industry, someone asked me recently what should be done to get more African artists signed by Universal and the likes. I responded that this shouldn't be the goal. The ambition should be to create, finance and grow African companies that are strong enough to compete against (and even acquire) other global players.

💎 African talents and athletes are the raw material of the continent's entertainment and sports sectors. Let's not make the mistake of letting their value get captured elsewhere, like it's been the case for other African resources for centuries.

FOR THE CULTURE

In March, the Financial Times released an Africa Special edition that is a juicy treasure trove of goodness.

Conceived by FT Weekend editor Alec Russell and Nigerian-British poet Ben Okri, this collection of articles celebrates African creatives, from literature to film, visual arts, music and fashion.

Click through take your time to enjoy:

✒️ ‘We are daring to invent the future’ — the generation that rewrote Africa’s story

🎨 West Africa’s art scene: uncovering a long legacy of creativity

👑 From ‘The Woman King’ to Netflix’s ‘African Queens’ — how Africa’s history went pop

📽 Curator June Givanni on African cinema: ‘Films need to be seen in their own countries’

📖 Nuruddin Farah: ‘I can live without my books. They make their own friends’

📙 ‘The Famished Road’ and my quest for the imaginative richness of Africa

🦸🏾 Africa’s comic book superheroes tell the continent’s forgotten stories

🎤 How Afrobeats took over the world — and is still evolving

🏇 A new generation takes the reins at Nairobi’s polo club

🏍 Two wheels to Lake Turkana: my Kenyan motorbike adventure

✍🏿 The new talent lighting up Nigeria’s bestseller lists

🔊 Zeitz Mocaa boss Koyo Kouoh: ‘We are building our own voice, our own language’

👔 The African designers turning western waste into fashion statements

Marie Lora-Mungai

March 3, 2023

HUSTLE & FLOW #43: NBCUniversal + Showmax =🔥, Tems wins a Grammy, Investors look into Film Studios

Marie Lora-Mungai

March 3, 2023

What happened in the African Creative and Sports space in February 2023? Quite a lot.

Scroll down for the low-down.

BIG NEWS OF THE MONTH: VIDEO STREAMING

The plot thickens in the African streaming space 🤔.

🤝 Leading local platform Showmax, which is owned by the South African MultiChoice Group, has partnered with Comcast's NBCUniversal and Sky to relaunch as a bigger and stronger OTT offering on the African market.

The new Showmax group will be 70% owned by MultiChoice and 30% owned by NBCUniversal.

🔥Showmax 2.0 will combine MultiChoice’s popular local content with international content licensed from NBCUniversal and Sky, third-party content from HBO, Warner Bros. Entertainment, Sony Pictures Entertainment and others, as well as live English Premier League football matches -- which is possibly the most attractive and valuable content property on the African market.

💪🏿This is a big, bold move that puts Showmax in the right position to compete properly with Netflix, Amazon and Disney+ on the continent.

Remember as well that Vivendi's CANAL+ Group, leader on the francophone market, now owns more than 30% of MultiChoice Group, and that both entities have been busy ramping up their investments in quality African original co-productions.

😅 For NBCUniversal, whose streaming service Peacock has been struggling in the US, it's a strategic move to capture one of the last emerging markets still up for the taking.

💰This type of consolidation signals more opportunities and bigger budgets for African content producers in the near future.

IN THE PRESS

I spoke to African Business Magazine about the state of the African entertainment industry today.

My key thoughts:

📈 The entertainment sector in Africa is still very much emerging and we have barely scratched the surface of what can be achieved by investing in African creativity

👷🏾 Africa’s entertainment industry is in the process of structuring itself

💵 Governments and DFIs (development financial institutions), such as African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank), IFC - International Finance Corporation, Agence Française de Développement, PROPARCO, and African Development Bank Group, are now looking seriously at the creative sector as a source of growth and job creation

📡 Tech giants such as Google/YouTube, Facebook/Instagram, Netflix or Amazon know that their next billion users will come from Africa, so they are investing heavily in the continent’s internet infrastructure

📱The recent growth in internet penetration, smartphone ownership, online payments and monetisation tools have finally given African creators access to the global online marketplace

🌍 All countries have a huge potential for growth, but some are distinguishing themselves in specific ways:

#Nigeria, the powerhouse

#Ghana, dynamic and strategic

#SouthAfrica, skilled talent pool servicing the world

#Kenya, the start-up hub

#Senegal, the cultural & sports capital

#Egypt with gaming #Tunisia with animation and #Morocco, with design, arts & crafts

but also #Rwanda, #IvoryCoast or #Benin

MUSIC

🎉 Congratulations 🎉 to Nigerian singer Tems who became the first home grown female Nigerian artist to win a Grammy.

🎤 Tems was recognized for her vocals and ad-libs on Future's song “Wait For U,” featuring Drake, which won Best Melodic Rap Performance.

✨ This win also comes a little over a month before the 2023 Oscars where Tems could once again make history as the first Nigerian artist to ever win an Academy Award thanks to her co-writing credit on Rihanna’s “Lift Me Up” off the Black Panther: Wakanda Forever soundtrack.

Other African artists to have won (at least!) one Grammy include: Ali Farka Toure (Mali), Angelique Kidjo (Benin), Black Coffee (South Africa), Burna Boy (Nigeria), Cynthia Erivo (US/Nigeria), Dave Matthews (South Africa), Femi Kuti (Nigeria), King Sunny Adé (Nigeria), Ladysmith Black Mambazo (South Africa), Lebo M (South Africa), Lekan Babalola (Nigeria), Miriam Makeba (South Africa), Nomcebo Zikode (South Africa), Oumou Sangaré (Mali), Owuor Arunga (Kenya), Robert John "Mutt" Lange (South Africa), Sade Adu (UK/Nigeria), Sikiru Adepoju (Nigeria), Soweto Gospel Choir (South Africa), Tinariwen (Mali), Trevor Rabin (South Africa), Wizkid (Nigeria), Wouter Kellerman (South Africa), Youssou Ndour (Senegal).

🎤 Six-year-old music festival Afrochella, which takes place in Ghana 🇬🇭 over the Christmas period, will be rebranding to AfroFuture this year after running into some IP issues 🤨 with US festival Coachella 🇺🇸.

🌍 In 2019, Afrochella was the anchor event for The Year of the Return campaign encouraging African-Americans and other people of African descent to come discover the continent. It remains one of the few festivals focused on African music that are able to attract a global crowd.

In the same category are the powerhouse Afronation (Miami, USA/May, Portimão, Portugal/June, Ghana/TBD) and uber hipster Afropunk.

💡 These festivals have been instrumental in showcasing African culture to the world, but also in supporting the growth of African music:

✅ They are a major source of soft power for the host or sponsor country

✅ They introduce a variety of African music genres to a core audience of music lovers

✅ They enable meetings and collaborations between African and global artists

✅ They provide a source of solid revenue for African artists, as performance is still the main way musicians make money despite the rise in streaming

✅ They fill a gap in a continent that suffers from a critical lack in performance venues

We've only scratched the surface of how African creativity can be presented to the world through events and experiences.

Great things happen when you mix music 🎧 and fashion 👓.

As African music's influence continues to grow worldwide, more collaborations between top African artists and global brands looking to build cultural cachet are taking place.

🔥 In November last year, Burna Boy performed at Rihanna's Savage X Fenty Vol. 4 runway show.

🔥 Burna Boy was also tapped by Burberry for its ‘The Night Before’ festive campaign.

💡 But African artists' star power also represents an opportunity for smaller African fashion brands to gain international exposure.

👟 More specifically, partnering with a rising music star from the continent could be key for African streetwear brands, which are not that well known locally.

They might find that it's easier (and much more lucrative) to appeal to the diaspora or to global music fans.

👉🏿 Examples to emulate include diaspora-founded streetwear brands such as Amsterdam-based Daily Paper or London-based ABAGA VELLI, as well as Nigeria's Ashluxe.

FILM

British Hollywood actor Idris Elba, who is of Ghanaian and Sierra Leonean descent, recently announced that he was working on a plan to open up film studios across Africa 🎥.

More specifically, he met with the presidents of Ghana and Tanzania to discuss the underlying policies and tax incentive packages that would also be needed in order to make such a project successful.

🤓 In my UNESCO report on the African Film & Audiovisual sector, I put forward 4 strategic models for African countries seeking to develop their film industries.

In my view, governments can choose to pursue one specific model or combine several together, depending on their ambitions and the resources at their disposal.

💡Opening film studios and other film infrastructure is a key component of the Service Model, in which a country positions itself to become to production service center for global projects.

The Service Model is potentially very lucrative. It is based on:

✅ Investment in solid transport, hospitality and film infrastructure, including film studios

✅ A local pool of well-trained technical professionals

✅ A diversity of natural shooting locations and a temperate climate

✅ English as an official or widely-spoken language

✅ Political stability

✅ Attractive co-production treaties and tax rebates

Some African countries already pursuing this model include: #SouthAfrica, #Morocco, #Mauritius, #Namibia.

But many more countries present the right profile: #Ghana and #Tanzania for example, but also #Kenya (an early leader who has not yet worked out its incentive package), #Rwanda, or even #Zimbabwe.

💰 Funding is now becoming available for such projects. If you are a developer with a serious project (feasibility study, business model, government support), please send me a DM.

SPORTS BUSINESS

💰 African tech startups raised a record amount of money in 2022 - anywhere between $3 and $5.4 billion, depending on the source (Disrupt Africa, Briter Bridges, Africa: The Big Deal or Partech) and their calculation method.

⚽️ Out of this amount, about $30M, or less than 1%, went to sports-related companies, according to ASCI - The African Sports & Creative Institute.

Considering their size, the stage of development of their tech ecosystem, and their homegrown armies of sports fans, it's no surprise that Nigeria and Egypt dominate this sector.

Most of the sports ventures that raised money in 2022 are also either 🎰betting or 🎮 gaming startups.

There is no doubt that there's still a lot of opportunities to explore in that space.

But here's another one:

As 🏃🏿 athletes of African descent dominate just about any sport on the planet, is there any performance tracking solution that African sports scientists and data analysts could develop for the world?

African countries are edging their way in the global ⚽️ football transfer markets.

Transfer data is important because it is a key indicator of players' value based both on their intrinsic skill levels and on their country's and club's ability to develop and market these skills.

Here are some key facts from the recently released 2022 FIFA Global Transfer Report:

🏆 Nigeria, Ghana, and Ivory Coast are among the top 10 countries globally in the number of transfers made in the Men’s Football category.

#Nigeria ranked 5th, with 725 transfers earning $104.2M.

#Ghana ranked 8th, with 515 transfers earning $17.4M.

#IvoryCoast ranked 9th, with 428 transfers earning $38.3M.

⚖️ At the club level, African countries earned more than $71.2M from selling players and spent only $14.5M to acquire others.

💸 The biggest spenders in player acquisition fees are clubs from South Africa, Tunisia, Egypt, Sudan, Libya, and Morocco.

💰 Clubs from Ivory Coast and Tunisia made the most revenue from transfers. Clubs from Burkina Faso, Cameroon, and Morocco also earned revenue from transfers.

🏃🏿 The Women’s Football category also showed significant transfer market growth both globally and at the continent level.

#Nigeria (6th) was the top ranking African country in the Women's category with 53 transfers (+29% from 2021).

#Ghana ranked 10th with 38 transfers (+90% since 2021).

Although the growth should be celebrated, these numbers are all very low compared to the massive potential of African football players.

We should be talking about billions here, not millions.

💡 Investing in the player identification and training pipeline is a massive opportunity for governments, local organizations, development institutions, and private companies.

Marie Lora-Mungai

February 5, 2023

HUSTLE & FLOW #42: Africa's richest YouTubers, Gaming attracts big investors, African music's WOW numbers

Marie Lora-Mungai

February 5, 2023

HUSTLE & FLOW is back, under a new format!

In 2022, I transitioned my writing on the African creative and sports industries to Linkedin, which allowed me to be more reactive and reach a wider audience.

Every month going forward, I will gather my most popular posts in a newsletter format, published both on Linkedin and here on my website.

Subscribe below to make sure you don't miss anything!

Here we go.

————-

As we enter 2023, the world may be in the midst of a global downturn.

But Africa has always danced to the beat of her own drum.

Inflation, energy shortages, supply chain issues? This is just business as usual, the struggle that is fueling the hustle.

And as always, creators gonna create.

ANIMATION & COMICS

Here's some of the #animation and #comicbooks projects I'll be looking forward to this year:

🔥 Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire, an animated anthology of 10 sci-fi and fantasy stories from rising talent across 6 countries, produced by Triggerfish Animation and The Walt Disney Company.

⚡️ Iwaju, the afro-futuristic animated series from Kugali Media and Disney+.

💫 Iyanu : Child of Wonder, the animated series by HBO Max and Cartoon Network based on the graphic novel created by Roye Okupe's YouNeek Studios.

💪🏿 Decolonize, a comic anthology facilitated by the Goethe Institut across Africa.

Click here to learn more about these projects, and continue reading to find out what to expect in African #digitalcontent #film #TV #music #fashion #visualarts in the coming year.

DIGITAL CONTENT

Who are Africa's top earners on YouTube?

💵 Despite the growing popularity of other platforms such as TikTok, YouTube is still king when it comes to reach and revenue for creators.

🏆 With 14.3 billion visits per month, it is the 2nd most-visited website in the world after Google (which owns YouTube).

⏳694,000 hours of video are streamed on the platform every minute compared to 452,000 for Netflix.

👉🏾 CashNetUSA looked at the top YouTubers in every country to compile a "YouTube Rich List".

So what do we learn from the data?

😣 Africa is far, far behind other continents when it comes to revenue. Africa's "richest" channel is Egypt's Creative Crafts in 5 Minutes, which generated close to $9M. It may seem like a lot, but all other continents have channels above $40M.

💰 4 out of the only 8 African channels that generated above $1M are located in North Africa. Special shout out to Nigeria's Mark Angel ($4m) and Uganda's Masaka Kids ($1.3M). Search the Kenyan top channel at your own peril.

📡 Africa's digital creators are held back by persistent issues with connectivity. The article puts internet penetration in Africa at 22% but it's actually 43% (at least). Still, it's not enough.

💸 YouTube in Africa also suffers from a lack of advertising inventory. Also, ads are cheaper in Africa than elsewhere, which means less revenue for creators.

But of course, as you all know, where there is a challenge, there is an opportunity.

👑 American kids’ channel Cocomelon is the highest-earning YouTube channel of all time, with an estimated $282.8M amassed since its creation in 2006.

👶 In fact, channels with content made for children were the most profitable in 5 of the 6 continents.

👶🏿 Africa has the youngest population in the world.

Case made.

Some African creators have recognized this opportunity. Nigerian kids channel OmoBerry by Limitless Studios has reached 53.6M views, and is clocking an additional 250,000 views every day.

There's space for a lot more.

GAMING

The world's biggest investors have their eyes set on the African gaming market 🎮.

👉🏿 When South Africa's Carry1st raised $27M last month, it did so from bluechip VC firms like BITKRAFT Ventures, a16z Games, Konvoy, Lateral Frontiers VC and Kepple Africa Ventures. This latest round came on the back of another $26M raised between 2021 and 2022.

👉🏿 South African play-to-earn startup Skrmiish recently raised a $2.5M seed round after acquiring 100,000 players across 100 jurisdictions worldwide.

👉🏿 In September 2022, Nigerian-based blockchain gaming platform Metaverse Magna (MVM), incubated by Nestcoin, raised $3.2M from Polygon Labs and others through a token sale valuing the company at some $30M.

👉🏿 Earlier last year, Egyptian fantasy football platform Eksab raised $3M from 4DX Ventures, P1 Ventures, Golden Palms Investments and Tofino Capital to scale across MENA and Africa.

So, what do these investors see in Africa? 👀

📈 Although the global gaming market is expected to stabilize in 2023 (as a correction to the post-pandemic boom), emerging markets such as Africa, Latam and the Middle East will continue to grow, according to a report by Newzoo.

😯 The number of gamers in Africa more than doubled from 77 million to 186 million between 2015 and 2021.

💵 While gaming revenue in the European and US markets declined last year, Middle East and Africa revenue grew +6.6% to $6.8 billion.

📱 95% of African gamers are mobile gamers (no surprises there).

💰 Sports betting is already a highly lucrative - if controversial - business on the continent. Play-to-earn gaming could leverage some of the same basic triggers (desire to make easy money while doing something fun) in a more wholesome way.

👊🏿 There is increased collaboration among creators, for example through the creation last year of PAGG - Pan Africa Gaming Group, which united 10 African gaming studios.

👶🏿 and then there is the famous demographic dividend again.

Let's see what 2023 will bring.

MUSIC

The growing global popularity of African music cannot be denied.

Here's some WOW numbers:

🚀 Burna Boy, Rema, Kizz Daniel, Wizkid, Bella Shmurda, and Fireboy DML have all reached and surpassed 300 million streams on music service Audiomack.

🚀 In August 2022, 8 of the 10 most streamed artists on the platform were African.

🚀 Audiomack averages 2.5 billion Afrobeats streams per month.

🚀 Apple Music saw a 500% streaming increase for African DJ mixes between August 2021 and August 2022.

🚀 Nigeria posted the biggest bump with 3,000% year on year growth.

🚀 'Peru' by Fireboy DML was one of the biggest songs of 2022, and scored an endorsement from the Peruvian government in addition to an Ed Sheeran remix.

🚀 Wizkid sold out the O2 arena in London in 12 minutes in 2021.

🚀 Videos using 'Mi Amor' by Marioo (Tanzania) and Jovial (Kenya) clocked over 7 billion views on TikTok.

FILM INDUSTRY

Under the leadership of Yaa Asantewa Asante (Juliet Asante), CEO of the National film Authority of 🇬🇭 Ghana 🇬🇭, the West African country has been making moves to establish itself as a leading film destination on the continent.

🎥 Two years ago, Ghana launched the #ShootinGhana campaign to promote the diversity of its locations and its technical capacity.

✈️ Earlier this week at Sundance, it was announced that the upcoming sequel to box office hit "Girl Trip", starring Regina Hall, Queen Latifah, Jada Pinkett Smith, and Tiffany Haddish, and produced by Will Packer, would be set in Ghana.

👂🏿I'm also hearing a rumor that Idris Elba might be considering backing a film studio project in the country.

Watch out Nigeria! After competing hard over jollof rice, football, festivals and end-of-year festivities, Ghana is about to give a hard time to Nollywood.

❓What are the big trends shaping the African film and TV industry today?

🌍 A little over a year ago, I released a comprehensive report for UNESCO that takes a deep dive into the audiovisual markets of the continent's 54 countries.

🤓 With 271 (dense!) pages for the English version, it is the only document that goes into this level of detail and analysis about an industry and a continent where reliable data is cruely lacking.

In it, I highlight several major trends, including:

💡The slow but encouraging formalization of the sector

💡The digital revolution

💡The future of cinemas

💡The beginning of a long-awaited boom in content production

💡Africa's new partners: the United-States and China

💡The education challenge

💡Intellectual property and the piracy curse

💻 It also includes information on "new" sectors such as digital content creation, OTT platforms, mobile distribution, and animation.

👀 It is a must-read for all filmmakers, private investors, government representatives and policy makers interested in Africa.

Click here to read or download the full report, in English or French.

——-

Filmmakers often reach out to me for help developing, pitching, distributing or selling their projects.

Sometimes, they straight up want an introduction to Netflix or Prime Video & Amazon Studios.

Unfortunately, I am unable to help them. This is not what I do 😊

However, when I do take part in workshops or conferences, I have one major piece of advice to share:

❌ DO NOT hang all your hopes on a windfall from Netflix or Amazon. Their teams are submerged with requests, and both platforms follow a specific strategy that may or may not include your genre or territory. If they want to, they will find you.

❌ DO NOT stop everything you're doing because you had a good meeting with a Hollywood studio. Unfortunately, this meeting has a 99% chance of going nowhere. In the 1% of cases where you progress to a deal, it will take months to negotiate the terms and years for your project to - perhaps - get made. In the meantime, you'll risk dying of frustration (and hunger).

✅ Instead, as producer and author Houston Howard says in this video (a must-watch), ATTACK THE MARKET WITH IP.

What does this mean?

It means that you should not wait to put your idea, story, character or concept out there -- and not through a pitch deck.

The trick is to establish your project through a faster, easier and cheaper medium than film:

✒️ Write a magazine article, a blog, or even self-publish a book.

🎧 Record a podcast episode or podcast series.

🎨 Draw your characters. Animate them if you have the skills. Publish your story as a comic book.

📷 Shoot a photo series. Film a 1 minute proof of concept with your phone.

Distribute your content online, collect feedback, improve on it, and keep shipping, all the while building a community of people interested in your art.

Once it's out, it is yours. If you can show quality of execution and traction, you will attract the buyers' attention.

And when they eventually come find you, you will be on a much stronger footing to negotiate that deal.

FASHION

Seedstars, the IMPACT FUND FOR AFRICAN CREATIVES and the African Fashion Foundation have partnered to launch The African Fashion Futures Incubator.

👗 The new program will offer training and grant funding to a first cohort of 14 fashion designers from Nigeria, Ghana and Rwanda over a 5-months period.

The African Fashion Future Incubator aims to address the lack of business and management skills in young fashion brands on the continent, as well as provide networking and fundraising support.

🎉 Congrats Roberta Annan and Onyinye Fafi Obi 🎉

VISUAL ARTS

💪🏾 Artists of African descent are crushing it on the art world's biggest stage.

🇬🇭 🇬🇧 Last week, celebrated Ghanaian-British filmmaker John Akomfrah was chosen to represent Great Britain at the next Venice Biennale, which will open in April 2024.

🇫🇷 Meanwhile, France will be represented by 36-year-old French-Caribbean artist and poet Julien Creuzet.

🏆 Akomfrah's will be one of the most anticipated national exhibitions at the 2024 Biennale, especially since the British Pavilion took the Golden Lion in 2022 thanks to another Black British artist, Afro-Caribbean Sonia Boyce.

🏆 The 2022 Biennale also crowned another Black woman, with African-American Simone Leigh receiving another Golden Lion for her work on the US Pavillion.

Last year's edition of the Biennale, which had been delayed because of the pandemic, drew more than 800,000 visitors, the most in its history.

It also welcomed the inaugural participation of Cameroon, Namibia, and Uganda, as well as returning participations from Ghana, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.

PLACE TO GO

🇸🇳 Dakar, Senegal 🇸🇳 has been at the top of my travel wish list for several years now.

But since I have not had any direct work-related opportunities to visit, I haven't yet made it there (Have a good reason for me to go? DM me!).

Why Dakar? Because it has become one of Africa's foremost creative and cultural hubs:

💃🏿 Last December, CHANEL held the Chanel Métiers d’Art show, the inaugural runway show for the haute couture brand on African soil, in the Senegalese capital. The glamorous event took place right on the heels of the Dakar Fashion Week and attracted 800 guests, including Pharrell Williams, Naomi Campbell and Princess Caroline of Monaco.

🎨 Dark'Art, the Biennale of Contemporary African Art, is one of the continent’s largest contemporary art event, with some 450,000 visitors in 2022. Nigerian-American visual artist Kehinde Wiley (who made Obama’s official portrait) opened his Black Rock artist residency near Dakar in 2019.

🎸The All-Africa Music Awards (AFRIMA) have taken place in January Dakar for the past 8 years.

🏀 The city is host to brand new basketball facilities used by the National Basketball Association (NBA)'s Basketball Africa League (BAL), and a state-of-the-art 50,000-seat football stadium. Traditional Senegalese wrestling is also an incredibly popular sport drawing huge crowds.

🎊 The Dakar carnival, which takes place in November, aims to rival the great carnival of Rio in Brazil.

🌴 And then, of course, there's the beaches.

Will 2023 be my Dakar year?

(Great article on Quartz by birdstoryagency)

Marie Lora-Mungai

January 24, 2022

HUSTLE & FLOW #41: Top 3 Trends for the African Creative & Sports Industries in 2022

Marie Lora-Mungai

January 24, 2022

Lire en français avec Google Translate / Leia em português com Google Translate

Dear colleagues and friends,

How is the year starting out for you?

On my side, after an Omicron-flavored December, I am now feeling some NYE (New Year Energy). Indeed, the first few days of 2022 have already brought us big news in the African entertainment space - a good omen for what’s to come.

I now keep track of these announcements in real time on LinkedIn -- follow me there to make sure you don’t miss out.

With HUSTLE & FLOW now dedicated to in-depth opinion and analysis, I am starting this new year with my Top 3 Totally Subjective Trends for 2022. As a bonus, I’m also throwing in my thoughts on the main and most urgent challenge for the African creative and sports industries going forward.

This DJ takes requests, so please don’t hesitate to suggest topics that you would like me to cover in future editions. You can do so by simply replying to this email, or by reaching out on LinkedIn.

And if you’ve been forwarded this newsletter by a friend, the link to subscribe for yourself is here.

Happy reading,

Marie

MY TOP 3 TRENDS FOR 2022

1. MONETIZING AFRICA’S CREATIVE ECONOMY

If the first two years of the pandemic have shown us that digital content was King (remember the explosion of online concerts, endless Zoom conferences, IG Live DJ sets, Nollywood Netflix binges, 3D fashion shows, and record-breaking virtual art auctions), 2022 will be the year where platforms and entrepreneurs get serious about monetizing the millions of eyeballs behind these flickering screens.

The first players to board the train were, of course, Meta (the Company Previously Known as Facebook - also owner of Instagram and Whatsapp for those sleeping at the back), YouTube, and TikTok. The pandemic fast-tracked the social media giants’ plans to deploy monetization features that were already available elsewhere across Africa. These moves have set in motion a major shift by suddenly allowing African entrepreneurs and creators to bypass a certain category of gatekeepers and earn directly from their work.

Making this possible from a technical standpoint is the mushrooming of local fintech solutions, with African startups in the sector raising a whopping $3B in 2021. My prediction for 2022 is that we will see the emergence of various companies focused more specifically on helping creators connect with and monetize their audience. This new segment of the market already includes Wowzi (Kenya), Selar (Nigeria), Minly (Egypt), StarNews (Ivory Coast), but also ANKA (formerly Afrikrea, Ivory Coast), the creative-focused e-commerce platform which just raised $6.2M.

Finally, we will be entering a whole new realm of possibilities this year with the global mainstreaming of blockchain technology, cryptocurrency, and NFTs, and the reflection around Web3. If I lost you here, don’t panic. Future Africa has a great explainer about what these innovations could mean for the continent and its creators. Africa, and more specifically Nigeria, already counts some of the most active crypto and NFT communities in the world. In November 2021, leading art fair ArtX Lagos, led by the always-visionary Tokini Peterside, held a special NFT exhibition and sale in partnership with digital art marketplace SuperRare, featuring among others star Nigerian digital artist Osinachi. This is just the beginning.

2. THE AMERICANS ARE COMING

The first month of the year has brought us three major news: Amazon Prime Video’s entry into the Nigerian market through licensing deals with prominent Nollywood production companies Inkblot and Anthill; Warner Music Group’s acquisition of music distributor Africori, and Andreesen Horowitz’ first African investment in gaming publisher Carry1st (alongside Google and the rapper Nas).

Spurred both by the Black Lives Matter movement and by the imperative to find new growth markets, Hollywood companies started partnering with African creators a couple years ago. Disney is producing sci-fi series Iwájú with Kugali, and the feature film Greek Freak about Greek-Nigerian NBA star Giannis Antetokounmpo, directed by Nigerian director Akin Omotoso. The studio also picked up the rights to several other African animation projects. Disney+, which is expected to launch on the continent later this year, is already predicted to sign up 3.1 million subscribers by 2026. Also notable on the content side are Nigeria’s EbonyLife Media’s numerous development deals with international studios.

All these announcements have led The Hollywood Reporter to proclaim that the streamers were (finally) investing in Africa, but this is just the tip of the iceberg as the volume of conversation going on privately is much bigger. This new interest for the African entertainment space also does not only come from American players. China has been making its own chess moves, most recently with the strategic sponsorship of the on-going African Cup of Nations by TikTok and crypto exchange Binance, companies both founded and led by Chinese CEOs.

As I told Quartz last week, the good news is that experienced entertainment providers with global reach will help grow African talent and intellectual property worldwide. However, it is important for the future of the continent’s creative industries that the IP remains at least partially owned by its African creators. With the appeal of African music, film, art, and fashion at an all-time high, African creative entrepreneurs are in a good position to seek and negotiate true win-win partnerships.

3. THE RISE OF THE AFRICAN INVESTOR

Which is why I am particularly excited about this final trend: the rise of African players across the investment value chain.

At the seed stage, angel investing is now taking hold. After the ground-breaking $200M Paystack exit and the minting of several unicorns including Flutterwave, Fawry, Wave and ChipperCash, successful African entrepreneurs and business people are now seeing the value in supporting and mentoring the next generation. Angel networks are thriving, as well as investment syndicates such as the previously mentioned Future Africa Collective (of which I am a member) or CcHub’s own outfit.

Meanwhile, wealthy Africans have started to look at art as an asset class. Younger collectors have been snapping up contemporary pieces in recent auctions, while Former Sony exec and FreeMe Digital founder Michael Ugwu has positioned himself as an ardent supporter of and investor in the local NFT art ecosystem and is motivating others to join him.

In Venture Capital, we are seeing the emergence of new funds led by Africans, including several focused on the creative industries, such as Laureen Kouassi-Olsson’s Birimian, Roberta Annan’s Impact Fund for African Creatives, and HEVA Fund, led by George Gachara -- interestingly all three showing a strong focus on fashion. In the music space, Afropop superstar Mister Easy launched his $20M Empawa Fund in 2020.

When it comes to Sports Business, South African billionaire Patrice Motsepe was elected president of the hot mess that is the Confederation of African Football (CAF) last year, based on his promise to transform it into a profitable venture. Zambian economist Dr. Dambisa Moyo has joined prominent Nigerian businessmen Babatunde “Tunde” Folawiyo and Tope Lawani in investing in NBA Africa, owner of the Basketball Africa League (BAL). Bolstered by the marketing power of the NBA, BAL will be a great case study for what I want to call a fresh SAAB (Sports As A Business) mindset in Africa, where sports were previously seen either as a playground for rich political cronies seeking influence, or as a slightly hopeless destination for non-profit developmental efforts.

Finally, African institutional funding is also on the rise, including through two notable projects I had the privilege to advise on. Multilateral trade institution Afreximbank, which in 2020 had announced the launch of a $500 million fund to support the African creatives industries, is now working on the first-of-its-kind panafrican film finance facility. The new vehicle will provide African-sourced and managed funding through a variety of financing products to commercially viable projects from across the continent. Meanwhile, the African Development Bank (AfDB) has approved a loan of $170 million to finance the Digital and Creative Enterprises Program (i-DICE), a Federal Government of Nigeria initiative promoting investment in the digital and creative industries.

AND ONE CRUCIAL CHALLENGE

The phrase “Africa is rich in talents” has been said so often that it has become a tired cliche. I myself am guilty of having repeated it numerous times over the years.

But every experienced African operator knows the truth: the main, most painful challenge we are all facing is in fact the scarcity of trained and specialized creatives and professionals, of properly developed projects, and, in the creative and sports space (tech has greatly improved) of established, investable companies.

We should expect major deal flow and recruiting bottlenecks as the most obvious IP, talents and companies are snapped up by early movers and the lack of capacity building mechanisms becomes obvious.

Netflix, one of the first global giants to enter the market, has been forced to reckon with this issue after a few (private) disappointments. The company has since invested in programs to train TV series writers and even Development Executives in partnership with the Realness Institute, and held a post-production workshop. The streamer has now just announced a $1 million scholarship fund for film and TV students in sub-Saharan Africa. If Netflix is struggling to find trained talents, everybody will.

But obviously, in every crisis lies an opportunity, and this should signal to education players that now is the time to invest the space.

Marie Lora-Mungai

December 22, 2021

HUSTLE & FLOW #40: Farewell 2021, Bring it on 2022

Marie Lora-Mungai

December 22, 2021

'Twas the last fortnight of twenty-twenty-one,

When after an intense year trying to catch up

With so many things, people and places kept on hold,

Stories to be told, ideas and projects to be sold;

And because our world is still, honestly, quite messed up,

No one dared wishing each other a Happy One

By fear of jinxing it for everyone.

Dear colleagues and friends,

Here at Restless Global, we feel very lucky to end this Pandemic Year 2 on a high note.

In fact, 2021 was our busiest and best year ever. We signed with major clients, expanded our team, collected and analyzed piles of data, Zoomed quite a bit, wrote and wrote and wrote some more, and hosted events showcasing African creative entrepreneurs in Abidjan, Montpelier, and Nice.

The results included a groundbreaking report on the African film and audiovisual sector that is now being quoted everywhere, and exciting new films and series developed with partners in Nigeria and Hollywood that will (hopefully) be coming soon to a screen near you.

Our strong focus on building innovative models to finance the African creative industries has helped leading players such as UNESCO, Netflix, Afreximbank, AfDB, and the Nigerian government channel new funding to the space. Putting our money where our mouth is, we also made our very own first angel investments.

As we close 2021, the African sports, entertainment, and creative industries are now clearly on the global map. Investors have caught on, and this is all I was hoping for when I started this newsletter in February 2020.

Today, there is so much going on in the space that it is hard to keep track. So, I’m trying something new: for the latest news and time-sensitive announcements on the African creative and sports business sectors, please follow me on Linkedin.

Going forward, HUSTLE & FLOW will focus more squarely on analysis and will be published periodically. Look out for the next edition in January with my Top 3 Trends for 2022.

Enjoy the jollof, the nyama choma, the turkey, or the foie gras, and see you on the other side.

Marie