HUSTLE & FLOW #75: African auteur cinema wins at Cannes; Big Money chases African venues; the artist-founder-CEO question; and more

The new edition of HUSTLE & FLOW is out!

💫 In May, African creatives took center stage at the Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi, the Africa CEO Forum in Kigali, the Cannes Film Festival, and during the Africa Day celebrations.

😶 May was also the month I went viral. Needless to say, that last point was not on my bingo card for 2026 - or ever.

In this edition, I talk about African cinema’s groundbreaking successes at Cannes, Afrobeats and Nollywood's cooling relationship, the latest in the global repatriation movement of looted African artifacts, new investments in Sports and Entertainment infrastructure, one of Africa’s largest financial institutions boarding the creative industries bandwagon, and more.

Click to read 👇 👀

🎤  So yes, I went viral this month when President Macron commandeered my mic at the Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi.

It was much ado about nothing really, so I won’t go back over it, but ICYMI (in case you missed it) and feel excluded, here’s:

My post about what really happened in the room

One particularly successful meme (wait for me in the background vocals)

My interview about the whole wahala on Monocle radio

Alright, that’s enough, let’s get back to business.

AFRICA DAY

🌍 This year, Africa Day came with a campaign attached.

Opportunity Africa, a pan-African movement convened by Africa No Filter, Brand Africa, and partners including the African Union, launched #NotWaiting, calling on Africans across the continent and diaspora to spotlight the people, ideas, businesses and progress already shaping Africa's future.

🗓 The campaign will repeat on the 25th of every month, creating a recurring moment for collective, positive self-representation online.

This follows the March launch of the Opportunity Africa Creative Council, a continental platform bringing together senior creative leaders and designed to reshape how Africa is perceived globally and how it defines itself.

The initiative is well-intentioned, well-organized, and the people behind it are serious. Moky Makura’s Africa No Filter has done an impressive job at documenting the economic consequences of how Africa is seen externally, and at shifting this narrative.

Hopefully, this campaign will be successful at amplifying what is already happening on the ground: the fact that African creative professionals are now building products that are undeniably first-rate and naturally force the world's attention.

FILM

One great example of that is African filmmakers’ success last month at Cannes, the world’s most glamorous film festival.

🏆 First, Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo became the first Rwandan director to screen in the Cannes Official Selection.

Her film Ben'Imana not only received a standing ovation, but it went on to win the Caméra d'Or, the festival's prestigious award for best debut feature across all sections, plus the FIPRESCI Critics' Prize as a cherry-on-top.

Ben'Imana, set in 2012 Rwanda against the backdrop of the Gacaca community justice process, follows a genocide survivor whose capacity for forgiveness is pushed to its limits when her teenage daughter becomes pregnant.

🕙 Ben'Imana took ten years to make.

It passed through La Fabrique Cinéma at Cannes, the Atlas Workshops at the Marrakech Film Festival, the Ouaga Film Lab, and the Berlinale World Cinema Fund, before a single frame was shot.

It received post-production support from the Norwegian Sørfond and won the Red Sea Souk Post-Production Award at the Red Sea Film Festival.

As is typical for festival films, Ben'Imana was built the long and painstaking way through the global development lab circuit, one residency and one grant at a time.

🛠 What is a lot less typical is Ben'Imana’s financing architecture.

The mechanics of international film productions often mean that the IP of African films end up owned by the European countries that financed them.

💪🏾 But the team behind Ben'Imana, led by Ejo Cine (Rwanda) and Princesse M Productions (Gabon), managed to keep majority ownership on the continent, thanks largely to the support from Rwanda's new state-backed Film Fund - one of the first titles to benefit from it.

In the enigmatic world of auteur cinema, this is big, ground-shifting, and a decisive argument in favor of African film funds.

The film will be distributed by Paris-based MK2 films (who, hopefully, will not forget African audiences?).

🎬 Another Cannes winner was Nigerian cinema as a whole.

To those who dismissed Nigerian cinema as only capable of Nollywood-style hyperbole (nothing wrong with that by the way - those filmmakers laughed all the way to the bank), I’ve always said that once Nigerian filmmakers cracked the auteur world, they would dominate.

Well, it’s happening now.

In Cannes, two things happened:

🙌 👏 First, the Esiri brothers' Clarissa (Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway transposed to Lagos, shot on 35mm) received a standing ovation at its Directors' Fortnight premiere.

Afrexim’s CCInc (Osahon Akpata) financed the film, whose cast includes Sophie Okonedo, David Oyelowo, and Ayo Edebiri. Critics are calling it a breakout, and indie distributor darling Neon has the world rights.

🤝 At the same time, across town at the Film Market, Seoul-based Flix Oven announced CJ Obasi (Mami Wata, Nigeria's Oscar submission) as the inaugural fellow of a new African-Korean filmmaker residency.

CJ will go to Seoul for a month to develop his new feature, with Morgan Freeman exec producing. Continental Entertainment's and former CAA Head of Africa Ozi Menakaya structured the deal.

🏆 This comes the year after Akinola Davies Jr.'s My Father's Shadow (the first Nigerian film in Un Certain Regard) earned a Special Mention for the Caméra d'Or at Cannes.

Three different pathways to global festival cinema that, beyond artistic vision, share some structural similarities (also present in the Ben'Imana success story):

🔹 African financing - finally

🔹 Proper time spent on development

🔹 Knowledgeable representation

🔹 Co-productions that make sense

🔹 Distribution deals negotiated before a film premieres

🔹 Reps, sales agents, and distributors who understand how to position African auteur talent for the global market

Nollywood built one of the world's largest film industries on volume, speed, and cultural relevance. That story isn't going away.

But a parallel track is forming, and it will expand the definition of Nigerian cinema.

FASHION

👗 If you've been following Nigerian fashion's export moment - the viral BBC story about the prom dresses shipped to Florida, the pop-ups selling out in London and Atlanta - you've been watching the demand side of a story that has barely started building its supply chain.

🏭 Nigeria's fashion has always had a structural problem hiding behind the headlines: the lack of local production infrastructure that pushes many designers to manufacture abroad.

That gap got a little smaller last month, when the Kwara Garment Factory signed a management and operations agreement with KWS Garment Production Village, handing over the running of one of Nigeria's most advanced industrial apparel manufacturing facilities to a private operator.

This would be an obtuse story if the private operator wasn’t Folake Akindele, founder of Tiffany Amber, one of the most internationally recognized African fashion brands of the past three decades, and someone who herself has spent much of her career manufacturing outside Nigeria.

👨🏿🌾 The unfortunate reality holding African fashion back is this: the continent produces roughly 6% of the world's total cotton supply, yet 90% of that raw cotton is exported for processing elsewhere.

The current situation in Nigeria is that the country grows the fibre, exports it, and then buys it back as fabric.

Nigerian designers may create samples locally, but the bigger brands often work with Chinese or Turkish factories to produce pieces at scale, sometimes reimport the finished garments, before finally selling them to customers in Lagos or London.

Every step of that chain that happens outside Nigeria is value that does not come home. The Kwara factory, if it delivers on its ambition, starts to shorten that chain.

The thing is, the Kwara Garment Factory has existed on paper and in partial operation for several years.

🤞🏾 The hope is that a private operator like Akindele will be able to deliver on its promise, which is to employ up to 4,000 workers across its production ecosystem, extend beyond garment production into textile manufacturing, and leverage the still-elusive AfCFTA to reach continental scale.

The history of state-owned industrial facilities in Nigeria being handed to private operators is a mixed one, to put it diplomatically. There will be a lot of pressure on Akindele to make it work.

But if she succeeds, it will be transformative.

The Kwara factory is not Nigeria’s only large-scale garment manufacturing investment.

🤯 In July 2025, Ogun State and ARISE IIP announced a $2 billion garment manufacturing hub within the Industrial Platform Remo Free Zone - a project of an entirely different order of magnitude, with projected capacity of 4.4 million garments daily and between 120,000 and 150,000 direct and indirect jobs.

The Ogun project is backed by Afreximbank and modelled on ARISE IIP's proven and state-of-the-art Glo-Djigbé Industrial Zone in Benin, which already produces garments for Kiabi, Gémo, and U.S. Polo Assn.

It is good to see Nigeria making multiple, serious bets on rebuilding its garment manufacturing base. The execution, as always, is the variable worth watching.

HERITAGE

Back to that infamous moment on stage at the Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi.

📃 What got drowned under the internet buzz was the real reason why President Macron was participating in the Creation in Motion session I was MCing: to announce that France had passed a landmark framework law on the restitution of African cultural heritage.

The law, approved unanimously by both the French National Assembly and Senate, is significant, and in many ways even symbolic.

Until now, every single restitution required its own specific act of Parliament, a procedure so slow and cumbersome that in the nine years since Macron's 2017 Ouagadougou speech promising to return looted African artefacts, only a handful of objects had actually made it home.

🥁 The new framework removes that bottleneck: restitutions can now be authorized by government decree, without a parliamentary vote for each case. Already this year, Côte d'Ivoire received the sacred talking drum Djidji Ayokwe, seized in 1916.

The French law does not exist in a vacuum. The global movement towards repatriation of looted African artifacts has been steadily building over the past 10 years.

📦 The Netherlands sent back 119 Benin Bronzes to Nigeria in June 2025, while Germany has transferred dozens more. Cambridge University also transferred ownership of 116 Benin Bronzes to Nigeria in February 2026. Ghana received 130 gold and bronze artefacts from the UK and South Africa in November 2025. (The British Museum is still holding out).

Critically, African countries are also building the infrastructure to receive these objects: Nigeria's Edo Museum of West African Art (EMOWAA), designed by David Adjaye, is now open. Ghana is developing a Pan-African Heritage Museum near Cape Coast Castle, and Benin's new Quartier Culturel et Créatif in Cotonou includes dedicated gallery and studio space.

MUSIC

🎵 🎥 Two of Nigeria's biggest cultural exports - Nollywood and Afrobeats - are no longer on speaking terms. At least not for free.

Filmmaker and video director Dami Twitch set off a wave of industry conversation with a candid observation on the Afropolitan podcast: Nollywood producers can no longer use popular Afrobeats songs in their films without formal licensing clearance, and most of them simply cannot afford what that now costs.

The collaboration between the two industries, he added, is now "at a very weird place."

Why? Because top Afrobeats artists like Davido, Rema, Tems, Asake or Adekunle Gold have now been signed by global majors (UMG/Mavin/Def Jam, Warner, Sony/Columbia/RCA, Empire, etc) in sophisticated, legally binding agreements that transfer control over an artist's music catalogue, publishing rights, and sync licensing decisions to companies headquartered in London, New York, or Los Angeles.

Under these deals, the artist cannot unilaterally grant permission for their music to be used in a film anymore, even if they personally want to.

📝 The rights holder (the label or publisher) must approve the license, set the fee, and execute the contract.

For a Nollywood independent filmmaker operating on a tight budget in a currency that has lost most of its value against the dollar, that fee is frequently prohibitive.

But here’s the thing. It’s a problem, but it’s also progress.

The fact that Afrobeats songs are now commercially valuable enough to require formal sync licensing is the sign of a maturing industry.

💸 For years, the complaint from artists and rights advocates on this continent was precisely the opposite: that African music was being used everywhere without compensation, without credit, and without legal consequence.

The problem is not that the rights of the artists are now protected, but the mismatch in scale between a globalized music rights system and a film industry that is still predominantly local and naira-denominated.

What Nollywood is now experiencing is a version of what Hollywood deals with routinely (the sync licensing process) but without the infrastructure that makes it manageable.

Hollywood productions have music supervisors, legal teams, and pre-negotiated blanket deals with publishers. Nollywood independents have WhatsApp and a phone call to a friend.

The solution will eventually come from building the Nigerian equivalent of what works elsewhere: a centralized, transparent sync licensing registry where filmmakers can quickly find out who controls what rights, what it costs, and how to pay, in naira, with a clear process, at rates calibrated to production budget levels.

SPORTS

⚽️ I’ll go ahead and say it: the biggest investment opportunity in the African creative industries right now - in terms of transaction size and volume - is Sports and Entertainment infrastructure

Kigali's BK arena

With African sports and music booming globally, the lack of venues, districts, and ecosystems capable of capturing that value on the continent is the obvious gap.

🏗  Concretely, this means arenas, stadiums and other mix-use venues of varying sizes that can host sports events, concerts, performances, festivals, or conferences - and provide the anchor for additional revenue streams from tourism, hospitality, retail, and media.

But now, Big Money is finally going after that gap:

🔹 In July 2025, IFC and Proparco made a $50M bet on Helios Sports and Entertainment Group, which has infrastructure at the core of its strategy

🔹 In January 2026, Premier Invest announced the launch of the African Sports and Infrastructure Fund (ASIF), an open-ended fund designed to provide equity financing for ten multipurpose arenas across key African cities

🔹 The Lagos Arena, a $100 million, 12,000-capacity venue financed as a Public-Private Partnership, seems back on track after a 2-year delay

🔹 Morocco is deploying a multi-billion investment roadmap in stadiums and supporting infrastructure ahead of the 2030 World Cup, including the Grand Stade Hassan II in Casablanca, the world’s largest football stadium with 115,000 seats

The latest move happened 10 days ago at the Africa CEO Forum:

🤝 IFC and Masai Ujiri’s Zaria Group announced their partnership (aka, investment by IFC in Zaria Group) to develop sports and entertainment districts across major African cities including Nairobi, Lagos and Johannesburg.

Zaria Group has emerged as a leading player in sports infrastructure, with the BK Arena, Amahoro Stadium, and the $26M mixed-use Zaria Court in Kigali under its belt.

For too long, sports in Africa had only been seen through the lens of “social development” (and it is still seen that way by many). This attitude has kept the physical infrastructure under-invested for decades.

But this perception is slowly changing.

💡 The reality is, sports and entertainment venues should be treated like ports and airports -- as essential, revenue-generating, and nation-building infrastructure.

The challenges, however, are real:

Construction and operating costs for this kind of infrastructure are heavy, and in Africa, ticket sales, sponsorship, and media rights alone do not cover them yet.

To make the economics work, you have to layer in government incentives (land contributions, tax rebates, PPP structures), hospitality anchors (hotels, food, tourism attractions), retail and commercial tenants, and aggressive space rental strategies to maximise utilisation between events.

Getting that revenue mix right, and rebalancing it as the market matures, is where these projects succeed or fail.

As with many worthwhile endeavors, investing in sports and entertainment infrastructure is complex, difficult, and implies the ability to focus on the long-term rather than on quick turn-arounds.

FINANCING

💰 For years, we’ve complained that banks don't understand creatives, and creatives don't understand banks.

In May, one of Africa's largest financial institutions decided, very publicly, to do something about that.

At the (now infamous) Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi, Equity Group CEO Dr. James Mwangi highlighted how the bank is restructuring the way it works with creatives by developing tailored financial solutions that support long-term growth.

Three days later, at the Africa CEO Forum in Kigali, the bank backed those words with a formal commitment.

🤝 Equity Group and IFC signed an MOU explicitly naming the creative sector as one of three strategic pillars, alongside agriculture and MSMEs, under a framework Mwangi labelled the Africa Creative Economy Transformation Agenda, or ACETA.

An MOU between Africa's largest bank by footprint and the IFC (providing financing and guarantees), with a named agenda, shows that the commitment has moved from a simple idea to a structured initiative with accountability attached.

This comes after a similar partnership announced last December between HEVA Fund and NCBA Bank to launch bespoke creative financing products (event financing, invoice discounting, LPO financing, working capital), built directly around how creative businesses actually generate and spend money.

These moves are very exciting for a creative finance nerd such as myself because bank loans can help unlock growth in the creative industries at a much wider scale than VC, simply because they are much better adapted to the large majority of creative sector companies, which are profitable SMEs (and not high-growth tech startups).

📊 The HEVA-NCBA model in Kenya, now almost six months old, will start producing data soon on uptake, default rates, and whether the products are actually reaching the creatives they were designed for.

It will serve as important guidance for Equity Group, and no doubt for all the other banks that will soon join the creative industries financing bandwagon.

CREATIVE CASH FLOW

📖 It’s been a little over a month since the release of my book CREATIVE CASH FLOW, and it is steadily making its way around the world. Thanks everyone for your warm support!

At the book’s Nairobi launch event, I asked the audience one question: Do you identify the most as an artist, a founder, or a CEO?

This is also the first question I ask of the readers in the first Chapter.

Why?

🗑 Many training programs have wasted time and money trying to turn pure creatives into CEOs.

My view is that it is not always (not often) possible - and this shouldn’t be a problem. It’s just a fact.

🧑🏾🎨The skills that make someone a brilliant artist are not the same skills that define an effective operator.

And what makes a great founder - the hustle, the storytelling, the ability to launch from nothing - is not what a business needs at growth stage.

In the book, I argue that the first step you should take in your journey to build a sustainable creative business is one of self-reflection.

Being wrong about who you truly are and how it shapes your approach to business is one of the most expensive mistakes you can make.

So, who are you, really?

I built a fun quiz to find out. It’s in the book, but you can also take it here 👉 www.creativecashflow.africa/quiz

How well do you know yourself?

There are no wrong answers. The results won't judge you; they'll just help you build smarter by pointing you toward the gaps you need to fill and the people you need around you.

Let me know if you got diagnosed correctly ;)

📺 Finally, to wrap up this edition, here’s the link to watch my interview on France24’s Across Africa.

Among other things, I expanded on one key point I make in CREATIVE CASH FLOW: visibility is not viability.

😎 😭 You can have a lot of followers, press coverage, and awards, and still struggle at the end of the month (I also call this Prestige Poor).

Moral of the story: what we should aim for and recognize are solid, sustainable, and profitable creative businesses, not fake fame.

HUSTLE & FLOW #74: Creative Cash Flow Drops; Ethiopia Stirs; Nigeria Owns Cannes Again; the Dark Side of the Creator Economy; and more

The new edition of HUSTLE & FLOW is out 👀

It’s been a packed few weeks.

📖 First of all, my book is out, of course, and now the real work begins.

Then, I’ve returned to Ethiopia and left energized - I tell you why.

Also in this edition: Nigeria takes Cannes again, the creator economy shows its dark side, a beloved fashion industry player pivots, and a new sports data solution launches.

There’s a lot to get into, so let’s go 👇

CREATIVE CASH FLOW LAUNCHES

📚 You should be aware by now because I’ve been shouting it from the rooftops: my book CREATIVE CASH FLOW: Mastering Money, Business and Growth in the African Creative Economy has launched!

It is available for digital sales at www.creativecashflow.africa and on Amazon Kindle.

Communiqué’s Offscript wrote a lovely piece about my career and what led me to write this book.

The short version is:

For the past 5 years or so, I've worked with leading DFIs such as Afreximbank, IFC, and Proparco, building the case for investing in the African creative industries (for those wondering, that is what my actual job is). By 2025, a combined $3 billion had been pledged for the sector.

But investors are struggling to deploy these funds. The reality is that most creative founders looking to raise are simply not ready. And I’m not even talking about investment readiness, I’m talking about basic business readiness. The lack of business and financial literacy in the creative economy is what is holding the ecosystem back.

💡 CREATIVE CASH FLOW is about bridging that gap. It gives creative entrepreneurs a clear and grounded roadmap to building a creative enterprise that is commercially coherent enough to grow, attract the right capital, and survive the specific volatility of African markets.

So what exactly is in the book?

📖 Part I starts with the hardest question, which is one of self-reflection. It asks the reader to determine if they are an artist, a founder, or a CEO. Those are not interchangeable roles, and being self-aware about one’s interests and capabilities may be the biggest hack to building a strong creative business. Chapter 2 then maps the African creative economy as it actually exists beyond the myths, the fantasies and the headlines, sector by sector.

📖 Part II is business fundamentals. Chapter 3 covers revenue architecture and how to build multiple income streams. Chapter 4 is a crash course in financial literacy, what I call Financialese. Chapter 5 takes that financial knowledge into the specific operating reality of African markets with their currency stress, payment delays, and low visibility. Chapter 6 addresses building teams in a resource-constrained environment.

📖 Part III is where the growth tools live. Digital and AI tools in Chapter 7, IP monetization in Chapter 8. And then two chapters on capital: what types exist and how to choose the right one for your business (Chapter 9), and what the fundraising process actually looks like from the investor side (Chapter 10). And yes, I do actually name names and tell the readers who is funding what.

📖 Part IV zooms out to the ecosystem and what it will take to scale the sector as a whole, not just individual businesses.

CREATIVE CASH FLOW was written primarily for creative founders, but it’s also useful for incubators, accelerators, development institutions, and investors trying to understand what they're looking at when they evaluate these businesses.

💪 The book is the first step. I’m also developing masterclasses, workshops, and curriculums based on the same content. My goal is to spread this knowledge far and wide so creative entrepreneurs can build stronger, sustainable, and investable businesses.

If you share this vision, and have access to a community that would benefit from CREATIVE CASH FLOW - let’s talk!

Also, if you’re in Nairobi, I’ll be doing my first launch event tomorrow Wednesday May 6th at 6:30pm at the Alliance Française. Register here to secure your spot (already 100 seats booked): bit.ly/ccflow26

ETHIOPIA'S CREATIVE SECTOR IS WAKING UP

✈️ This month I was back in Addis for the second time this year - the universe is clearly telling me something.

Quiet and shy Ethiopia is not yet on the radar of creative industries investors. But I suspect it’s about to change.

📈 First, there’s no denying the underlying growth dynamics. With about 138 million people, Ethiopia is the second most populous nation in Africa after Nigeria, and one of the fastest-growing economies on the continent.

In the past couple of years, the government has been running a serious reform program, and the results can be seen in the opening of the telco sector (with the arrival of Safaricom and Mpesa in the country), the transition to a flexible exchange rate regime, and the complete makeover of Addis Ababa, which is putting Lagos and Nairobi to shame.

⚠️ That’s not the full picture of course: Ethiopia also suffers from recurring conflicts in some regions, the GDP is hovering at $979 per capita, inflation is persistent, things don’t always quite work yet, and freedom of expression is still limited.

This complexity explains why the country’s impressive growth numbers haven’t yet translated into consumer spending power or a functioning creative market. But what I saw on the ground confirmed the direction of travel.

🤖 At the Ethio-French CreaTech Forum, I was impressed by the originality of the young companies coming out of the first two cohorts of the Alliance Ethio-Française’s Habesha Creative Lab, which spanned animation studios, gaming companies, education solutions, ecommerce, AR/VR experiences, and cultural tech.

Animation studio Behager lij took the top prize for their lovely and hilarious series Sunday Morning, about four kids who are trying to entertain themselves without waking up their mother. Both culturally specific (the supporting characters are a chicken and a worm) and universal, it definitely deserves to be on global screens.

Another example is a project called Digital Hands by Rehoboth, that uses augmented reality to project patterns on manual weaving machines, helping artisans work much faster - a really interesting blend of cutting edge technology and age-old craftsmanship which gives a new definition to the concept of modernity.

What struck me was not just the quality of the ideas, but the thoughtfulness of their relationship to culture. These founders are building from a specific place, with specific references, for audiences who would recognize and value that specificity. No Western copycat projects detected.

🎉 A week later, I attended CRAFT Addis, a brand new creative festival organized by Zeleman, Ethiopia's leading advertising and communications agency, launched as part of the company's 20th anniversary.

The venue — the Adwa Victory Memorial Museum — was world class (again, Lagos and Nairobi, iiiiish).

The programming was broad, from masterclasses and panels on AI, platform economics, and scaling creative businesses to a great Craft Market, film screenings, a gaming arena, and the highlight - the last concert of Mulatu Astatke, the 83 year-old father of Ethio-jazz. Proof upon proof upon proof that something is brewing in the land of coffee.

💃🏽 If you follow me on Instagram (@marieloramungai), you know that I also took time to explore the fashion scene.

Here’s my honest review: Ethiopian craftsmanship is extraordinary. The handwoven cotton fabrics are a delight to wear, the finishings were sharp, and the shapes flattering for all, at a very affordable price point.

Of course, there is still a lot to be done. Most Ethiopian designers are still cut off from the pan-African and global fashion markets. Websites don’t show complete collections, some designs are still too traditional, many brands don’t have international means of payment, and designers are not plugged into the African fashion PR machine.

I don't want to oversell this. Ethiopia's creative sector is early-stage, operating in a complex and sometimes restrictive environment, with infrastructure gaps that will take years to close. But it has the key ingredients to become a continental leader.

Quiet is not the same as dormant.

FILM

Moving on to this newsletter’s regular programming.

🎬 In film, Nigeria showed us this month that it was still capable of making headlines despite the global slowdown.

First, Arie and Chuko Esiri's sophomore feature Clarissa — a reimagination of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway shot on 35mm across Lagos and Delta State — was selected for the 58th Cannes Directors' Fortnight.

🏆 The selection comes directly on the back of Akinola Davies Jr.'s My Father's Shadow earning a Special Mention for the Caméra d'Or at Cannes 2025.

Two years in a row of Nigerian feature films in Cannes is not a coincidence. Something has shifted. I always predicted that once Nigerian filmmakers cracked the author cinema model (just as they cracked commercial films), they would dominate it. Here we are, people.

Meanwhile in Nollywood, the NFVCB officially named Funke Akindele the Nollywood Box Office Champion, recognizing four consecutive years of dominance culminating in Behind the Scenes grossing ₦2.7 billion (almost $2 million). 🔥

The film is the first Nollywood production to cross the ₦2 billion mark at the African box office, and is the highest-grossing Nollywood title of all time across Africa, the UK, and Ireland — making Akindele the first filmmaker to rank number one at the African box office for three consecutive years.

🇳🇬 The Esiri brothers and Funke Akindele represent very different types of filmmaking and very different markets, but the same Nigerian chutzpah.

CREATOR ECONOMY

🤳In totally unnecessary news, Kenya just launched its own TikTok. It's called UrbanTok.

Mzawadi Group unveiled the platform at the Connected Africa Summit last week, with full government fanfare. The goal: to provide a direct response to the struggles of Kenyan creators with foreign algorithms and payment gateways.

The frustration behind this launch is completely legitimate. But we need to separate the diagnosis from the prescription.

📱 TikTok currently has over 18.4 million adult users in Kenya alone. That is a deeply embedded social infrastructure that shapes how millions of young Kenyans communicate, entertain themselves, discover music, and yes, make money.

Building a competing platform and expecting those 18 million people to migrate would require a reason so compelling that it outweighs the cost of leaving behind their audience, their followers, their content history, and their social graph.

😬 The Android app for UrbanTok briefly appeared on the Google Play Store before being taken down. Launching a platform to challenge the world's most engaging short-form video app and not having your Android app ready on day one is... hmm.

I said the same thing about "building Africa's own Netflix", and I'll say it again here: the problem with global platforms is real, but the solution is not to build a smaller, emptier version of the same thing and hope for the best.

The real levers are different. Governments have actual power here: advocate directly with TikTok to activate Creator Rewards in the market, negotiate local payment integration, push for data-sharing agreements, and threaten regulatory action if platforms continue to extract value without returning it are the real ways to effect change.

Good luck, UrbanTok. You'll need it. 🫡

A story that came out in April in the Guardian highlights the dark side of the rise of the African creator economy: it's giving a powerful platform to some unsavory characters 😈

They've always been there: the enthusiastic misogynist, the gender violence apologist.

But now, they're no longer just the creepy neighbor or cousin you avoid at family gatherings. They have audiences and revenue streams.

💪🏾👊🏾 Welcome to the African manosphere.

If you've watched Louis Theroux's documentary on Netflix, you know what I'm talking about: a loosely connected online ecosystem where communities of men bond over the shared belief that feminism has victimised them and that reclaiming dominance over women is the solution.

They have their own language. They talk about Andrew Tate, "red pills," "simps," and "alpha males."

A CNN analysis found that social media posts using known manosphere language averaged more than 4,000 mentions a day on X in Kenya alone in 2023. Despite having only 1.8 million X users, Kenya was consistently in the global top 10 for manosphere keyword usage. It even ranked third in January 2024, right as femicide cases were spiking across the country 😱

The African manosphere is not a Western import. It is a homegrown product. But the global "aesthetic" and community now give it extra validation and reach.

🤖 Kenya is the hotbed, but this is continent-wide. From Zimbabwe's Shadaya Knight (700k X followers) to Nigeria's Àgbà John Doe, Shola and Sir Dickson (1.6 million combined), to Ethiopia's Naty Mon (500k on TikTok), and South Africa’s Penuel The Black Pen, every major African market has its own version.

Two names you should know (and avoid) from Kenya specifically:

🔴 Amerix (real name Eric Amunga) grew from 150,000 followers on X in 2020 to 1.9 million today. Tells followers that "noisy and angry women are sex-deprived". The main force behind the trending hashtag #MasculinitySaturday.

🔴 Andrew Kibe, former radio host, 420,000 YouTube subscribers before being banned by Google for hate speech violations. Now back on socials and currently touring Kenya promoting his book 28 Commandments: A Journey into Manhood.

😳 441 million views on TikTok for the hashtag #AndrewKibe alone.

The manosphere is winning the algorithm. The same digital infrastructure that made Afrobeats global and iShowSpeed's Africa tour a hit is now scaling misogyny to a new generation of African young men.

It’s not all sunshine and rainbows in the creator economy, and it’s good to be reminded of it from time to time.

FASHION

💔 Leading fashion platform Industrie Africa has closed its e-commerce shop. This is sad news, but sadly not surprising.

The economics of African fashion e-commerce have always been brutal. You're working with a niche, globally dispersed customer base, small order volumes, fragmented logistics, currency volatility, and cross-border shipping costs that can dwarf the margin on a single garment.

Unit economics simply don't stack the way they do for a mass-market platform.

🚧 Add in the removal of the de minimis exemption and new US tariffs on African goods — which hit Industrie Africa hard, given that ~80% of its orders came from the US — and the structural headwinds become close to impossible to overcome.

Industry Africa’s story is not unique to them, but one that the sector has told repeatedly. What's remarkable is how long they lasted, and how well.

✨ Founder Nisha Kanabar built something genuinely differentiated. Sharp, consistent curation across 75+ designers from 20+ African countries, a strong editorial voice, and real relationships with designers.

That combination earned IA global credibility and loyal customers in ways that pure commerce plays couldn't. Brands like Lisa Folawiyo, Tongoro, and Christie Brown gained meaningful international visibility through the platform. After a Lagos Fashion Week showcase, a brand could launch on Industrie Africa and become its top seller almost overnight.

But curation and credibility don't fix the cost of a DHL shipment from Lagos to Los Angeles. 📦

IA will now pivot from ecommerce to IA+, an advisory and experiential retail model built around physical concept stores, luxury hotel partnerships, and cultural institutions.

Their first activation, a concept boutique on Bawe Island in Zanzibar, points toward a model where the curatorial expertise travels to where the consumer already is, rather than asking the consumer to navigate the friction of cross-border e-commerce.

We wish them well. 🙏🏾

SPORTS

📊 Africa Sports Unified has launched the Africa Sports Deals Tracker, a continuously updated database of verified sports business transactions across the continent, covering sponsorships, media rights, investments, infrastructure, and strategic partnerships.

The stated goal is to address fragmentation: deals are often underreported, under-documented, and difficult to benchmark. Anyone who has tried to build an investment thesis on African sports knows the pain.

🏗️ This is not a small problem. Without reliable deal data, it’s almost impossible to identify trends, size markets, benchmark valuations, or make a credible case to global LPs that African sports is a genuine asset class rather than a passion project.

The absence of data hasn’t completely stopped capital from flowing in (as the BAL and PFL Africa deals have shown) but it has kept those investments largely isolated, driven by relationships and conviction rather than market intelligence.

🌍 The global sports industry has been data-rich for years. Platforms like Deloitte’s Annual Review of Football Finance, SportsPro’s deal databases, and a growing ecosystem of sector-specific intelligence services have made it increasingly difficult for uninformed capital to stumble into sports deals in Europe or North America. Africa deserves the same infrastructure.

⚠️ There are caveats. A database is only as good as what gets reported into it — and in African sports, where deals are routinely done on handshakes and announced in press releases that leave out any meaningful financial detail, populating an authoritative tracker will require serious editorial effort and strong relationships on the ground. It will also need buy-in from the very operators and investors who currently benefit from opacity.

I’ll be watching closely.

HUSTLE & FLOW #73: Showmax is gone; Nigeria streams but doesn't earn; Nairobi's secret sauce; and more

🥊🥴 March 2026 gave the creative industries some tough love.

Being a creative, an entrepreneur, or even an investor usually means being more optimistic than average. But this month made sure to remind us that things are not always as rosy as we may want them to be.

First, Showmax was killed off by Canal+. The reasons for this sad news were financial of course, but also strategic. Then the Next Narrative Africa Fund revealed its first slate, and not everyone was pleased. Spotify also released its new streaming data for Nigeria, and it was good or meh, depending on who you ask. In this edition of HUSTLE & FLOW, I talk about this gap between optics and economics.

I also go over my recent trip to Nairobi, and the overlooked opportunity that I discovered there - and that one is definitely positive.

Read on to find out! 👀👇

STREAMING

That’s it: as of March 31st, you can no longer subscribe to Showmax. And in 30 days, Africa’s only homegrown competitor to Netflix will go dark.

💸 By now, you’ve read the numbers, and they’re so bad that it’s hard to dispute Canal’s brutal verdict. Showmax was bleeding money. In its 11 years of operation, the streamer had accumulated $430 million in losses, including $268 million just last year. Another way to put it is this: for every $1 Showmax made, it lost $2.50. Ouch.

So Canal+’s logic is clear. It paid $3 billion for a group facing subscriber losses, currency devaluations, and a streaming unit hemorrhaging cash at scale. It had promised significant cost synergies to its shareholders. It had to cauterize the wound.

But there was also another reason, which Olumuyiwa Olowogboyega at Notadeepdive unpacked in a brilliant piece (read it here).

The shutdown was not a simple reaction to bad results: it was baked into Canal+'s business model from the start. We were just all (except Olumuyiwa) too distracted to see it.

Let’s unpack it.

One of the reasons Multichoice’s business was always so confusing is that it went by many different names (Multichoice, Dstv, Mnet, Showmax) and pursued different business models. For example, Dstv is a Pay TV service that aggregates various linear channels, including its own, such as Mnet and Supersport, and sells them to you as bundles. Meanwhile, Showmax was a standalone streaming service with no connection to Dstv, only giving subscribers access to content it had either acquired or licensed directly. With this model Showmax was competing frontally with Netflix.

Compare this to Canal+’s much cleaner approach: in everything it does, the French operator is primarily an aggregator. Its Pay TV offer is similar to Dstv, but its inhouse streaming service, myCanal, is not a standalone service. From its launch in 2013, myCanal was designed as a single interface through which subscribers access Canal+'s own channels and on-demand options, alongside third-party services.

🤝 Netflix got bundled into myCanal’s French subscription tiers as early as 2019. Disney+, Paramount+, Max, and Apple TV+ followed. The Netflix-Canal+ bundling agreement was then extended to 24 Francophone African countries in July 2025. Canal+ CEO Maxime Saada has described the company's relationship with Netflix as "80% partners and maybe 20% competitors."

Canal+ was never really fighting Netflix or any of the other global streamers.

And there lies the crux of the matter: as Olumuyiwa puts it, you cannot simultaneously build a Netflix competitor and bundle Netflix. The two models are simply incompatible. From the moment Canal+ set its sights on acquiring Multichoice, it knew it had to kill Showmax.

Instead, Canal+ will deploy its own myCanal and TV+ apps, already engineered for offline viewing, mobile-to-TV integration, and low-bandwidth environments, and will continue expanding its Netflix bundling partnership across anglophone sub-Saharan Africa. Makes sense.

⚠️ But what the strategic logic does not account for is what gets lost in the execution.

Showmax was a brand with high awareness and solid market share in anglophone Africa, where Canal+ doesn’t resonate. Showmax's brand equity was actually an asset Canal+ acquired then chose to destroy. A collateral damage of the deal, perhaps.

Showmax was also not just an app with broken unit economics: it had become the most serious commissioning operation focused on African content on the continent. The teams had learned, slowly and at enormous cost, what African audiences actually watch and what price points hold. That market intelligence doesn’t live in the catalog that will be migrated to Dstv Stream but in people and relationships

🧠 Canal+ has committed to no retrenchments. But the question is whether the people who built that editorial capability will still be doing editorial work or whether they will be absorbed into other teams. Kill the product if you must, but please, preserve the brain.

FILM

🎬 The other announcement that got the internet talking this month was the reveal of Next Narrative Africa Fund’s (NNAF) first slate.

Founded by former US diplomat Akunna Cook, NNAF operates as a hybrid: $10 million in development grants for scripts, combined with $40 million in commercial equity once projects are production-ready.

The nine projects selected from more than 2,000 submissions spanning 80 countries are:

  • a South African action film produced by Trevor Noah

  • a political thriller from Rapman, the British-Ghanaian director behind Netflix’s “Supacell”

  • an action drama starring and co-written by South African actress Thuso Mbedu

  • a Lagos whodunnit from the Esiri Brothers

  • a Cold War-era Ghanaian spy series with André Holland as executive producer

  • a musical-fantasy starring Banky W and Adesua Etomi

  • a political drama by Sudanese filmmaker Mohamed Kordofani

  • a comedy-horror by Zoey Martinson

  • and a Nigeria-based sci-fi romance by Boma Iluma.

These first nine projects have received script development support between $20,000 and $100,000 per project, not production investment. If they make it through to production, Cook estimates they would represent over $60 million in production activity on the continent.

👅 The announcement got filmmakers' tongues wagging. The dominant feeling was sharply captured by Kenyan actress and scriptwriter Serah Mwihaki, who wrote: “if a guy like Trevor is competing in the same pool, then what are my chances?”

Tambay Obenson at Akoroko LLC and the African Film Press wrote the most precise and honest analysis of the whole wahala, and I recommend reading it in full here. His core observation: the disappointment is legitimate, but it's being directed at the wrong target.

NNAF is a commercial fund with a nonprofit development arm. Cook has been clear that she is not running a charity, and that diaspora audiences expand the market in ways that support larger budgets and wider reach. A slate that reflects that logic is not a betrayal of the fund's stated mission - it is the mission.

NNAF never promised to discover and finance the next generation of filmmakers based on the continent. It set out to develop and co-finance commercially-sound African content that can travel far enough in the world to “change the narrative”. To support that strategy, it set a target production budget at between $3 and $7 million, which allows for a certain level of production quality and the participation of some relatively big names that can draw attention. This type of budget is substantial for African films, and if such a film is going to be financed by private funds, it needs to sell. Sell where? This kind of money cannot be recouped on the African continent only. Hence the diaspora angle.

The frustration, Tambay argues, comes from the gap between what the name "Next Narrative Africa Fund" seemed to promise continent-based filmmakers, their probably misplaced expectations of what such a fund can achieve, and the simple market reality.

🏗️ The harder structural point is this: when public support systems are absent, when co-production agreements are thin and national film incentives are patchy, a single private commercial fund starts to bear the weight of an entire missing architecture. It looks like more than it is. And when it then behaves like the commercial vehicle it was always designed to be, the letdown hits disproportionately hard. The problem is not NNAF, but everything that should exist around it and doesn't.

In my 2021 report for UNESCO on the African Film and Television Industry, I laid out some recommendations for countries that want to develop their film ecosystem. Five years later, most are still valid: remove administrative and fiscal barriers to film production, implement local broadcast incentives and quotas, support local stars, develop tax rebates systems, sign co-production treaties, organize (especially niche) festivals, strengthen collective management organizations and empower them to fight piracy, and more.

A private initiative like NNAF, however well intentioned, is not the right vehicle to fix market infrastructure failings. That’s the role of governments.

But emerging writers shouldn’t despair, as another opportunity to access serious development infrastructure has just landed.

🌴Former Netflix exec Funa Maduka has launched Palmtrees, a screenplay incubator to support filmmakers based in regions that have historically lacked “the infrastructure to develop them at the rigor the global market demands.”

Funa was the original African film champion at Netflix, way back in 2014 before the streamer was even available on the continent. She spent six years there leading international original films and acquisitions, and played an instrumental role in expanding the company’s content in Europe, Middle East, Asia, and Africa. She was responsible for Netflix’s first African content acquisitions, including Lionheart, for example. She also produced and directed Waiting for Hassana, the first Nigerian film to world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival.

So, she’s not a newcomer.

⚡For Palmtrees, Funa partnered with Neon, the indie studio behind Parasite and Anora and arguably the most credible champion of world cinema working in the US market today.

The program will select 8 to 10 writers from Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and Oceania. Selected writers receive one-on-one script development support, compensation throughout the process, and a three-week in-person residency. Applications are open now, with a June 1 deadline.

You won’t be competing with Trevor on that one.

MUSIC

Spotify’s annual Loud & Clear report landed on March 16 with the usual fanfare.

📈 In it we learned that Nigerian artists generated ₦60 billion (about $43.4 million) in revenue in 2025, a 140% increase over two years. Total streams hit 30.3 billion, local consumption surged 170% year-on-year, and independent artists captured 58% of all royalties. A good story.

Then Tochi Louis at Creator Economy IQ did the real work (download his comprehensive Music Business 2025 report here), and the picture got considerably more complicated.

The consumption figures are genuinely impressive. Nigeria generated 3.77 billion Spotify streams in 2025, up 53% from 2.46 billion in 2024, confirming it as the largest streaming market in Africa by volume.

Even more striking, 92.12% of those streams went to Nigerian artists, making it one of the most locally concentrated streaming markets on the planet. Nigerian listeners are proud of and loyal to their music. When they do stream foreign music, the appetite is remarkably narrow: nearly 42% of all streams directed at US artists in Nigeria in 2025 were generated by a single act, the rapper Gunna (who knew? 🤷🏽♀️).

In contrast, Spotify streams in South Africa actually declined 3.7% in 2025, from 1.94 billion to 1.87 billion - possibly a sign of a maturing market. South African listeners are more internationally curious, with foreign consumption spread across multiple artists.

But here is where the economics undermine the optics. Despite Nigeria’s consumption boom, the real dollar value of its streaming revenue has been eroded by approximately 44% since 2023, driven by the devaluation of the naira.

💀 Also, Spotify doesn’t pay a fixed rate per stream. It distributes royalties proportional to each market’s subscription revenue pool. A Nigerian Spotify Premium subscription costs around ₦1,600 per month (~$1.17), while the US equivalent runs to $13.78. So, as local streams grow, the per-stream payout shrinks, because the pool is funded by one of the cheapest subscription tiers in the world, in a currency that has halved. Kenya, by contrast, saw the real value of its streaming revenue increase by about 18% over the same period. South Africa experienced a more moderate decline of around 8.5%. So the naija curse struck again: Nigeria is doing the volume but its economics are actively sabotaging it.

Tochi also studies the Nigerian music ownership structure all the way to the top. His analysis reveals that, while Nigeria’s music ecosystem looks diverse at the label level, just three companies control over 70% of Nigeria’s total streaming volume once you follow the money to the distributor and parent-company level: Empire, Sony, and Universal Music Group. Which means that the companies that negotiate with DSPs, control metadata, and hold the licensing relationships are, with very few exceptions, foreign.

As competition for control over Africa’s music export infrastructure intensifies, the number of streams Nigerian artists are generating is just one data point. More impactful for artists on the ground is how much revenue is generated, where and how, where value leaks, who controls distribution, and who ultimately captures the royalty flow.

DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE

Another March announcement was for the upcoming launch of Communiqué OS, the new digital platform of creative economy intelligence company Communiqué.

What is it? Well, I’m waiting for the platform to go live to experience it for myself, but here’s what we know so far:

📊 Communiqué calls it “a Bloomberg terminal” for the creative economy. The platform indexes Africa’s creative economy across 54 markets, 1,068 verified entities, and $4.2 billion in tracked capital. It offers a Creative Economy Health Index that scores countries on investment attractiveness. Embedded within is a cool new tool that Communiqué debuted in their latest Creator Economy report: the Audience Anchor Ratio (AAR). It measures export-readiness through the percentage of a creative entity’s audience that is based outside its home country (Nigeria scores high there, of course).

The platform also includes a Creators Hub with various resources for creative professionals. Later, Communiqué also plans to release a matchmaking engine that surfaces data-informed connections between founders, investors, and operators.

💰 Discovery is free but intelligence is not. The business model is token-based, which basically means that you buy a package (starting at $8) to access a certain amount of premium analysis for an unlimited time period.

Communiqué’s founder David Adeleke has been building the knowledge infrastructure for this industry for years. Now he’s turning it into a product. Will you use it? Let me know your thoughts.

SPECIAL KENYA FOCUS: NOTES FROM NAIROBI

✈️ 🇰🇪 A few weeks ago I spent more time in Nairobi than my usual dash in-and-out.

I wanted to take the time to talk with people and see if there was any opportunity in the Kenyan creative space that I had missed.

Turns out there was.

First, let me start with the more obvious. West Africa is particularly strong in music, film, fashion and visual arts. Kenya…not so much. Obviously, there are exceptions and brilliant Kenyan artists in all these disciplines. But overall, those are not sectors where Kenya particularly shines, for reasons that have to do with culture and costs, not talent or skill.

Kenya, however, distinguishes itself in other ways.

🖥️ First, CreaTech. Kenya’s tech space is strong, organized, and forward-thinking. I always say that Kenya is a country of early adopters. These positive characteristics have started transferring to the CreaTech sector, where we have seen startups like HustleSasa, Wowzi and Twiva raise money and develop real businesses. And there’s more coming.

🎤 Second, live entertainment. Nairobi is one of the most active cultural cities on the continent, and the live entertainment sector reflects that. Crucially, it’s also much more structured and easier to navigate than Lagos or Accra. Festivals like Blankets & Wine and SolFest have long stopped being simple events to become cultural IP, recurring brands with real audience loyalty and monetization potential. Companies like HustleSasa and MOOKH AFRICA handle discovery, ticketing, audience data, promoter financing and even, for HustleSasa with its ANZA MMA and Friday Fight Nights, original IP creation.

🪑Third, homeware. If Kenya’s path to scale in fashion is hard to pinpoint (besides the huge success of Vivo Fashion Group), the country’s homeware and lifestyle design sector is better positioned. It benefits from a deep craft base in woodwork, ceramics, weaving, and metalwork, a growing design sensibility aligned with global tastes, and a strong domestic anchor in tourism and hospitality. High-end lodges, boutique hotels, and restaurants are increasingly sourcing locally designed furniture and décor, creating a production base that does not depend on export markets from day one.

But here’s what had previously escaped my radar: Kenya’s food scene is POPPING. 🍽️🍽️🍽️

Kenyans spend almost 50% of their income on food on average (more in rural areas, less in urban centers), one of the highest rates globally. Kenya also has a particularly diverse agricultural output, making it a top global exporter of tea, coffee, fruits and vegetables.

These drivers, plus the high proportion of foreigners in the country, have turned Nairobi into fertile ground for a recent boom in new restaurant concepts, from Cultiva, to Hero Bar, The Diner or Beit es Selam.

Several of those have the potential to become specialty dining chains. The OGs in that space are Java House, which launched in 1999, and Artcaffé, founded in 2008. Java began as a single café in 1999, scaled into a regional platform across East Africa with 100 locations, attracted private equity, and was eventually acquired by institutional investors. Artcaffé, with 60+ outlets and a deliberate blurring of the line between restaurant, bakery, retail and even gourmet concept store with Artcaffé Market, took the model further. Both chains diversified their portfolio to include other restaurant brands and retail food products.

💡 These case studies show that a Kenyan food concept can achieve the level of operational standardization, brand consistency, and revenue predictability required to be treated as a real asset class.

But restaurants are only one layer, and arguably not the most interesting one from an investor perspective, because their forex potential is limited unless they expand regionally.

📦 The more compelling opportunity is in premium packaged food and beverage brands, where Kenya has a credible path to export-led growth.

☕ Tea and coffee are the clearest and oldest examples. Kenya is one of the world’s largest tea and coffee exporters, but historically most of that value left the country unbranded. This is changing now with brands like Kericho Gold, Over a Drink, or Spring Valley Coffee.

Then there are the smaller but structurally interesting plays. As someone whose only vice is dark chocolate, I was excited to discover that Kenya now had sprouted high quality bean-to-bar brands like The Chocolate Bar, with beans sourced from Uganda. I came back with a large supply in my luggage, which has since then been decimated. Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire, watch out.

🌿And then there are businesses like Cocopure, which is building a portfolio of superfood powders targeting the global wellness market.

What ties these together is a shift from upstream commodity supplier to downstream brand owner. Kenya’s historical role in global food systems has been production. The current transition is toward branding and packaging (which I was surprised to find were top-notch, especially compared to similar products in West Africa), and direct consumer relationships. That’s where the margin sits. 💰

This just gave me one more reason to start planning my next trip to Nairobi.

HUSTLE & FLOW #72: The City You Slept on; Rethinking Hubs; Fashion + Textile; Who Really Won AFCON; and more

February was a long-overdue return to East Africa for me - a region I roamed extensively during my decade as a Nairobi-based journalist and entrepreneur.

🇪🇹 First, Addis Ababa, where I gave masterclasses to a network of East African creative hubs.

🇰🇪 Then, Nairobi for the Sankalp Africa Summit.

I hadn’t been back to Addis in more than 15 years, and the city deserves a moment in this newsletter.

My recent engagement made me think deep about the role that creative hubs could - and should - be having in this ecosystem. I share my thoughts here. I also talk about why investors need to stop separating fashion from textiles, IFC’s new creative bet, the quiet rise of African auteur cinema, AFCON’s win for Morocco, and the hype around vertical dramas.

Let’s go. 👇

ADDIS ABABA, CREATIVE CITY

🎄 My first impressions, after the first breath of fresh, high-altitude Ethiopian air: the country’s “corridor policy” means new roads everywhere, new buildings, but also new parks with fully-grown trees and Vegas-style fountains. Streets lit like Christmas trees at night. The city has moved and is moving.

My group still got sick from eating at a local joint though. Food poisoning remains part of Ethiopia’s charm for now.

I only had three days on the ground and time to visit only a few places: Habesha Creative Lab (where I was holding my sessions), Zeleman agency and Kana TV. But that was enough for me to be able to say this: Ethiopia’s place in the African creative landscape is seriously underrated.

Ethiopia, like most African countries, has no dedicated creative industry policy. But that has never stopped creatives and entrepreneurs from doing their thing, and in Addis, the sector’s energy was evident.

🎮 The Habesha Creative Lab (opened in May 2025 at the Alliance Ethio-Francaise, where my sessions took place) is the newest player in Addis’ modest but real hub ecosystem that also includes iceaddis (launched in 2011 - the original tech incubator) and Creative Hub Ethiopia. The Habesha Creative Lab explicitly targets digital creative sectors such gaming, VR, AR, animation, and AI. The first cohort incubated and trained 14 creative entrepreneurs with perfect gender balance. It will be interesting to track their journey.

🎯 My next stop was at Zeleman, Ethiopia’s largest and most influential creative agency which provides 360 services to the biggest companies operating in the country - from advertising, to branding, events, PR, social media, data analytics, strategic communications and leadership training. Founded by award-winning filmmaker and entrepreneur Zelalem Woldemariam, it has shaped much of the country’s contemporary visual and brand language for the past 20 years.

To give you an idea of how important the company is: Zeleman was the local production partner for iShowSpeed’s Ethiopia stop on his Africa tour for example, handling on-ground logistics, media production, and local amplification.

Two things that struck me as I toured the agency:

First, Zeleman already integrates AI in all its workflows and is even about to open an AI-only department. No amount of resting-on-your-laurels detected here.

Second, 15 years ago, I struggled to find a translator who actually spoke English in Addis. Now, Zeleman’s 140 staff communicate in English among themselves. Gen Zs are more comfortable with it than with Ahmaric, Zelalem told me, because of YouTube and TikTok. Wow.

📺 Then, I went to visit Kana TV, Ethiopia’s most-watched private entertainment broadcaster. I’ve talked about Kana TV before. In fact, it is one of the 12 African creative success stories I profiled in my report for Proparco’s CREA Fund. If social media overuse has destroyed your ability to read a few pages of prose, I also made a Linkedin carousel version, so no excuse.

The story of Kana TV is one of grit and ingenuity. It launched in 2016 backed by Moby Group (known for starting TV channels in impossible markets, such as Afghanistan) and rapidly captured 40–50% of prime-time TV viewing by initially acquiring and dubbing Turkish series into Amharic, proving there was a massive, unmet appetite for high-quality, localized entertainment.

What Kana TV did was rewire Ethiopia’s media economy: it forced competitors and regulators to rethink production norms and content policies, introduced Ethiopian SMEs to TV advertising, and spurred investment into local shows alongside dubbed content. Today, Kana TV produces its own programs, blending quality entertainment with operational efficiency. A team was shooting something in the open space during my meeting with CEO Nazrawi “Naz” Ghebreselasie, for example.

Talking about Naz, his own story is like a movie: a solo Ethiopian refugee to Canada at 16 years old, he studied physics first, then became the country’s math champion. Now he actually applies classical mathematical formulas to improve Kana TV’s programming strategy. And, spoiler alert, it works.

🥸 Ethiopians are famously humble and very uncomfortable with showcasing personal achievements. I hope Zelalem and Naz will forgive me for putting them in the spotlight, but they know I’m doing this because the continent’s creative entrepreneurs need role models and stories of homegrown success.

So, you got it - the level of creative drive and innovation in Addis impressed me. I’ll be back in a couple months for CRAFT Addis, the country’s first creative economy gathering organized with great ambition by Zeleman.

CREATIVE HUBS, THE MISSING NODE

The reason I went to Addis in the first place was to work with an East African network of creative hubs and help them think through their transition from fully donor-funded to a more sustainable model.

What I found confirmed something I’ve suspected for a while: these hubs sit at the most strategic infrastructure layer in the entire ecosystem but are almost universally under-positioned.

Cultural and Creative hubs come in many shapes. Most were established with donor support. Some sit inside cultural centres or embassies, while others are offshoots of existing tech hubs. What they share is a confusion about what they are actually for:

  • Is the goal to support innovative artistic creation?

  • To train young creatives for employment?

  • To incubate bankable creative enterprises?

  • All of the above?

🤔 Part of the confusion is rooted in a deeper misunderstanding: culture and creative industries are related, but they are not interchangeable. Culture is about expression, identity, and heritage. Creative industries operate as market systems involving IP, distribution, monetization rails, supply chains, and capital structures. Culture requires support; creative industries attract investment.

When a hub tries to straddle both without clarity, it becomes diluted. It can host workshops, organise showcases, rent desks or equipment, but misses the opportunity to systematically shape the market.

💵 Another challenge is the distortion in approach and expectations caused by the VC narrative. Tech has dominated Africa’s investment conversation for a decade, and it’s left most people believing that companies = startups and investment = VC.

In fact, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Over 90% of creative companies are SMEs: fashion labels, production houses, studios, agencies, publishers. They are often profitable, labor-intensive, and rarely capable of 10x growth in three years. Forcing them into the VC template pushes them to invent inflated TAMs to impress VC funds that will leave demo days unimpressed anyway, reinforcing the idea that creative industries are “uninvestable.”

These SMEs are not uninvestable, they’re just talking to the wrong audience. Financial instruments adapted to creative businesses - working capital, invoice factoring, revenue-based financing, angel checks, micro-PE - do exist and are becoming increasingly available. Yes, this is a very complex and opaque world to navigate. But hubs need to build this financial literacy so they can direct founders toward the right doors.

Sitting between creatives, schools, corporates, governments, donors, and investors, hubs have the potential to become the most important infrastructure layer in the African creative economy. Specifically as:

1️⃣ Market intelligence centers. The data on African CCIs is disjointed. Hubs could be the ones to connect the dots: which subsectors are growing locally, where distribution bottlenecks sit, what infrastructure is missing. Over time, the hub becomes the reference node for its territory.

2️⃣ Talent pipelines for the real economy. Creative skills are valuable beyond the creative sector. Consumer brands need social media managers, mining companies use VR for staff training, retailers need brand designers. Hubs could bridge the gap and widen employment paths.

3️⃣ Pre-investment filters for financiers. DFIs and funds are actively seeking structured creative deals, but cite weak financial literacy and informal structures as reasons for slow deployment. Hubs are the ideal partner for business readiness programmes, the step that must come even before investment-readiness. That makes them a trusted filter for capital.

The repositioning is deep work. It requires hubs to define their mandate clearly, build internal finance capacity, and extend their networks beyond the cultural circuit toward banks, investors, and export agencies. And critically: hubs need to see themselves as businesses too. Staying grant-dependent makes it impossible to operate with the long-term discipline that serious pipeline-building requires. But the potential is enormous - and exciting.

FASHION & TEXTILE

After Addis, I was off to Nairobi for the Sankalp Africa Summit, where I gave a masterclass on Investing in the African Creative Industries and moderated a panel on “From Craft to Capital: The Fashion and Textile Industry as an Engine of Trade, Climate Action, and Employment.”

The speakers - Wandia Gichuru (Vivo Fashion Group, Kenya), Yayra Agbofah (The Revival, Ghana), Mary Porter Peschka (IFC East Africa), and Maaza Dikker Hupkes (GIZ, Ethiopia) - surfaced a structural argument that more investors and governments need to hear.

(c) Sankalp Africa Summit 2026

Traditionally, textile is treated as “industry,” 🏭 while fashion is treated as “creativity.” 👗 In government ministries, textiles sit under manufacturing or agriculture and fashion sits under culture.

♻️ But this separation is artificial: fashion and textile are very much part of the same value chain. Cotton is grown, fibers are spun, fabric is woven, garments are manufactured, brands create demand, consumers buy, and eventually waste must be absorbed. Textile capacity without demand for garments is idle infrastructure and fashion without manufacturing capacity is constrained growth. The two depend on each other.

And that’s important because Fashion & Textiles are probably the creative sub-sector with the most direct link to impact.

Textile and apparel manufacturing are historically the entry point into formal industrial jobs in emerging economies, particularly for women and young workers. Kenya’s Vivo Fashion Group is one of the best local case studies in that regard, with 30+ stores across East Africa and roughly 450 employees (mostly women). I also profiled Vivo in the CREA Fund report, and the short-attention-span-friendly version is here. Key to the story: Vivo built that scale by serving domestic consumers while producing locally.

Because yes, if you want jobs at scale in this sector, you do need people to buy clothes. This can contradict the other reality, which is that the global fashion industry is resource-intensive, and famously one of the most polluting in the world. African countries drown under millions of tons of second-hand clothes from the West that flood markets like Kantamanto in Ghana.

But, as Wandia Gichuru put it, Africa is downstream in the waste chain, not upstream in the overproduction model. The surplus is not produced in Africa, but elsewhere. The real question is not whether Africa should industrialize in textiles, but whether it can build a cleaner industrial model from the outset. GIZ’s Sustainable Industrial Clusters programme in Ethiopia, which is focused on wastewater treatment, water use reductions, renewable energy, and worker standards, shows this is possible at cluster level.

Investors readily finance factories and industrial parks. Creative economy capital focuses on storytelling and design but is less equipped to assess supply chains and compliance. The result is that textiles are funded as industrial assets, fashion is funded as fragmented SMEs, and the system as a whole is under-capitalized.

Reframing fashion and textiles as one asset class would recognize that the sector’s creativity and soft power, labor intensity, gender profile, and export potential align naturally with impact mandates.

Working capital for brands, access-to-market efforts, compliance financing for factories, cluster-level environmental upgrades, but also textile and trade policy reforms, should not sit in separate silos. They are components of one competitive ecosystem.

INVESTMENT

Now on to the more newsy part of this newsletter.

🤝 IFC has “signed a mandate partnership with” (translation: they are investing in) TerraKulture, Lagos's 23-year-old cultural institution founded by Bolanle Austen-Peters, to support the refurbishment and expansion of its creative and training facilities.

The announcement mentioned inclusive growth, cultural expression and job creation, and those themes are definitely key to both institutions. But the more interesting story is elsewhere: what actually made this deal possible is that TerraKulture is a real business.

TerraKulture is not a passion project that convinced a DFI to take a leap of faith. It is a multi-revenue, multi-decade institution that has quietly built one of the most diversified business models in Nigeria's creative sector.

🎭 First, TerraKulture is what we can call a “multi-purpose venue”: the location comprises a 400-seat theatre, an art gallery, a bookstore, and a popular restaurant. On top of that physical infrastructure, TerraKulture runs well-known creative training and skills development programs, partly funded by donors such as Mastercard. And then there's the content arm, which includes blockbuster original theatre and film productions. The result is a solid company with physical and IP assets that generates a couple million dollars in annual revenue across several revenue streams.

IFC does believe in TerraKulture’s cultural mission, but the real reason it was able to back it is because the numbers work, the model is diversified, and the governance is solid enough to absorb institutional money.

FILM

🎥 African auteur cinema seems to have finally cracked the international festival circuit in a way that finally feels sustained rather than exceptional.

🏆 In the past year, the lineup has gone from sporadic to proper: On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (Zambia), My Father’s Shadow (Nigeria), How to Build a Library (Kenya), Khartoum (Sudan), Lady (Nigeria), Dao (Senegal), and Soumsoum (Chad) have been noticed at Cannes, Sundance or Berlin.

My Father’s Shadow went on to win a BAFTA last week, confirming that African auteur films are also entering the mainstream awards conversation, and not just the festival circuit.

Meanwhile, Djimon Hounsou has joined other leading diaspora actors such as Idris Elba and David Oyelowo in launching his own production company focused on developing African stories.

African storytelling is becoming competitive and valued at the highest global levels, which matters for reputation, deal-flow, and future financing. It also makes the case for institutional capital to step in earlier. We’re seeing early signs of this with Afreximbank’s CANEX INC and Nigeria’s MBO Capital backing Clarissa by Arie and Chuko Esiri.

Clarissa was acquired for worldwide distribution by NEON, while My Father’s Shadow was picked up by MUBI, signaling that the space is growing for premium, globally positioned African content.

However, don’t be fooled: these two films are very much outliers, star actors also struggle to produce African films, and festival recognition doesn’t fix the wider distribution problem.

⚠️ At the mass-market level both in Africa and globally, distribution has collapsed and the film industry is experiencing serious disruption because of fast consolidation among buyers and platforms, a corrective move on previous overspend, and of course, AI.

I spoke to Variety about the dichotomy between festival success and the distribution bottleneck. What gives me hope is that the distribution picture is structurally difficult, but not static. A few things are making me cautiously optimistic:

1️⃣ Local experimentation is happening. African industry professionals are not sitting idle. EbonyLifeON+, Kava, and Circuits are various examples of Nigerian platforms attempting different models. I remain skeptical about the long-term economics of purely local streaming, but it matters that alternatives are being attempted.

2️⃣ Theatrical exhibition is quietly bouncing back. The Nollywood box office shattered records this past year. Pathé is also expanding its cinema footprint in Francophone Africa. Cinemas still have legs on the continent.

3️⃣ Non-traditional models are getting smarter. Fusion Intelligence is one example of a company in Nigeria approaching distribution through technology and software to enable a network of community cinemas. That’s interesting.

With fewer illusions about easy scale, and more experimentation with format and technology, we could argue that the African film industry is in a healthier place than when it was obliviously dependent on global streamers who could - and did - pivot away overnight.

VERTICAL DRAMAS

🤳🏾 If you work in media circles in LA, Seoul, or Beijing right now, one term keeps coming up: vertical dramas. In Africa? Almost silence.

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while. My friend and industry colleague David Adeleke and his team at Communiqué beat me to it with a very solid piece: “Nollywood’s Billion Dollar Microdrama Opportunity.” I strongly recommend reading it for the data, numbers, and market sizing.

The article’s core thesis is simple but powerful: vertical microdramas (ultra-short, serialized, mobile-native fiction designed for smartphone consumption) have already exploded into a multi-billion-dollar business in China and are now scaling aggressively in the US and Southeast Asia.

These are not basic TikTok stories but structured, addictive narrative products engineered for monetization through micro-payments and subscriptions, driven by aggressive cliffhangers and data-driven storytelling.

The economics are radically different from traditional film and TV: lower production budgets, faster turnaround, direct monetization from audiences, and no gatekeepers.

For Nollywood, the argument is that this could represent a new distribution rail and a new cash engine that bypasses the structural bottlenecks we keep complaining about: retreating streamers, weak broadcasters, fragile cinema infrastructure.

Of course, pricing, payment integration, and purchasing power are real constraints. But the format is inherently aligned with a mobile-first market such as Africa.

I’ll write more soon about this new medium and where I think the opportunity lies for Africa, so consider this a teaser. Stay tuned 👀

SPORTS

The AFCON final was, well, not ideal.

In the end, Morocco lost against Senegal on the pitch. But it won somewhere else: in the wallet.

According to CAF, AFCON 2025 generated 90% more revenue than any previous edition thanks to its record 23 partners (compared to 17 for AFCON 2023 and 9 for AFCON 2021). In 2025, the event attracted sponsors from the United States, China, Germany, Japan, Turkey, and the UK, enjoying a truly global commercial footprint for the first time.

🏆 Meanwhile, the prize pool doubled compared to recent editions, with the winner taking home a record $10 million as part of a total $32 million pot.

Morocco's Commerce Minister also stated that the tournament generated over €1.5 billion in direct revenue, funded 80% of the infrastructure needed for the 2030 FIFA World Cup, and created over 100,000 jobs. "We gained a decade of development in 24 months," he said.

Now, some of this could be PR. But what we know for sure is that five of the six stadiums designated for the 2030 World Cup were successfully tested during AFCON. Morocco compressed what would typically require a decade of infrastructure development into two years 🤯.

For African governments and investors watching from the sidelines: Morocco just proved that hosting a major African sporting event doesn’t have to be a cost center. The returns, when the infrastructure is thoughtfully planned, spill far beyond the pitch into tourism, construction, technology procurement, hospitality and logistics.

For the African sports ecosystem more broadly, AFCON's commercial evolution is not just good news for CAF. A richer, better-run continental football body means more money flowing downstream. If the governance holds of course.

HUSTLE & FLOW #71: Special Edition — The African Creator Economy Grows Up

The month of January was a super high-signal month for the Creator Economy - globally and in Africa.

From the 1 Billion Followers Summit in Dubai to iShowSpeed’s 20-country Africa tour and Khaby Lame’s groundbreaking $975 million deal, creators grabbed headlines everywhere.

I also just came back from Lagos, where I partnered with the African Creators Summit to launch its Business Day, the first high-level gathering of African Creator Economy executives and professionals - getting all these minds in one room unearthed some new insights, which I’ll share with you here.

The African Creator Economy is growing up, and there’s much to talk about, so get reading  👀👇

In the space of four weeks, there’s been a shift in the way the Creator Economy is being perceived on the continent. At a mass awareness level, we can thank iShowSpeed for that.

For 28 days, you, me, and everybody were mesmerized by the capacity of a 21-year-old live YouTuber to single-handedly change the narrative about the continent for the better.

But what took place behind the screens this past month is equally fascinating.

Industry observers are converging on the same conclusion: globally, 2026 is the year the creator economy matures into a real industry. What we are seeing is an evolution toward an integrated ecosystem, where platforms, commerce, and creator-led ventures interlock operationally.

Here in Africa, we are observing the same trajectory, despite the usual challenges. Let’s explore what this means, concretely.

CREATOR ECONOMY VS CREATIVE INDUSTRIES, CREATOR VS CREATIVE

But first, a little bit of housekeeping. There’s too much confusion out there over terms, so an extra clarification won’t hurt.

Creator Economy: The ecosystem comprising platforms, tools, businesses and revenue models that allow individuals (”Creators”) to monetize an audience they directly reach online.

Creative Industries: The sectors that harness and showcase culture, creativity, and intellectual property to produce goods and services that generate economic growth, create employment, and project soft power. The Creator Economy is one sub-sector of the Creative Industries, alongside others such as film, music, fashion, design, gaming, visual arts, literature, live performance, and so on.

Creator: A person who builds and monetizes a direct relationship with an audience, primarily through digital platforms. Those used to be called “influencers”, but now a Creator can also be a trained lawyer, doctor, chef or podcaster whose main business is to create digital content around their expertise.

Creative: A person whose core skill is content, cultural or artistic production. A Creative can be a graphic or web designer, brand strategist, writer, singer, designer, filmmaker, etc, working either for themselves, for a creative enterprise, or for a non-creative enterprise (the automotive industry employs plenty of designers, for example).

Talent: Anyone with recognized ability within their industry. You can be a music talent or a marketing, engineering, or management talent, for example.

Brand: A repeatable commercial identity that audiences recognize, trust and are willing to pay for. A Creator, a Creative or a Talent can become a brand when they create this commercial identity that goes beyond themselves. For example, Nollywood star actress Omotola Ekeinde says that she has two identities: Omotola (who she is when she wakes up in the morning) and OmoSexy (her brand).

Things should be clear now. Let’s continue.

THE 4 KEY MOMENTS OF JANUARY 2026

1️⃣ The 1 Billion Followers Summit in Dubai

The 1 Billion Followers Summit in Dubai - January 2026

The 4th edition of the 1 Billion Followers Summit, which took place in early January in Dubai drew a record-breaking crowd of over 30,000 attendees, more than 15,000 creators and over 500 speakers with a combined reach of 3.5 billion followers.

What’s relevant to our conversation here is that Africa wasn’t tokenised. African creators were showcased among the speakers and had the opportunity to interact with the global creator ecosystem.

Until now African creators had been somewhat isolated, so their integration in such a high profile global event is instrumental for them to gain access to global tools, strategies, and other creators with whom to potentially collaborate.

2️⃣ iShowSpeed’s Africa tour

iShowSpeed somewhere in Africa - January 2026

There was no way to miss this - iShowSpeed’s Africa tour captured the African zeitgeist last month. The one we now call “Speed” for short (real name Darren Watkins Jr) is a YouTube-first live streamer whose distinctive skill is turning public space into real-time global spectacle. His content is unscripted, chaotic, often uncomfortable, and deliberately designed to generate clips at scale.

If, like me, you’re only discovering him now, you might not know that Speed has been causing a ruckus online for a while. He registered his YouTube channel at 11 years old in 2016, and first started gaining attention five years ago because of his over-the-top, sometimes violent verbal and physical reactions while gaming. He progressively built a massive fan base around football fandom, and then expanded aggressively into IRL content and travel. He’s not a choir boy. He has faced sanctions, ecosystem bans, public backlash and real-world security incidents due to his behavior, including being swatted live on stream.

Africa was not his first international tour. Speed has taken this format on the road before, including high-profile stints in Australia and New Zealand. What changed this time was not the content style, but the context. His mother is Ghanaian, and he framed parts of this trip as a form of return.

The decision to come to Africa was also strategic in that it allowed Speed to create especially unique content for his audience. Global coverage of Africa remains stubbornly narrow, so what Speed offered through his roaming, unscripted livestream showing daily chaotic but joyful life was counter-programming at scale.

Backed by travel company Expedia, the Africa tour was expansive: close to a month on the road, twenty countries, and a relentless pace designed to maximise contrast, crowds and symbolic moments. Morocco was the top-performing stream with 15 million views, followed by Ethiopia (11M), Algeria (10.3M), and Kenya (10M). But Benin, Ivory Coast and Ghana (that shea butter massage!) provided their own viral moments. The Lagos leg was the worst of all (that’s a story for another day), but Speed did cross the 50-million-subscriber mark on YouTube there, on the same day he turned 21.

Speed managed, almost single-handedly, to disrupt the default Western storyline about Africa. The continent suddenly appeared as a place that is modern, young, loud, colorful, and digitally fluent.

What this tour may unlock next is more interesting than the tour itself. The most immediate impact is likely to be a rise in culture-driven travel by American Gen Zs and diaspora-curious audiences.

More importantly, this episode may force African governments to recalibrate how they understand power in the digital age. Many will chase creators simply for visibility, but the more strategic ones may understand the benefits they can reap from investing in things like clear filming rules, predictable permitting, security coordination, visa facilitation and creator-friendly commercial frameworks.

3️⃣ Khaby Lame’s $975m deal

Khaby Lame

The other major news was the announcement that Senegalese-Italian Khaby Lame - the world’s biggest TikTok creator with 163 million followers - had sold his company for $975 million. This was NOT an exit, but a 360 deal with a Chinese MCN (Multi Channel Network), structured as an all-share acquisition through a US-listed entity called Rich Sparkle Holdings. This means that, despite the headline-grabbing number, no money changed hands and Khaby didn’t make a cent in cash.

What he got out of this deal is something else: his content, IP, image, style of humour, and even his digital AI twin will now be scaled and monetized industrially by a highly efficient Chinese machine. I wrote a Linkedin post about it which was widely read - if you haven’t seen it, catch up here.

Another very interesting point about the Khaby Lame deal is that his company never went through a classic US/EU venture pathway.

Even before the paper acquisition by Rich Sparkle Holdings, Khaby only owned 49% of his company Step Distinctive Limited (there would be more to say about these unfortunate company names).

Rich Sparkle is listed on the Nasdaq’s small-cap market, so its SEC listing is public. That’s how we can see that the other shareholders of Khaby’s company are neither big US VCs or talent agencies, nor a European media fund. Instead, Khaby’s business and financial partners are offshore holding entities tied to very discreet, mostly Chinese individuals.

It makes sense that the Chinese would have been the first to notice Khaby’s rise on TikTok and understood the global potential of his particular brand of silent comedy.

The creator economy is not insulated from the broader realignment of global trade and geopolitics.

US platforms and Hollywood no longer sit at the centre of gravity. Capital, infrastructure, and execution capacity are already shifting toward China and the Middle East, and the next wave of creator scale will be built there, not in the West.

4️⃣ The African Creators Summit in Lagos

The African Creators Summit inaugural Business Day - January 30th, 2026 / Lagos, Nigeria

All these movements made for a perfect backdrop for the 3rd edition of the African Creators Summit, which drew 3,000+ attendees, most of them young creators, to its standing-room only main stage and its experiential space powered by Meta.

The Summit also set the stage for the release of the excellent new Africa Creator Economy Report by TM Global and David Adeleke ’s Communiqué.

I’ve been attending the Summit since its first edition, and this year I partnered with Oladapo Adewunmi at Apollo Endeavor Limited to launch ACS's inaugural Business Day, an invitation-only gathering of platform executives, top creators, entrepreneurs, investors, policymakers and ecosystem builders. The goal of the event was to validate the Creator Economy as a recognized sub-sector of Africa’s creative industries, quantify its contribution through fresh data, shared metrics, and case studies, and brainstorm practical solutions to boost its growth.

Weren’t there? No worries, here’s the gist 👇

THE AFRICAN CREATOR ECONOMY: HOW BIG CAN IT GO?

In my keynote, I focused on laying the path for the African Creator Economy’s next stage of growth.

As the global creator economy is moving from “influencer buzz” to a structured sector forecast to surpass $500 billion by 2027, Africa is following suit at remarkable speed. Valued at $5 billion in 2025, the continent’s creator economy is projected to hit close to $30 billion by 2032. The maths behind these big numbers is often wobbly, but what you should pay attention to is the pace.

African audiences are already substantial in the platforms: the number of registered accounts are close to 300 million on Facebook, 200 million on YouTube, 190 million on TikTok, and 150 million on Instagram.

There’s no precise estimate of the number of African content creators, but it’s likely in the tens of millions. We talked about iShowSpeed and Khaby Lame who, despite their African heritage, cannot be considered African creators. But Africa has its stars too.

Mark Angel (one of the Business Day’s speakers) is the OG of African skit-makers. He built one of the continent’s earliest and most successful YouTube-native comedy franchises long before the “creator economy” had a name, making millions - in USD! - from his massive Facebook and YouTube audiences.

Ruth Kadiri and Omoni Oboli are the Nollywood queens of YouTube. Ruth has built a YouTube-first model with over 2.5 million subscribers, while Omoni Oboli was first a traditional movie star who then launched her own digital studio, releasing full-length films directly to YouTube. Her channel has close to 2 million subscribers, and her films routinely reach tens of millions of views. Her biggest hit, Love in Every Word, has 31 million views, for example.

Then we have Wode Maya (Ghana) and Tayo Aina (Nigeria), both long-form travel and business creators with over 1 million YouTube subscribers each. They are some of the most internationally recognised African creator voices.

In a completely different category, Algeria’s Oum Walid runs one of the world’s largest creator businesses on YouTube with over 14 million subscribers. Her practical, mass-market cooking content has another particularity - she never shows her face.

These are just a few examples of some African superstars. They are the outliers. They make hundreds of thousands, and in some cases million, through content creation.

But today you can find thousands of creators across the continent making a living through various types of content: comedy, film, cooking, business, travel, tech, beauty and lifestyle -- even if the majority (about six in ten according to the Africa Creator Economy report) still earn less than $100 per month from their creative work.

Things are moving fast. However, while talent may be evenly distributed, markets are not. When it comes to converting reach into revenue, African creators face serious structural handicaps.

The first one is monetization.

According, again, to the Creator Economy Report, creators across the continent generate income through a mix of brand partnerships, platform payouts, and self-owned ventures.

Over the past five years, the number of brands working directly with African creators has increased significantly. We have seen the rise of influencer marketing, alongside the emergence of businesses that help creators manage these opportunities, such as startups Wowzi and Trenderz, who both presented at the event. But the advertising landscape in Africa is still limited. Finding ways to increase the pool of brands working with creators is both a challenge and an opportunity.

A growing number of creators are also selling products and services, whether physical merchandise (typically for beauty or lifestyle creators) or digital products such as ebooks, online courses, and templates. One would imagine that this revenue stream would be severely constricted by African consumers’ low purchasing power, however, Selar has made a compelling business case for this segment of the creator economy. In fact, as COO Seyi William-Ogunbiyi announced during the ACS Business Day, Selar is on track to disburse a staggering N30 billion (that’s $21 million!) to creators in 2026.

It turns out that, as the Creator Economy report confirms, Africans are more ready to pay for products that have a direct utility, such as learning new skills or self-improvement, and this is where Selar thrives.

Interestingly, platform payouts are only the primary source of income for 5.8% of creators, still according to the report. This is one of the core constraints of the African creator ecosystem: what is the most structured monetization channel elsewhere in the world remains severely limited on the continent.

Indeed, only Facebook and YouTube currently operate revenue-sharing programmes in Africa. As it has been widely reported, African creators typically earn under $1 per 1,000 views, compared to $3–10 in the United States or Europe, because of the shallow African advertising pool. Platforms have democratised visibility but not financial opportunity at the same pace.

As a result of these monetization challenges, creator incomes remain volatile, fragile, and overly dependent on platform algorithms.

The second challenge is the well-known issue of piracy and the lack of copyright infrastructure, which means that content is easy to steal, hard to license, and even harder to collect on. In practice, it means that social content gets reposted, clipped, and republished without permission, with few workable routes to license or enforce rights at scale. As a result, creators struggle to turn social media IP into reliably monetizable, investable assets. At the event, we heard from Makerverse, a South African startup who developed a solution for the music labels and artists to efficiently register, track, distribute and monetize their content.

The third challenge is inconsistent regulation, which sometimes helps, but more often causes friction.

On one hand, governments are legitimate regulators, such as when they enforce consumer and data rules. Nigeria fined Meta $220 million over consumer/data-related findings, for example.

But over or badly timed regulation can quickly become a brake on growth. Kenya for example has steadily expanded taxation and compliance around the digital economy. The country’s new tax law has had real-life impact: last year, streaming platform Twitch decided to suspend monetization in Kenya, because the new regulations were too heavy for their business there.

Governments also sometimes intervene about the content being shared itself. Last month in Ethiopia, police arrested multiple TikTok creators linked to outfits worn at the Ethiopia Creative Awards, citing “public morality.”

These events are quite unfortunate, because governments have the power to become major enablers of the creator economy. They can use their influence to advocate for the platforms to switch monetisation on, they can help reduce payout friction, and they can  force fairer platform terms. They can also support the development of infrastructure, such as creator hubs.

One of the best examples of this comes, ironically, also from Kenya, where the government announced that it would allocate 10% of its public communications budget to digital creators campaigns. Wowzi was one of the biggest proponents of the idea.

Finally, the last structural constraint to the growth of the African creator economy is that too many African creators are expected to run businesses without the skills or teams required to do so. Most creators come into the ecosystem through talent and audience growth, not through training in finance, contracts, IP management, pricing, or long-term strategy. As a result, reach scales faster than structure, and creators are not currently presenting as investable businesses.

In fact, leading investors Walter Baddoo (4DX Ventures) and Iyinoluwa Aboyeji (Future Africa) explained at the event that institutional investors are not looking to back individual creators but structured businesses built AROUND the creator economy (such as marketplaces, distribution and rights infrastructure, tech or financing tools for creators). The four startups that presented at the event - Selar, Wowzi, Trenderz and Makerverse - provided concrete examples of what investor-backable creator economy companies look like.

I’ve been bullish about the creator economy for several years now. It is a sector where African talents, not just in terms of creation but also in tech, can shine. There’s potential for African creators to become global talents as well.

The challenges and hurdles are clearly identified, and all of them have practical solutions. We, collectively, just need the will to implement them.

OTHER KEY INSIGHTS FROM THE ACS BUSINESS DAY

Our speakers dropped gems throughout the day, here are the few that struck me the most:

1️⃣ Africa urgently needs a creators’ association

On the Policy panel, a spirited debate between Ojoma Ochai, CC-Hub CEO, Baba Agba, SA to the Minister of Arts, Culture, Tourism and the Creative Economy, and Isioma Nnenna Alexis Idigbe, Head of Media, Entertainment and IP Law at Punuka Attorneys led to this conclusion:

It is now time for Africa’s creators to self-organize and self-regulate through a responsible industry body that can engage platforms, governments and communities.

2️⃣ Turning into followers into fans

This insight was offered to us by Nile’s CEO Moses Babatope: in order to scale, creators need to learn how to turn (free) followers into fans that are ready to consume whatever they have to offer beyond the platforms. Nollywood made this transition when it convinced what used to be an audience of pirated VCDs to come to the cinemas.

3️⃣ Investor-backable models are emerging

As I mentioned earlier, institutional investors won’t back individual creators (until a local Khaby Lame emerges), but they’ll back businesses built around the creator economy - in many cases those are solutions that see creators as customers rather than as the product. Backable models include: aggregators, marketplaces, distribution and rights infrastructure, tools and services for creators, and financing solutions (fintech/creator banks).

4️⃣ The creator economy is merging with everything else

Earlier I said that the Creator economy was a subsector of the Creative Industries. In our last panel of the day, we heard from professionals in the fields of Fashion (Ifeanyi Nwune), Music (Chioma Frances “Ohrma” Okoro), Media (James Torvaney (ACA)) and Film (Moses Babatope) about how the creator economy intersects with their own business. What is becoming clear is that the creator economy is morphing from a vertical into a horizontal layer across the creative industries. And any creative business that ignores it will ultimately lose relevance.

We plan to hold more such Creator Economy events over the course of the year. Want to be part of the conversation? Send me a message to let me know.

HUSTLE & FLOW #70: The 10 Big Shifts of 2025

Who won and who lost in 2025?

🚨 In this final 2025 edition of HUSTLE & FLOW, I break down the 10 structural shifts that actually mattered this year in media, music, fashion, sports and the creator economy.

If you work or invest in Africa’s creative or sports sectors, this is your reality check before 2026:

  • who gained leverage,

  • who lost it,

  • where money is flowing,

  • and what strategies make sense going forward.

🧐 Let me be clear: this is the ONE piece of writing you should read to understand where the industry stands today.

As usual, I’d love to hear from you so please like, share, subscribe, comment, or all of the above.

🎅🏿 Happy holidays to all 🎄

THE YEAR IN REVIEW: THE 10 BIG TRENDS OF 2025

1️⃣🤖The Mainstreaming of AI - but not yet in Africa

In 2025, AI stopped being a (simultaneously) fun and scary tool to play around with and became an integral part of the creative production stack. 

And the industry finally admitted it: Netflix publicly acknowledged using AI in parts of its workflow, AI-assisted films started showing face at festivals, and the Academy of Motion Pictures even announced that yes, machine-assisted films could win Oscars. 

Meanwhile, an AI-generated band got 1 million streams on Spotify, and H&M signed with 30 models to use their digital twins for social media ads.

In fact, social media platforms such as YouTube have been so flooded by AI slop that they were forced to change their algorithms to demonetize it. Linkedin (my own creative outlet) is not immune -- in the sea of copy-paste ChatGPT content, spelling mistakes and bad grammar have become a gauge of authenticity.

The disruption isn’t abstract: whole service layers (subtitling, dubbing, photography, graphic design, basic animation, VFX, mood boards, trailers) are being compressed or wiped out, leading The Ankler to state: “Hollywood’s AI-era Jobs Collapse is Starting”. 

In Africa, most creatives and old-school funders are still pretending this is not happening, or that we have time. I wrote about the urgent need for the continent’s creatives to wake up back in April. In the 8 months since then, progress has been slow, niche, and personality-driven. 

Senegal stands out. Filmmaker Hussein Dembel Sow has been a leading voice on the artistic, ethical, commercial and technical aspects of AI use in the African creative space, while Senegalese AI music mastering startup Senmixmaster just raised money from Platform Capital.

Nigeria held its first AI Film Festival and released its first AI-themed movie, but these events remained marginal relative to the scale of Nollywood. 

Elsewhere, AI is still mostly used as a curiosity to make fun trailers, posters, or TikTok effects rather than as a systemic productivity lever inside studios, agencies, fashion houses or music businesses. And that’s the problem.

AI could enable African creatives to bridge the resource gap and compete globally on the strength of their ideas. But if they miss that bullet train, they could also be left behind. 

In the past few months, I found myself with three different Google executives at various conferences, and I pleaded with them to make Google’s Nano Banana Pro available for free to African creatives - just like they offered free access to Gemini AI Pro tools to university students. It sounded like it was the first time they had heard of that idea - let’s hope that it makes its way.

2️⃣📺 The Great Media Consolidation

The media industry went through several waves of consolidation in the past decades. But 2025 will be remembered as the year traditional media and streaming became one.

In Africa, the Canal+MultiChoice merger changed the media map overnight, creating a pan-African giant that now controls premium pay-TV, a large share of sports rights, and Africa’s biggest homegrown streamer, Showmax. 

In the US, Netflix’s recently-announced move to absorb Warner Bros. Discovery sends the same message but in a different accent: scale is no longer optional. 

The transition to streaming has been brutally expensive for the industry as a whole, structurally loss-making for many, and lethal to mid-sized operators who can’t amortize content, tech and marketing costs across massive subscriber bases. 

So these deals aren’t just empire-building or ego. Consolidation is the market’s way of deciding who gets to keep playing capitalism’s game -- the survival of the fittest.

For African filmmakers and producers, however, it’s hard to spin this as good news. Fewer buyers means fewer commissioning editors and fewer doors to knock on. 

Yes, a stronger pan-African champion could mean more stable demand for local content, and more money for prestige projects. This week, Canal+ unveiled its 2026 slate, which includes the film “Heist of Benin”, directed by Ava DuVernay and starring David Oyelowo. The group has also pledged to boost the international circulation of South African series “Shaka iLembe” and “Spinners”.

But history suggests that consolidation usually leads to tighter budgets, more risk aversion, less options, and more dependency for providers and suppliers. It was clearly the mood on the ground as I strolled the carpeted booths of MIP Africa in Cape Town this September. Whatever way we look at it, the African content market has contracted.

Which leads me too… 

3️⃣🔩 The Content Distribution Choke Point

Africa’s content distribution problem isn’t new, but in 2025 and in the context of the Great Media Consolidation, it’s become impossible to ignore.

The issue isn’t talent, volume, ambition or even money anymore: there are just not enough pipes. Not enough cinemas, not enough local broadcasters or telcos that pay. International buyers are prioritizing their home markets, and Netflix’s newly constrained licensing budget can’t save us all.

The result is that, without enough offtakers to build a distribution strategy on, return on investment remains a fantasy that no serious financier will entertain.

This state of affairs has recently reignited the well-worn trope that “Africa should build its own Netflix”.

In a series of 3 recent posts that got Linkedin talking, I dug deep into this issue:

First, I explained why the idea of developing local streaming platforms “a la Netflix” is naive and lazy thinking. It ignores economics (fragmented markets, high capex, low ARPUs), consumer behavior (the leading platform is YouTube and it’s free), infrastructure, and well-documented case studies.

Then, I analyzed other Emerging Market streaming “winners” to identify the factors of success - just to reinforce my point that if you’re hoping to make it big by building an African platform without must-have sports rights, a very deep, exclusive local IP catalogue, and a telco or broadcaster parent willing to underwrite losses for 5-10 years, you and your banker are in for a lot of disappointment.

Finally, I tackled the real question: which distribution solutions make economic sense given Africa’s actual context and situation? I outlined several ideas:

  • a pan-African rights and metadata exchange addressing the missing infrastructure layer; 

  • an AdTech solution to onboard African SMEs into digital advertising, that would expand the African advertising pool and unlock ad-supported distribution models;

  • scaled networks of community cinemas;

  • and niche platforms (keeping expectations modest).

If I had more space, I would have added the role governments can play by supporting the establishment of strong national broadcasters with the mandate to invest in local content.

We can improve African distribution, as long as we stop telling ourselves stories and focus our efforts in the right direction.

4️⃣🤳🏾 The Creators’ TakeOver

As traditional film and TV struggle globally, the creator economy is doing the opposite: it’s thriving. 

In 2025, MrBeast is running a vertically integrated media empire with retail, gaming and global distribution; Dhar Mann built a billion-view factory outside Hollywood; and major studios and streamers are cutting first-look deals with YouTubers, TikTokers and podcasters. 

The signal is clear: in the US in particular, audiences haven’t disappeared, they’ve migrated, and the economics have followed them. Creators who own their relationship with fans, their data and their formats are now more bankable than many mid-budget film and TV projects.

Africa is starting to see the same dynamic play out - at its own scale, but with real money involved. 

Omoni Oboli and Ruth Kadiri have quietly built powerful YouTube distribution machines, bypassing traditional broadcasters entirely. Several Nigerian skitmakers like Mark Angel, Emmanuella, Taaooma, Broda Shaggi, Kie Kie, or Mr Macaroni, are now making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and in some cases even millions, through a mix of platform payouts, brand deals and live appearances. 

These are still outliers, not the norm, but they matter because they prove it’s possible. What’s missing, of course, is structure. The ecosystem remains messy, informal and poorly intermediated. Two structural issues stand out:

First, unequal platform access: monetization features that are standard elsewhere are still unavailable or restricted in many African countries, often because of fraud, perception of low volumes, or the complexity involved with enabling local payments.

Second, premature taxation by short-sighted governments risks killing the golden goose before it lays enough eggs. A couple of months ago Twitch suspended monetization in Kenya after the passing of the new Finance Bill, and similar reforms in Nigeria are also coming after creators’ previously overlooked income.

There is a need for organized advocacy to clear the path for the explosion of Africa’s Creator Economy. That’s why I have partnered with the African Creators Summit, Africa’s top Creators event, to host a dedicated Business Day on January 30th 2026, focused on identifying practical solutions. 

Attendance is limited and invitation-only, but if you are a professional and have something to contribute to the conversation, message me and I’ll see what I can do 😎

5️⃣🎵 The Still Untapped African Music Market

African music remained one of the fastest-growing music markets in the world in 2025, both culturally and commercially - just not where it should matter most. 

This year, CKay joined Rema, Wizkid, Tems, and Tyla in Spotify’s 1 Billion Club, African artists continued to sell out arenas across Europe and North America, and Afrobeats, Amapiano and Afro-fusion became permanent fixtures of global pop culture. 

On the surface, it looks like a success story. Underneath, the economics are badly skewed. The bulk of recorded-music revenue tied to African artists is still generated outside the continent, monetized through foreign platforms, touring circuits, promoters and labels.

When IFPI announced that Sub-Saharan Africa’s music revenue reached $110 million in 2024, this was celebrated as a milestone. But the truth is, it’s a minuscule number. Given population size, consumption levels and the cultural centrality of music, Africa’s music revenue should be closer to $1 billion. 

Why the gap? Well, money is leaking everywhere on the continent: persistent piracy, broken metadata, weak copyright collection, fragmented CMOs, limited platform penetration, and a chronic shortage of compliant, scalable physical venues. Africans listen obsessively to music, but the system fails to capture that value locally.

This year, at gatherings such as the Dakar Music Expo, Global Citizen’s Music Economy Development Initiative (MEDI) in Lagos, and FAME Week in Cape Town, my interactions with music professionals all centered around this issue.

That’s why, for investors the real opportunity is not “the next artist”, but infrastructure. 

On the digital side, companies like Makerverse (in which I am an angel and advisor) are tackling the critical layers: rights management, distribution, data, payments, and transparency. On the physical side, players such as AfroNation, Masai Ujiri’s Zaria Court, HustleSasa (I’m also an angel and advisor), or Tix Africa, and a growing ecosystem of promoters, venue operators and touring platforms are rebuilding the live-music economy city by city. 

Music is one of the continent’s biggest investment opportunities, but it’s also one of the hardest -- tourists or hype capital beware. 

6️⃣🛒 The Cross-border Commerce Push & Pull

2025 delivered a series of cross-border commerce shocks that hit African companies selling physical goods - especially fashion and design - square in the face. 

A year ago, I wrote about Temu entering Nigeria (soon after South Africa) and the threat that this represented for the local fashion and design industries. Fashion entrepreneurs in Nigeria tell me they are not worried because they don’t target the same customers, but in South Africa, Shein and Temu now command an enormous 37.1% share of the digital clothing, textile, footwear and leather market. The South African government is now pushing back - better late than never.

The second shock was the fear and confusion created by Trump’s tariff policy, and the lingering uncertainty around the future of AGOA (treaty providing duty-free access to the US for select African countries) until it was finally renewed for 3 years last week. The impact was felt on the ground: Hundreds of thousands of jobs in garment factories are at risk or already lost in countries like Lesotho, Kenya, and Madagascar.

Then, ecommerce marketplace Etsy abandoned PayPal in favor of its own payment system, effectively locking out thousands of African small sellers from a key sales channel.

Suddenly, access to the US market, which was long positioned as a growth lever for African fashion and design, looks a lot more fraught. 

Overlay all of this with persistent inflation, and selling internationally in 2025 became more expensive and more uncertain for small African creative businesses.

And yet, here’s the contradiction: global appetite for African design has not slowed. The BBC story on American teenagers buying their prom dresses from Nigeria captured the cultural pull. Fashion pop ups are booming from Johannesburg to Cotonou, London and New York. Lagos Fashion Week winning the $1m Earthshot Prize underscored African fashion’s role in sustainability and innovation. Dakar Fashion Week literally staging a runway on water was a masterclass in storytelling and ambition. 

For African fashion and design businesses, 2025 made one thing painfully clear: trade policy, platforms, payments and logistics now matter just as much as taste.

7️⃣🏀 All Eyes on African Sports 

2025 saw a surge of serious activity in African sports, with capital, leagues and formats converging on the continent at once. 

Helios Sports & Entertainment Group’s (HSEG) $50m raise from IFC and Proparco crystallized institutional confidence, and was quickly followed by the high-profile launch of PFL Africa. 

The BAL continued to professionalise operations and opened the door to franchises, a pivotal (and risky) shift toward long-term asset building. The NFL doubled down on the continent with flag football programs, academies, and commercial partnerships. This strategy showed results in 2025, with 8 African athletes (out of 13) joining its elite International Players Pathway class of 2026.

Add the first E1 electric powerboat race in Lagos, credible talks around F1 in South Africa, Rwanda and Morocco, and AFCON on the doorstep, and the direction of travel is unmistakable.

What ties this together is a dual thesis: Africa as a growth market (young audiences, urbanization, mobile distribution) and as a prime talent pool. Global leagues are looking to lock in early, before rights, sponsorships and formats price them out. 

But this is also where optimism meets reality. African sports is a notorious minefield: politicized federations, opaque governance, inflated projections, and no shortage of opportunists selling dreams to unsuspecting investors. 

Which makes the next phase critical. Outcomes will depend on professional operators who can structure deals, enforce governance, and create credible pathways toward durable revenues. 

8️⃣💰 The Slow Start of Capital Deployment 

A handful of notable investments in the creative industries did get over the line in 2025: among them are Africori (fully acquired by Warner Music), HSEG (IFC and Proparco), Filmmakers Mart (IFC and Sony), Twiva (Sony), Muzikin (Digital Africa), Maraz (not announced), Vanhu Vamwe and The Rad Black Kids (Silverback Holdings), Senmixmaster (Platform Capital), and probably others that didn’t get on my radar. These deals matter, but they are still exceptions, not a functioning market yet.

But the more important shift in 2025 was conceptual: the investment world finally made peace with the fact that the VC model does not work for most creative businesses, which are often SMEs that are profitable but with slow scalability, asset-heavy operations, and irregular cash flows. This is no longer controversial. 

Vehicles like HSEG and Silverback Holdings explicitly positioning themselves as permanent capital platforms reflect a growing consensus that creatives need longer time horizons, flexible return profiles, and capital that understands IP, rights and cycles. 

This month, the partnership between HEVA Fund and NCBA Bank in Kenya represents a genuine milestone. The two financial institutions have come together to offer financing products specifically designed for creatives, such as event financing, invoice discounting, LPO financing, working capital support, and start-up incubator financing. That model is replicable, and it matters far more than another flashy fund announcement.

So why is capital still not flowing fast enough? Because the bottleneck is not actually money (I’ve said time and again that there’s plenty of cash sitting around), it’s company readiness. Too many creative businesses (including some big names you know and admire) remain informal, poorly structured, and financially illiterate, making them unbankable and uninvestable regardless of intent. This issue came up clearly this year during my pipeline-building and matchmaking work for Proparco’s CREA Fund.

Strengthening balance sheets, governance, cash-flow management and strategic clarity is the unglamorous hands-on work the ecosystem keeps postponing. This is precisely where the next phase must focus, and it’s where I’m personally doubling down in 2026. Without stronger companies, no amount of capital innovation will unlock the scale everyone keeps talking about.

9️⃣🏗 The quiet rise of infrastructure-first thinking

2025 marked a subtle but decisive shift in the African creative economy: the centre of gravity moved away from content and towards infrastructure. 

After years of betting on “the next hit”, the ecosystem is finally acknowledging what operators and investors have learned the hard way: creativity cannot scale without systems. 

This is the logic behind what I described as the rise of Creative SaaS: platforms and tools focused on the unglamorous plumbing of the creative industries - rights management, payments, data analytics, distribution, compliance, logistics, workflow and monetization.

You see it everywhere once you look for it. First, in the new crop of CreaTech, with companies like Filmmakers Mart, Selar, Makerverse, Twiva, Wowzi, Trendrz, Stylebitt, TFB Studios, BeautyHut, The Folklore, Hustle Sasa, Tix Africa, or Fusion Intelligence. 

But even HSEG is fundamentally an infrastructure bet on leagues, venues, IP and long-term asset management. 

This shift matters because it signals maturity and a hard lesson learned. Infrastructure grows slowly, requires patience, and may not get you VIP tickets to movie premieres. But without it, the creative economy won’t be able to build sustainable value.

2025 didn’t solve Africa’s creative infrastructure gap, but it did mark the moment when the ecosystem stopped pretending it could leapfrog it. 

🔟🌍 The Widening gap between Global cultural relevance and Local value capture

I’ve hinted at this issue earlier when talking about music and fashion, but it deserves its own spotlight.

In 2025, this paradox was impossible to ignore: Africa’s cultural influence has never been stronger, yet its ability to capture value locally remains painfully weak. 

This leaves stakeholders with two very different, very pragmatic paths: 

If you’re a creative entrepreneur or a private investor, you need a diaspora-first strategy. That’s where purchasing power, stable payments, reliable distribution and scalable audiences exist today. Ignoring the diaspora in the name of “local pride” is bad business. This is where tours make sense, where streaming pays, where brands have budgets, and where exits are actually possible. The mistake is pretending otherwise.

If you’re a government, DFI or public institution, your role is different, and more urgent. Your job is not to chase hits, talent or prestige projects (let the professionals handle that abeg), but to finance local creative infrastructure so value can eventually be captured on the continent itself. Cinemas and national broadcasters, multi-purpose venues and sports infrastructure, data centres, broadband, and payments rails, education and skills platforms. These are the investments that will move the needle for the largest number of people. Until this foundation exists at scale, Africa will keep exporting culture and importing revenue models. 

I’ve been long, I guess I had a lot to say. 

I’m out 🫳🎤



HUSTLE & FLOW #69: Exporting African Fashion, ANKA's acquisition, the rise of Creative Saas, Afro Nation + PFL, and more

Ciara walking the runway for Fruche at Lagos Fashion Week 2025

The new edition of Hustle & Flow is out!

A bit late - apologies for that.

✈️ I’ve been shuttling between Johannesburg, Lagos and London this past month and, despite how well I’ve trained my ChatGPT BFF, it still cannot write this newsletter for me.

🗽And there is A LOT going on at the moment. Just the other day, a Ugandan rapper formerly known as Young Cardamom became the new mayor of New York. Imagine.

In this edition, I talk about exporting African fashion, ANKA’s surprise acquisition, the rise of creative Saas, the new partnership between Afro Nation and PFL Africa, and what conference organizers can learn from the Creation Africa Forum.

Among, as usual, various other things.

If you don’t subscribe already, join the party: https://lnkd.in/drBY8jnz

It starts here 👇

BROADCAST

✂️ Cost-cutting has started at Canal+ Africa (the new name for the Canal+Multichoice merged entity).

You may remember that as part of the public-interest conditions attached to the deal’s approval by South Africa’s competition authorities, Canal+ agreed to a 3-year moratorium on merger-related retrenchments in SA, and to a substantial, sustained spend in local content and in supplier development and procurement.

And yet.

🏷️ Last week, the company demanded a blanket 20% discount on all invoices from MultiChoice’s service providers.

This concerns all vendors, from office suppliers to production houses and even new contractors. Payments have been frozen while negotiations take place.

🧊 The reality is that Canal+ paid a rich price ($3 billion in total) to acquire a group facing financial losses, mounting competitive and macroeconomic pressures, and whose legacy Pay TV business is melting like an ice cube in the Kalahari desert.

So “synergies”, aka cost-cutting, were always on the horizon.

But the blanket cut seems like a particularly blunt instrument, especially considering that many of Multichoice’s 3,269 independent providers are small and mid-size enterprises, and probably quite vulnerable to such a brutal change in payment terms from a big client.

This also seems completely contradictory to the “supplier development” condition Canal+ had previously agreed to. Ask for forgiveness, not permission, I guess?

Anyway, the Competition Commission is looking into this.

STREAMING

Nazrawi “Naz” Ghebreselasie, CEO of Kana TV, has written a sharp operator-lens piece on the realities of streaming in Africa.

For context, Kana TV is Ethiopia’s leading entertainment channel and one of the 12 case studies I profiled in my Proparco CREA Fund report, Success Stories in the Creative Industries in Africa and other Emerging Markets.

💡 Particularly enlightening is Naz’s breakdown of streaming’s unit economics in Africa, where the toxic mix of low ARPU and high server costs means that audience growth actually leads to deepening losses - an issue I became familiar with during my Buni.tv days.

If you work in media, sports, or telco on the continent, the full piece is a must-read.

FASHION

Lagos’ art season is in full bloom, and although I sadly missed ArtX, AFRIFF, Lagos Photo and Lagos Design Week, I did make it to Lagos Fashion Week.

(For some behind-the-scenes content that does not make it to Linkedin, head over to Instagram @marieloramungai and check out my stories and highlights.)

I was there with some investors to dig into African fashion’s export potential, and how we can unlock it.

📈 In the past few years, soft signals (social media virality, celebrity endorsements) have been telling us that the global desirability of African aesthetics and brand stories is rising.

African Fashion’s emphasis on craftsmanship, sustainability, and culture is resonating worldwide.

🌍 The key to global market entry is the diaspora -- roughly 42 million Afro-descendants in the US, 10 million in the EU and 2.5 million in the UK.

Diasporans are engaged with the culture and willing to spend (in hard currency) far more than most consumers on the continent can.

Yet, getting from “admired online” to “bought and worn” is still hard.

Here’s what gets in the way:

📢 Awareness and trust. Many shoppers abroad don’t know the brands yet, or worry about quality, sizing, shipping, and returns - all valid concerns.

📦 Shipping, customs duties and VAT. These extra costs can make a garment 25-40% more expensive by the time it lands in Europe. The US market used to be easier and cheaper to access, but Trump’s new tariffs and the end of the AGOA treaty are changing the rules of the game.

Right now, some top brands like Dye Lab, This is Us, Torlowei or Banke Kuku are working around these challenges by organizing pop-ups in London, New York, or Atlanta.

Shoppers line up around street corners and drops often sell out in a few days or even a few hours. When people can touch the fabrics and try on the clothes, they buy.

But pop-ups are time-consuming and hard to scale, so this can only be a temporary strategy.

Where do we go from here?

💠 Exporting needs to become simpler. Brands need clear guidance on tariffs and paperwork, pooled logistics, and local return points in the US/EU. If you’re working on these topics, let’s chat.

💠 We must build routes to market beyond Direct To Customer. Diarrablu has been very successful at building relationships with major US retailers such as Nordstrom or Anthropology. That’s an example to study and emulate.

💠 Financiers should offer working capital solutions tied to overseas orders, so brands aren’t stuck doing luggage drops and weekend pop-ups forever.

The demand is there, the taste is there, and the diaspora is ready. Efforts now need to go towards reducing friction.

🇬🇭 Just across the border, Ghana made a big move in favor of African fashion and creative IP: it formally granted Kente cloth Geographical Indication (GI) status.

GI is the same legal shield that protects Champagne in France or Darjeeling tea in India.

In plain terms: only authentic, hand-woven Kente from Ghana’s certified weaving communities can now be marketed as “Kente.”

It’s a big deal because:

💠 GI protection makes it harder for counterfeits (I’m looking at you Shein and Temu) to undercut Ghanaian weavers and helps keep more value in local hands.

💠 Every genuine piece will carry a scannable code that verifies where it was woven and by whom.

💠 Historic hubs such as Bonwire, Adanwomase, Agotime-Kpetoe will be able to get formal recognition in the value chain.

Now the real work begins: certification management, brand enforcement across markets, and smart licensing so fashion houses can collaborate without erasing provenance.

E-COMMERCE

They’ve also done a lot for African fashion:

ANKA (ex-Afrikrea) has been acquired by Global Shop Group, a New York–based company led by Matilda Ceesay.

The price was not disclosed. ANKA’s team, operations and branding will remain, with leadership transitioning to Ceesay.

With $13.5 million raised since its launch in 2016, ANKA is one of Africa’s most prominent CreaTeach startups.

⚙️ A little over a year ago, it pivoted from an ecommerce marketplace (Afrikrea), to a software-as-a-service solution (SaaS), combining a marketplace, a payment system, and logistics services, allowing it to quadruple its payment volume and reach breakeven with $4.1M revenue in 2024.

According to the company, it processed >$60m in transactions across 175 countries over the past year and supported 10,000+ jobs across 46 African countries since inception.

Moulaye Taboure, exiting CEO, also invested a lot of personal time and energy in sharing his knowledge with the entrepreneur community.

😅 After more than 10 years, I can imagine that he and his co-founders may feel that they’ve done their part (I’ve been there).

Either way we look at it, ANKA’s impact on the African Creative Industries has been undeniable.

So who’s buying?

Global Shop is a young vehicle (≈1 year old). Its CEO Matilda Ceesay has a fashion-ops, product, and tech background (ex-Nike, ex-BCG; MIT/Cornell).

👷🏾 Translation: this looks less like a “big check” roll-up, and more like an operator-led push to sharpen ANKA’s US go-to-market.

Considering that (despite the tensions around tariffs), the US market is by far the most lucrative for African creative goods due to its strong diaspora, this handover could usher in an interesting new era for ANKA.

I’ll be looking forward to Ceesay’s next moves.

CREATECH

ANKA’s trajectory from marketplace to SaaS solution actually pioneered a new trend that I now see being replicated across the continent and across creative sub-sectors.

I call it the “rise of the Creative SaaS”.

👋🏾 Goodbye, clunky streaming services, deserted fashion ecommerce sites and gig listing platforms with 12 users.

Smart createch founders across Africa have now caught on that what the industry truly needs is operating systems that standardize workflows, production, payments, logistics and data analytics.

Some would call these unsexy, but not me.

Because I like businesses that make sense and also, crucially, money.

Here’s just a few examples of companies building the much-needed rails for Africa’s creative class:

🎬 Filmmakers Mart is a production OS for crews, locations, permits, payroll and set logistics.

🤳🏿 Selar provides a full stack enabling creators to sell courses, memberships, tickets and digital goods, with fast local/FX payouts.

🎧 Makerverse handles rights, splits, distribution, analytics and cross-border payments for independent music labels, aggregators and communities.

👗 Stylebitt is an OS for fashion businesses and independent tailors, digitizing orders, measurements, costing and fulfillment.

🎤 HustleSasa provides ticketing, logistics and cash advance solutions for live events.

🎞️ Fusion Intelligence develops cinema software that includes ticketing, box office reporting, as well as community-cinema infrastructure.

💅🏾 Splice helps beauty salons manage bookings, payments, staff, loyalty programs and inventory.

All these companies are targeting fragmented supply chains in dire need of standardized tools and user-friendly tech to replace Google spreadsheets or even written records.

This may just be the meet-cute moment between creative and tech that we’ve been waiting for.

SPORTS BUSINESS

Leading Afrobeats festival Afro Nation has inked a multi-year deal to programme live entertainment around Professional Fighters League (PFL) Africa events.

🎵🥊 But this is not just a cool “Afrobeats meets MMA” partnership - it is a portfolio-synergy play by Helios Sports and Entertainment Group (HSEG), the investor behind both ventures.

Besides PFL Africa and The Malachite Group, which owns Afro Nation, HSEG also backs NBA Africa and the Zaria Group, developer of the Zaria Court entertainment complex in Kigali.

🎡 HSEG’s strategy is to invest in premium sports and entertainment assets and create a flywheel across sports IP, festival IP, venues and hospitality that can bundle sponsorships, share audience data, cross-market talent, and extend monetisation from tickets to media, merch, and hospitality.

In theory, this is a very powerful approach.

In practice everything will, of course, depend on execution, and also on HSEG’s ability to keep its own investors happy for the time that it will take to generate returns, which may take a while.

A useful comparison:

In pre-pandemic times, Vivendi’s CanalOlympia tried to fuse cinema (powered by Canal+ and StudioCanal) and music (from Universal Music) via a bricks-and-mortar network of venues across 12 countries.

💥 It was a good idea. But the difficult timing, coupled with some strategic mistakes (locations in small countries and outside city centers, only one cinema screen), the lack of flexibility of the model, and Vivendi group’s loss of interest in the project ultimately led to its failure.

We can only hope that HSEG will be both quicker (to learn and pivot) and more patient.

⚽️ CAF is back in the black.

In early October, CAF reported a $9.48M net profit on $166.4M in revenue for FY 2023/24, its first surplus in years.

📈 Growth was driven by new sponsorships, stronger broadcast income, and tighter financial controls.

That’s great news for the institution, but also for African football as a whole, as a healthier CAF can push cash downstream to clubs, leagues, and women’s football, improving product quality which in turn reinforces media rights and sponsorship value.

Up next is AFCON Morocco 2025, which is projected to be the most lucrative edition yet - if it’s not disrupted by Moroccan youths protesting for more hospitals, less football stadiums.

EVENTS

A big highlight of the past month has been the great experience I’ve had co-hosting the Creation Africa Forum in Lagos.

Organized by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and MansA Maison des Mondes Africains, the event gathered 1000+ participants, including 80+ speakers.

It also delivered a masterclass on what a useful (and fun) creative industries convening can look like.

What did they do differently?

Event organizers, please take note.

🔍 Sharp curation from actual industry experts.

From projects’ selection to discussion topics, Creation Africa's content was on point. No basic panel titled “Structuring the African CCI”, but targeted sessions with proper editorial angles aimed at an audience of professionals (no students, no randos).

🌍 A true panafrican scope.

The French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and MansA invited (and paid for! 🤯) 400 African creatives from 42 African countries to attend the event. And they mixed and matched them throughout the program, ensuring maximum cross-continental pollination.

🤝🏾 A bridge to the diaspora and foreign partners.

Key members of the diaspora (Ogas such as Sebastien Onomo or Pape Boye) were invited to share their experience, expertise and networks. French creative partners and investors were there too, ready to make deals and dance on Amapiano beats during the opening soirée.

🔗 An organized way to connect.

Participants could set up meetings ahead of time through the platform b2match, ensuring that no one was running around in a vacuum screaming “Can you hear me? Where are you?” on their phones. In fact, 800+ meetings were organized during the event (excluding impromptu ones!).

👌🏾 Diverse and pertinent content formats.

Keynotes, fireside chats, panels, in-depth case studies, hands-on workshops, report presentations, pitch sessions, plus parties, exhibitions, a food court, a pop up store, and world premieres. No boredom detected.

🌟 Stars, but the ones that matter.

Not the ones organizers invite so they can say “my friend so-and-so” at their next dinner party. Instead, inspiring professionals whose trajectory and insights are directly relevant to the audience:

Kenyan award-winning concept artist Yvonne Muinde, best known for her work on Hollywood hits like Avatar and Planet of the Apes.

French-Beninese Fif Tobossi, co-founder of groundbreaking francophone rap media Booska-P.

Or Nigerian business icon and philanthropist Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede, who I interviewed about the intersection between creativity and business.

A new standard has been set.

HUSTLE & FLOW #68: Visit Rwanda's Masterstroke; Canal+ Watch Outs; AGOA Uncertainty; and more

(c) LA Clippers

Hustle & Flow #68 is out!

😵💫 CANEX, TIFF, UNGA, AFFF, NAIFF... this time of year is HEAVY in events spelled in acronyms.

I skipped those ones, but in a couple weeks I’ll be back in Lagos for a special industry gathering that I’ll have the honor to MC for the second time - the Creation Africa Forum. Read on to see why you should be there as well.

In this edition, I also talk about what Canal+ should pay attention to now that the Multichoice deal is done, why no one is buying African content these days, AGOA uncertainty, Zimbabwean fashion moves, and Visit Rwanda’s masterstroke.

If you aren’t already, don’t forget to subscribe 👉 https://lnkd.in/drBY8jnz

BROADCAST

It’s official: as of 22 September 2025, Canal+’s $2 billion mandatory offer for MultiChoice is unconditional.

All regulatory boxes have been ticked, effective control is in place, and new management has been named. The consolidation play that’s been in the works for years has finally crossed the finish line.

🌍 Canal+MultiChoice now has the one thing every media operator begs for and few actually earn: a shot at real, global scale.

But now comes the hard part - they have to execute.

Globally, corporate mergers are notorious for their high rate of failure (between 30 and 70% depending on the study). More often than not, the new entity’s downfall can be traced back to botched integration.

Here’s what Canal+ will have to watch out for to avoid such a fate:

1️⃣ The stark difference in business cultures between France and Anglophone Africa.

As a French person who identifies as Nigerian-American (too long to explain here, just take it in stride), I’m well placed to tell you that doing business with French people is a minefield for straight-talking anglophones. Things are rarely what they seem.

Meanwhile, South Africans, Kenyans, and Nigerians all have their own cultural sensitivities that have nothing to do with those of Ivorians or Senegalese (who the French understand better).

Let’s hope that the Canal+ leadership will be wise enough to surround themselves with team members who are familiar with both cultures and can act as  “cultural translators”.

2️⃣ The lackluster global market for African content.

When Canal+ embarked on this acquisition journey a few years ago, Netflix and Amazon were bullish about the continent. Hollywood was signing development deals with African producers. African content was “The Future”.

Since then, crickets 🦗🦗🦗 In my next story, I explain why the landscape has so dramatically changed.

This is, for sure, not good news for Canal+.

But, at the same time, they alone (since Netflix and Amazon disqualified themselves) will have the expertise, means and resources to change the way the world perceives African content, by making bold bets on quality and originality.

3️⃣ Out-of-their-control FX fluctuations, pricing tensions, and customer churn.

Currency devaluations in several anglophone African countries have hammered margins in recent years, which led Multichoice to increase its prices.

But you can’t spreadsheet your way out of falling disposable incomes.

Here’s a crazy number: Recent DStv (Multichoice’s pay-TV service) price increases in Kenya have led to a drop in subscriptions in the country from nearly 1.2 million in June 2024 to fewer than 200,000 a year later 😮 That’s 84% of DStv’s subscriber-base in Kenya that just vanished.

Meanwhile in Ghana, disaster was narrowly averted yesterday when, after months of tense negotiations with the government who was threatening to shut the service down. Multichoice agreed to provide “additional value” to subscribers in exchange for a similar price increase (basically by bumping them up to bigger bouquets).

4️⃣ An overhyped, possibly overvalued Showmax.

Showmax’s management has talked about  their goal of reaching $1B annual revenue within 5 years. But external forecasters only expect about 3.7 million paying subs by 2029, which would amount to… $222 million per year if we assume a $5/month ARPU. That’s quite a gap.

I can only explain the $1B figure as Multichoice talking big as part of their strategy to boost their valuation during the acquisition negotiations with Canal+.

Reality will now set in. Expect carefully crafted communication over the next few months announcing a Showmax evolution, restructuring or new strategy, anything to explain away lower numbers.

To be clear: I do think Showmax is a great product and that it can succeed - the growth curve will just have to be slower because: Africa.

To sum up, this is not the end of the Canal+Multichoice saga, only a new chapter.

FILM & TV

What is certain is that the new Canal+Multichoice entity is taking its first steps at a less-than-opportune time.

😰 The global content market is under pressure – and in Africa, it’s even worse.

A couple weeks ago, I spent several days walking the floor at MIP Africa, talking to producers, buyers, and platform execs.

And word on the conference floor was this: the African content market has dramatically contracted.

📉 Commissions have been drying up (including of course from Netflix and Amazon), budgets are tightening, and international buyers of African content, already few and far between, are increasingly risk averse.

Just five years ago, Africa was the next content frontier. What happened?

1️⃣ First, as global streaming platforms mature, there is less tolerance for huge losses and content spend with uncertain ROI.

Many streamers are pulling back from simply chasing growth and focusing instead on safe bets and profitability.

This dynamic is strengthened by a widespread cultural movement towards more locally-resonnant stories and less exoticism.

2️⃣ Second, the economic slowdown and high inflation has impacted both ad revenue and consumer spend.

3️⃣ Third, AI adds another layer of pressure, pushing costs and budgets down even further, and inducing decision paralysis in the industry. Who knows what the market will look like in 6 months?

The result is that, despite the (unfortunately badly timed) proliferation of African film funds, African producers are struggling to get projects financed for lack of distribution and monetization options.

Of course, there are bright spots, but they are the exception, not the rule:

🔹Despite the uncertainty over the impact of its merger with Canal+, Multichoice has reaffirmed its commitment to investing in African content across genres.

🔹MTN is launching its highly anticipated MTN TV, taking a new crack at telco-led mobile video streaming.

🔹Besides regular acquisitions, Netflix is still working with a handful of trusted filmmakers in South Africa, where the recent success of the docuseries Beauty and the Bester has shown the untapped potential of African true crime.

🔹YouTube is delivering results for those who can leverage huge audiences, such as Ruth Kadiri or Omoni Oboli.

🔹Some industry veterans are seizing the bull by the horns and investing in new distribution initiatives such as Kava, Circuits, EbonyLife ON+, and community cinema projects. Nigeria definitely leads the way here.

🔹2025 festivals gave African cinema more slots, more profile, and a few historic awards. My Father’s Shadow won a Special Mention at Cannes. Venice recorded the largest African presence of its history with 20+ African projects. Locarno launched a four-year Open Doors “Africa cycle” covering 42 countries. And the just-concluded TIFF had a broad Africa/diaspora slate.

But still, this is a deeply challenging time for the industry.

It is a time for reflection, reinvention, and innovation.

WHAT’S UP AI

👽 A couple weeks ago, the Naija Artificial Intelligence Film Festival (NAIFF) took place in Lagos.

Organized by industry veteran Obinna Okerekeocha, Africa’s “first AI film festival” drew hundreds of submissions, and set out a clear brief: make AI a practical part of African storytelling, not a headline.

As you know, I’ve been concerned about the lack of urgency around AI adoption in the African creative community.

🔧 NAIFF’s real contribution was reframing AI from threat to toolkit. It provided the early scaffolding for an ecosystem: a pipeline of tech-savvy talent, an ethics conversation that includes rights-holders, and a proof-of-concept that AI can compress time-to-market for shorts, trailers, and social assets.

A step in the right direction.

PUBLISHING

I don’t talk a lot about the publishing space in this newsletter, not because I’m not interested (I love books much more than music or films), but because there are not many examples of successful publishing businesses on the continent.

That’s why I particularly enjoyed this piece from Communique on Narrative Landscape, the Nigerian imprint behind billionaire Femi Otedola’s recent blockbuster autobiography.

📖 The Lagos-based press sold 16,000 copies of the celebrity book in Nigeria and 4,000 in the UK within three weeks - numbers most titles never reach in a lifetime.

Earlier this year, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count also reportedly blew through a 25,000-copy first Nigerian print run in days.

Narrative Landscape’s portfolio of titles is impressive. It’s a calibrated blend of global icons and local voices, from Wole Soyinka and Lupita Nyong’o to Oyinkan Braithwaite. More recently, they’ve tilted toward non-fiction as consumer taste shifts to lived experience and business memoirs.

But Narrative Landscape didn’t start by betting on literary moonshots. They bootstrapped via publishing services, made money, and only then leaned into traditional trade publishing. One early smart move was to lock in Adichie’s Nigerian rights, refreshing the line with standout African-print covers.

🚚 But the company’s real moat is distribution control, through a direct-to-consumer pipeline that includes a logistics tie-up with Konga.

Once again, we fall back on distribution. Do I sound like a broken record?

FASHION & TEXTILE

📜 AGOA (the US trade preference program for Sub-Saharan Africa) expired yesterday, September 30, 2025.

At the last minute, and after months of lobbying from African governments and industry, the White House said that it supports a one-year stopgap extension.

But Congress hasn’t passed it yet… AND the US government just shut down. It’s a mess.

Concretely, what this means is that duty-free access for African AGOA countries to the US market is on pause.

🤑 Complicating matters further, the Trump administration’s 2025 “reciprocal” tariffs (10–30% for many previously duty-free lines) apply to AGOA countries anyway.

Some countries, like Kenya, are pushing for their own bilateral deal.

The outcome of the on-going negotiations is key for the African fashion and textile sector.

🏭 Africa has built real garment supply chains off the back of AGOA, and jobs are now on the line as US buyers shift to other sourcing hubs.

Some 300,000 African textile/apparel jobs are at risk, especially in Lesotho (40,000 jobs), Kenya (66,800), and Madagascar (60,000).

The impact of all this chaos has already been felt: buyers have canceled, factories have cut shifts, and the damage is showing up on the ground

Also, investors hate limbo. Confusion on the issue may ground investment decisions into new textile and manufacturing plants to a halt.

👗Finally, African fashion, already priced high because of various infrastructure gaps, will cost even more for American consumers.

The US is the biggest export market for African brands, with massive potential for growth, so the best brands won’t give up, but things will get harder.

So, what to do?

It’s time for plan B: deepen regional trade (AfCFTA), diversify to other markets (EU, Middle East), and invest in textile production infrastructure to lower costs and defend margins.

Now for a bit of good news:

💰 Two Zimbabwean brands, Vanhu Vamwe and The Rad Black Kids, have secured fresh capital during Afreximbank’s CANEX from Silverbacks Holdings and Nigeria’s ImpactHER.

Both brands earned their spotlight at CANEX WKND 2024 pitch sessions and attracted a slice of a $100,000 pledge from a consortium of investors.

🔥 Both Zimbabwean brands already sell through BOP Inc (an Amazon subsidiary), Net-a-Porter, Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, and Selfridges across the US, UK, and Asia.

“Both brands represent Africa’s growing influence in global fashion by blending cultural heritage with scalable, foreign-currency-earning business models,” said Silverbacks.

Vanhu Vamwe and The Rad Black Kids are not just good stories from Zimbabwe. They’re case studies in how African creativity can be turned into a commercial asset: culture translated into exportable brands, priced in dollar, pound or euro, distributed through retailers that actually pay on time.

More of this, please.

SPORTS

Visit Rwanda has crossed the Atlantic with two headline sponsorships in US sports.

🏀 The East African country brand is now the LA Clippers’ exclusive jersey-patch partner in the NBA, in a deal that also includes Intuit Dome rights and “coffee sponsor” status.

🏈 Visit Rwanda also signed on as an international tourism partner of the LA Rams in the NFL, with branding across SoFi Stadium and Hollywood Park.

These two new high-profile partnerships are a logical next step in a strategy Rwanda has been running for years with European football (Arsenal, PSG, Bayern) and the BAL in Kigali.

Rwanda is now stepping it up big time: the US sports machine offers unmatched reach, frequency, and conversion pathways in the world’s largest media market.

So what did Rwanda buy, exactly?

🔹NBA jersey patches are some of the most efficient global billboards in sport content. They appear in every highlight, every thumbnail, every jersey photo that circulates worldwide. “Visit Rwanda” will be in every shot.

🔹With the Rams, Rwanda plugs into the NFL’s L.A. complex through in-stadium signage, hospitality, and Hollywood Park activations. A powerful funnel to unlock business and high-net-worth tourism, especially from the diaspora.

🔹The Clippers package includes youth coaching exchanges and clinics tied to Rwanda - good for community optics and soft power.

With these deals, an African tourism board just bought top-tier US inventory, and not as a one-off Super Bowl ad, but as multi-year rights with athlete and arena integrations.

If this leads to strong tourism KPIs (US arrival growth, higher average daily spend and longer stays, new B2B opportunities, etc), this will act as a proof of concept for other African destination brands to follow suit.

📅 SAVE-THE-DATE: CREATION AFRICA FORUM IN LAGOS (Oct 16-18)

(c) MansA

In 2023, I had the honor of MC’ing the very first Creation Africa Forum in Paris. It was a strong debut, with 323 African guests representing 35 countries and the best of the continent’s creativity. President Macron even showed up.

This year, I’m back on stage as co-MC for the second edition of the Forum on October 16-18 at Federal Palace, alongside my friend David Adeleke.

What makes Creation Africa different from the sea of creative economy events is its sharp artistic curation by MansA (Maison des Mondes Africains). This means that we won’t just talk. Creation Africa is an experience - prepare to be wowed.

Backed by the French Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Culture, with support from AFD, Business France, Bpifrance and the Institut français, this second edition will bring together 50+ projects and 100 speakers from 40 countries across 🤖 immersive media (XR, games, AR, fashion innovation), transmedia publishing (webtoons), and cutting-edge audiovisual (TV series, VFX, sound design, animation).

The first two days are reserved for professionals, while October 18 is open to the general public.

If you’re in Lagos, you can’t miss this. Register here, and see you there!

HUSTLE & FLOW #67: Sony invests; Nigeria makes prom dresses; Etsy and Twitch lock out African creators; and more

(c) Lashonte Anderson via BBC / picturing Trinity Foster from Memphis

Hustle & Flow #67 is out!

🌄 I’m publishing this from Cape Town where I’m attending FAME Week Africa, so you will excuse a slightly shorter edition this time (or perhaps you prefer it shorter? Let me know in the comments).

The month of August is typically when the investment and development worlds are OOO, so you’d expect it to be slow. It wasn’t.

In fact, Sony Innovation Fund announced two deals - I talk about them below. Also, the good: Nigerian designers take over the US prom market (is there ANYTHING Nigerians can’t do?); the bad: African creators get locked out of Etsy and Kenyans gamers of Twitch; and the necessary: my proposal for an authoritative definition of the African creative industries.

👋 If you are reading this but are not yet subscribed, what are you waiting for? Join the other 10,000+ professionals who get HUSTLE & FLOW monthly in their inbox: https://lnkd.in/drBY8jnz

INVESTMENT NEWS

While other investors were off on a beach somewhere, Sony Innovation Fund was busy closing deals.

In August, the fund announced two new bets in Africa’s creative economy: Filmmakers Mart and Twiva.

🎬 Filmmakers Mart is a production marketplace that helps filmmakers manage everything from logistics and permits to catering and crews. This is also Sony’s first co-investment with IFC - International Finance Corporation.

🤳🏾 Twiva is a Kenyan social-commerce platform where influencers become sellers. It bundles influencer marketing, fintech, live streaming, and skills training to help creators monetize at scale.

These are only Sony’s second and third investments in the space after gaming publisher Carry1st, while Filmmakers Mart is only IFC’s second direct investment in an African creative company after ANKA.

⌛️ It’s worth noting that it took about two years for these (very motivated) investors to get here, and it was not for lack of trying. That’s simply how long it takes to study a new industry, design a strategy, build trust with founders, source and vet deals, and structure investments. It is also a reflection of the lack of investable deals I often talk about.

Now that the pump has been primed, it’s in our collective interest to make sure that more solid, bankable deals keep coming to the market.

FASHION

👩🏿🎓Prom has quietly and randomly become one of Nigeria’s most lucrative fashion exports - and this lovely piece by the BBC was the feel-good story of the summer for me.

In it we see 18-year-old Brianna LeDoux from Florida flaunt her prom gown, custom-made by a Nigerian designer. Her TikTok showcasing the dress has now been viewed 1.1 million times.

Brianna is part of a fast-growing movement of US teens tapping into Nigerian glamour for their biggest night of high school.

Thanks to TikTok and Instagram, these American teenagers are discovering that Nigerian designers can offer them things that their own market can’t:

✨ First, identity & cultural pride. Many of these young ladies are from diaspora communities. For them, a Yoruba-lace gown is a proud nod to their heritage.

✨ Then, Met Gala-level originality & drama at prices that undercut US couture. If you’re familiar with Nollywood red carpet looks, you know what I’m talking about.

✨ And finally, craftsmanship & care, with orders handled over WhatsApp with video consultations, precise measurements, and handmade detailing.

On the supply side, this has created a fascinating business model:

Five African designers interviewed by the BBC shipped more than 2,800 prom gowns to the US this season alone. One workshop in Ibadan even employed 60 full-time staff and 130 seasonal tailors to handle 1,500 dresses.

At $600–$1,500, these gowns are far cheaper than custom US couture ($3,500+) while still offering high margins for the designers. If we assume an average price of $1,000 per dress, that’s $2,8 million generated by just the five designers mentioned in the BBC story - a substantial amount.

The distribution channel couldn’t be more low-cost yet efficient: TikTok builds fame, Instagram drives sales, and WhatsApp manages customer service. That’s a full global sales funnel powered by social media.

And as prom is a recurring event, it has become a reliable annual anchor for the designers, representing up to 25% of total revenue for some of them.

💡 The US success of Nigerian prom dresses gives us a potentially replicable business model for creative companies: spot a cultural moment in a diaspora community with disposable cash (prom) > link it to emotional value (identity + self-expression) > build an export pipeline around it.

Yes, there are hurdles: new US tariffs, customs delays, scale limitations. But the fundamentals are strong. This model could be extended well beyond prom dresses into weddings, lifestyle, accessories, and other cultural “milestone” markets where diaspora consumers crave uniqueness and meaning.

E-COMMERCE

Now for the less happy stories.

As of last month, many African shops have been locked out of US-based creators platform Etsy.

The reason is the platform’s consolidation of all payments under its proprietary Etsy Payments system and its phasing out standalone PayPal.

Etsy Shop’s goal is to tighten control over fees, compliance, and buyer protection, but the unintended consequence is that, since Etsy Payments isn’t available in most African markets, sellers are effectively locked out.

👶🏾 The reality is that Africa is still the smallest market for these global platforms, so they’re not incentivized to implement inclusive solutions.

🐔🥚 But without access, it will stay that way. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem: if African creators can’t plug into global commerce, they can’t grow into the kind of market size that makes integration “worth it” for the Etsys, Netflixes, and Spotifys of this world.

Solving the payment integration issue would have a transformational impact on the African creative economy’s potential to generate revenue from global markets.

It may seem like a simple problem (why can’t global platforms just integrate Flutterwave and Paystack?), but it’s actually quite complex. Reminder to self to dig into it at a later time.

GAMING

🎮 In another blow to creators and more specifically gamers, leading live-streaming service Twitch has announced that it is suspending monetization in Kenya.

Twitch cited “recently imposed regulations [that] have restricted [their] ability to continue offering Twitch monetization opportunities to streamers in Kenya.”

🤑 The company hasn’t named the rules explicitly, but the most likely culprits are Kenya’s Tax Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2024 and provisions in the Finance Bill 2024.

The Tax Laws (Amendment) Bill, signed in December 2024, imposes taxation on income earned by content creators via monetization platforms such as TikTok, Facebook, but also Twitch. This means that platforms may be forced to act as withholding agents or face compliance burdens.

Meanwhile, the Finance Bill of 2024 introduced a 1.5% levy on local digital platforms and a 6% “significant economic presence” tax on non-resident companies earning income in Kenya through digital services. Twitch is unlikely to be big enough in Kenya to qualify as “significantly present” but still, this is adding complexity.

🔚 So, rather than adapt to these new rules, Twitch has opted to exit.

And this is not surprising. Once again, for global platforms, African markets are too small to justify making any effort.

This sad state of affairs could have easily been prevented. Kenya’s creator economy (like much of Africa’s) is still in its early days, and still fragile. Instead of standing back to enable growth before capturing value, the government is enforcing blunt regulation that drives platforms away, stranding local creators in the process.

If African countries are serious about building globally competitive digital and creative economies, then regulation needs to be strategic, enabling, and forward-looking. Imposing tax and compliance rules prematurely will only result in strangling the creative economy before it even has the chance to develop.

Still in gaming but on a positive note, the play-to-earn model is back, but more grounded and without the hype.

With rising costs across Nigeria, a recent TechCabal story highlighted how the mobile app Hyper is giving gamers a chance to earn extra cash. Hyper was built by Metaverse Magna (MVM), a Nestcoin portfolio company.

Here’s how it works:

🧩 Players compete either in head-to-head matches or in daily tournaments across a catalogue of more than 20 simple mobile games. The results are transparent, with public leaderboards and prize pools showing exactly who won what. Hyper uses its own in-app currency, HPR, fixed at ₦5 per coin. Players can cash out directly to their bank accounts or PayPal.

Importantly, Hyper runs smoothly on entry-level smartphones, which makes it accessible to a wide audience.

The amounts aren’t huge, but they’re meaningful. The most skilled and consistent players can reach around ₦48,000 ($27) per month.

🛒 Why does this matter? Because it shows that play can become a modest but real income stream. These micro-earnings won’t replace a salary, but they can cover essentials like groceries or data.

This model might be one key to unlocking the revenue potential of the much-hyped-up African gaming market.

It could also, in theory, offer an on-ramp: once people get comfortable making money online in small ways, they are more likely to try other (paid) digital platforms to access music, videos, or sports, for example. At least that’s the assumption.

BACK TO THE BASICS

When engaging with investors, the first question I’m often asked is: “But what are the creative industries, exactly?”

😵💫 Turns out, this confusion is shared by many - and for good reason.

There is not one, authoritative definition out there, but several imperfect ones. To complicate matters further, they don’t say exactly the same thing.

The three most widely used definitions come from UNESCO, the UK’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport, and the UN’s Conference on Trade and Development:

🔹UNESCO defines the cultural industries as sectors that safeguard and promote cultural identity and diversity, rooted in heritage and cultural expression. No economic angle.

🔹The UK’s DCMS frames the creative industries as those that draw on individual creativity and intellectual property to generate jobs and drive economic growth. Sounds pretty good, until you realize that they include software (?!).

🔹UNCTAD presents the creative economy as a hybrid framework linking culture, trade, and development, with particular relevance for the Global South. Too development-y.

Some African institutions and countries have tried to come up with their own spin on those, but so far, none has stuck.

Personally, I don’t like those that include terms like “livelihoods”, “informal”, “identity” or “youth”. They may be factually correct, but they make us look small and needy.

So, you know what I had to do. I took matters into my own hands.

I hereby present you my definition:

🌟 “The African Cultural and Creative Industries are the sectors that harness and showcase the continent’s cultures, creativity, and intellectual property to produce goods and services that generate economic growth, create employment, and project Africa’s soft power globally.”

The following 11 sub-sectors are included in this definition:

1. Audio-Visual Media & Entertainment: Film and cinema; Television and broadcasting; Radio; Music (recorded + live + streaming); Animation and VFX; Video games and esports; Streaming and on-demand platforms

2. Design & Fashion: Fashion design (luxury, ready-to-wear, traditional attire); Accessories and footwear; Interior design, homeware and décor; Graphic design, industrial/product design

3. Lifestyle, Beauty & Gastronomy: Beauty and cosmetics rooted in indigenous knowledge and aesthetics; Hairstyling and body art (braiding, barbershops, henna, adornment); Gastronomy and culinary arts (restaurants, chefs, street food, beverages); Cultural food products (indigenous superfoods, teas, drinks like palm wine, rooibos)

4. Sport & Entertainment: Professional and amateur sports as entertainment; Sports media, broadcasting, and event management; Esports (overlaps with digital media); Mega sporting events as cultural spectacles

5. Creative Business Services: Advertising and branding; Marketing and communications; Architecture and urban design; Creative consulting

6. Digital & New Media: Creator Economy and Digital content creation; Online streaming and distribution platforms; Virtual/augmented/mixed reality for culture and storytelling; NFTs and digital art marketplaces; Creative tech

7. Cultural Tourism: Heritage and museum tourism; Festival and event tourism; Creative city branding

8. Publishing & Literature: Books and e-books; Newspapers, magazines, periodicals; Comics, graphic novels; Children’s and young adult literature; Digital publishing and blogging

9. Performing Arts: Live theatre and performance; Dance (traditional, contemporary, urban); Festivals and cultural events; Music concerts (overlaps with audiovisual)

10. Visual Arts & Crafts: Painting, sculpture, photography; Handicrafts, textiles, ceramics, jewelry; Galleries and exhibitions

11. Heritage & Traditional Knowledge: Museums, archives, libraries; Cultural heritage sites and monuments; Indigenous knowledge, oral traditions, folklore; Crafts and artisanal products

What do you think? Am I missing anything?

🚨 If it resonates with you, I’m asking for your help to turn it into THE definition for the African creative economy. Please use it, share it, advocate for it.

Asante sana 🙏

HUSTLE & FLOW #66: Mo Money for film, Mo Streamers; Creator-Founders emerge, Roc Nation enters Africa, and more

🎉 July 2025 was a month of bold moves and big money in the African creative industries, especially in film.

Canal+ got the final-final approval for its takeover of Multichoice, and the tribunal included the binding condition to spend $1.4 billion in 3 years on South African content. Mzanzi filmmakers rejoice.

On top of that, the rails are being set for two new African film funds to start disbursing cash. And Nigerian filmmakers and film lovers are getting not one, but two new streaming platforms.

🤳⚽️👽 But wait, there’s more - moves in the Creator Economy, Football, and AI, plus a whole bunch of strategic investment announcements.

Get all the deets in this new edition of HUSTLE & FLOW (and don’t forget to subscribe!) 👇

FILM

💰🏃🏾South African filmmakers: $1.4 billion is sitting on your table - go grab it.

Last week, South Africa's Competition Tribunal officially approved the Canal+MultiChoice deal and the angel is in the details.

In order to validate the deal, the Tribunal added some “binding public‑interest conditions”, including $1.4 billion (R26 billion) to be deployed over three years into local content, sports, supplier development and HDP/SMME participation (South Africa's Black-owned businesses and small enterprises)

⏱ The clock started July 23, 2025. It stops mid-2028.

While everyone's debating "what this means for the industry," the money is already earmarked and the conditions are binding.

Canal+ even sweetened the pot by an additional $110 million, bringing the total commitment to $1.55 billion.

Producers, it’s time to move - strategically:

▶️ Pitch for a slate across the full 2025-2028 window, not single projects.

The regulators explicitly wanted "sustained local content".

▶️ Come with projects ready-to-go (you know, the one you’ve been trying to get made for years), not concepts.

Make sure your package is solid, with bibles, pilot scripts if possible, budgets, distribution and financing plans, and delivery schedules.

The money will move toward projects that can start shooting soon.

▶️ “Supplier development” will be a key criteria.

Make sure you design inclusion from day one by integrating HDP ownership, apprenticeships, and skills transfer directly into your budget and production process.

▶️ Now is the best time to negotiate favorable deals.

Negotiate AVOD rights, potential remakes, and international licensing while Canal+ is under regulatory pressure to stimulate the ecosystem.

Their "yes" muscle is stronger right now than it will be in 2029.

This money won’t be there forever. Post-2028, Canal+ is likely to prioritize integration savings over development spend.

🌍🎥 What about NON-South African filmmakers, you ask?

Well first, don’t forget that you could partner on a co-production with a South African outfit to tap into the Canal+ bounty.

But more funding is also on its way - and it is not tied to a specific country:

Next Narrative Africa’s $40 million Film Fund just closed its first open call. Out of this first call, it expects to provide between $20,000 and $100,000 in development grants to 6-10  “narrative-shifting” African film or TV projects.

For context, this is noticeably higher than the average development deal amount offered by Africa’s top buyers (such as Netflix, Canal+ or Showmax), which is usually around $10,000-$30,000.

NNA says that it will look in priority for commercially viable projects with budgets around $3-$7 million, in which NNA may invest up to 20% in equity. Again, this is much higher than the current average budgets for African films. Only Netflix’s South African budgets are in that range.

🤔 Can newcomer NNA identify better projects through this process than the experienced development teams at Netflix, Amazon, Canal+ and Showmax?

The NNA Fund winners are expected to be announced in December, so we’ll have the answer soon.

🤝 Meanwhile, EbonyLife, IFC and AfDB have announced their collaboration “to explore the conditions for the creation of a pan-African investment vehicle targeted at the region’s film sector”.

So, that’s prime DFI-speak. But what does this mean EXACTLY?

Basically, over the next 3--6 months the trio will run a full feasibility study, building the strategy, business plan, and legal structure for a potential pan-African film fund.

Then, if all goes well (which it normally does), the custom-designed entity will get financed by IFC, AfDB, and other investors

By this time next year, there might be yet another African film fund on the scene.

STREAMING

Either way you look at it, that’s A LOT of new funding coming up for African content.

📺 And I will sound like a broken record again but… where is all this content going to go?

In Nigeria, it looks like Netflix and Amazon retreating shocked the industry into action: the country is getting not one, but two new streaming services.

First, Mo Abudu (possibly Africa’s hardest working woman in showbusiness - at least this month) is back in the game with EbonyLifeON+. Yes, a mouthful.

This is Abudu's second attempt at building a streaming service.

💥 Her first, launched in 2015 with French tech company Summview, targeted diaspora audiences but ultimately failed. The timing wasn't right: Nigeria's internet infrastructure was shaky, data costs were prohibitive, and the market simply wasn't ready.

🪦Fast-forward to 2025, and the streaming landscape in Nigeria looks like a graveyard.

IROKOtv, once Nigeria’s pride and joy, finally threw in the towel in 2023 after burning through $100 million. Jason Njoku's brutal post-mortem was clear: "streaming wasn't the right model for Nollywood in Nigeria."

Even Netflix broke when faced with the brutal Nigerian economics: the global streamer stopped commissioning new Nigerian originals last year.

⚖️ Both IROKOtv and Netflix came to the same conclusion: the economics simply don't add up when your costs are in dollars but your customers pay in a currency that's lost 70% of its value since 2023.

But here's where it gets interesting:

The very reason others are retreating might be what makes EbonyLifeON+ viable.

When your server costs, bandwidth, and content licensing are priced in USD, and your subscribers pay with an ever-weakening Naira (now at ₦1,535 to $1), the math breaks.

🏗 But IF EbonyLife can leverage local infrastructure - Nigerian payment processors like Interswitch, local data centers like MainOne, cloud services priced in Naira - it might give the new incarnation of its streaming service a lifeline.

Also, with 5,000+ hours of original programming, including hits like "Blood Sisters" and "The Wedding Party", EbonyLife is not starting from scratch.

The platform's community-based model (which will include masterclasses, podcasts, star hangouts and live events) might also be a differentiator and create other revenue streams.

But an investor I spoke to recently pointed to a potential weakness: it doesn’t appear that EbonyLifeON+ has a proper tech and product team separate from other EbonyLife businesses.

⚠️ If that’s true, it would prevent them from executing properly on the opportunity they’ve stumbled upon. And that’s not only a shame, it’s a strategic mistake.

Two other Nollywood titans, another take on the same business:

Inkblot Studios and FilmHouse group have partnered to launch their own streamer: Kava.

Leveraging the partners’ own, proven pipeline of top Nollywood movies, the platform will debut with 30+ premium titles. New films are then set to drop every week.

👨🏾🍳 Rather than the Netflix “all-you-can-eat” buffet, Kava’s inspiration is the gourmet experience offered by European streamer MUBI through its 30-film rotating catalogue that cinephiles swear by.

Kava is banking on its niche focus to control costs and on the diaspora audience to bring in the dollars.

Theoretically, a platform focused on fewer, high quality titles prized by the diaspora would not need a huge amount of subscribers to break even.

So, Kava has a chance as well.

Aaaaand, let’s not forget Circuits, ANOTHER Nigerian platform which quietly launched late last year but on a pay-per-view model, positioning itself as a virtual cinema more than a Netflix clone.

Will either of these approaches work? The streaming landscape is littered with well-funded attempts which ultimately failed. 👻👻👻

But sometimes the best time to enter a market is when everyone else is leaving -- if you can solve the problems they couldn't.

CREATOR ECONOMY

🤳Communique’s Oritsejolomi Otomewo published a great article last week about African creators building scalable product businesses.

You should read it in full of course (and subscribe to Communique). But here’s the gist:

47 % of African creators now earn more from their own digital products (ebooks, courses, memberships…) than from brand sponsorships. This number points to a fast-growing global playbook in which creators are morphing into founders.

🍫 This transition was pioneered a few years ago by US creator MrBeast, who started his entrepreneurial endeavors with his chocolate brand Feastables and now runs a diversified billion-dollar holding company.

Now, local proof-of-concepts are emerging.

For example: Nigeria’s Aproko Doctor, who has 6 million followers across social media, launched his tele-health startup Awadoc this year. The company is already serving 50,000 patients across 13 countries and is now raising pre-seed capital.

Built-in demand and ultra-low customer acquisition costs make creator-led startups an attractive proposition for investors, despite the key-person risk.

In my opinion, one of the most interesting developments in today’s creative industries.

WHAT’S UP AI

👽 The unstoppable march of AI in entertainment continues.

While Hollywood has been treating AI like a taboo subject since the 2023 strikes, Netflix just openly declared they're using it for actual production, and that they're happy with the results.

Netflix teamed up with producers to use AI to create a scene of a building collapsing in an Argentine show called "El Eternauta" ("The Eternaut").

Co-CEO Ted Sarandos said that using AI, the scene was finished 10x faster than it would have with traditional visual effect tools, and that it cost less.

In the same month, Amazon invested in Fable’s Showrunner, a platform where anyone can generate full animated episodes with a text prompt, remix existing worlds, and even earn ~40 % of downstream revenue when others build on their storylines.

The company’s hypothesis is that AI is not just a tool for cheaper special effects but represents a new entertainment medium, more akin to video games.

And to close this topic, a tidbit of news that went viral last week: according to a new report by Datareportal, Kenya ranked #1 globally in ChatGPT usage, with 42.1% of Kenyan internet users reporting having used the service in the past month.

Ranked immediately after Kenya are the UAE (42%) and Israel (41.4%), while leading economies like Japan (5.8%), China (7.3%) and Russia (10.8%) trailed far behind.

This new statistic confirms Kenya’s status as a country of early tech adopters. But the question many asked is this: consuming AI tools is one thing, but what about creating, producing, leveraging?

SPORTS BUSINESS

⚽️🌟 Jay-Z is bringing his golden touch to African football.

The “Business, Man”’s sports venture, Roc Nation Sports International (RNSI), just planted its flag firmly in African football, signing eight rising stars from six countries in one swoop.

This is the continuation and strengthening of a strategy started in 2021, when RNSI signed a consultancy deal with South Africa’s Mamelodi Sundowns.

⛏️ RNSI is certainly not the first foreign agency to attempt to mine Africa’s notoriously deep pool of raw football talents.

They, just like anyone else, will have to face a daunting set of challenges:

⚠️ The good ol’ Africa fragmentation that makes sourcing talent, negotiating deals, and moving people around at scale such an operational and legal nightmare.

⚠️ The inference of local politics in anything football, meaning that operating in that world involves bicycle-kicking over landmines at every step.

⚠️ The lack of professional pre-academies, which means that by the time a player is spotted in Africa, they are already 15-18 years old as opposed to 11-13 years old in Europe - and this makes a huge difference in a footballing career

⚠️ And always, the lack of general infrastructure, both physical and immaterial, which makes progress much slower and much more expensive.

But RNSI does have the brand power, marketing know-how, entertainment synergies, and cash to make a dent.

We’ll be following closely.

INVESTMENT NEWS

💼 This partnership was actually announced last year, but the news went completely unnoticed then.

It is now confirmed: IFC (World Bank Group) and Proparco have invested a joint $50M in Helios Sports and Entertainment Group (HSEG).

HSEG, which ultimately aims to raise $75M, plans to deepen its strategy to invest in media rights, sports IP, live events, and physical infrastructure.

HSEG already owns a stake in NBA Africa, which valued the league’s Africa division at $1 billion, the Professional Fighters League (PFL) Africa, The Malachite Group (owners of the AfroNation brand), and mixed-used infrastructure developer Zaria Group, co-founded with Toronto Raptors President Masai Ujiri.

This is the kind of signal, and the type of projects, that turn investing in the Creative and Sports space from a niche and risky edge-case to an attractive mainstream proposition. Now watch the FOMO spread in the ecosystem.

✍🏾 In another investment news, Afreximbank’s CANEX Creations (the same war-chest that’s touting $2 billion to bankroll Africa’s creative economy) has signed its first deal:

Afreximbank has taken an equity bite out of Afrobeat star’s D’banj’s C.R.E.A.M. talent-discovery platform.

C.R.E.A.M. is sitting on 7 million subscribers, 10,000+ content submissions and has already written cheques or given exposure to 38,000 creatives across Nigeria.

It’s secret sauce is USSD (*463#) access on MTN, another reminder (from me being a broken record again) that distribution is the real moat.

Despite being in the midst of what is probably its biggest social movement since independence, Kenya is attracting the attention of global entertainment players.

In fact, Kenya just pulled off a three-pointer that would make Steph Curry jealous. In the span of twelve months:

🏆 The Recording Academy (owner of the Grammys) has picked Nairobi for its first Pan-African hub.

🎬 During the U.S.-Kenya Creative Economy Forum held in June, Tyler Perry Studios and the NBA Africa spearheaded a $93 million investment commitment to increase Kenya’s creative sector contribution to GDP from 5% to 10%.

⛹🏾 NBA Africa is also planning to build 100 basketball courts across Kenya over the next decade.

And here’s the part that is less visible: the bankers are now joining the party.

Stanbic Bank Kenya is raising a $100 million Catalytic Fund, with the creative economy on the ticket, while Equity Bank has already written a $194,000 cheque to the Kenya Music Festival and is looking at more ways to support the creative sector.

Kenya’s next creative season is looking good.

CREATIVE SUCCESS STORIES

🌟 And to wrap up, in July I profiled 3 more companies out of the 12 success stories featured in my Proparco CREA Fund study.  If you missed them, you can find them here:

Mundo: How Africa’s First Music Streaming IPO Started with a Very Wrong Business Model

ROK Studios: How a Content Crisis Built Nigeria’s Largest Film Factory

Triggerfish: How 5 Partners transformed a Failing Studio into Disney’s Go-to Animation Company

Coming up next week: Vivo Fashion Group, East Africa’s H&M with $9 million in annual revenue (!).

HUSTLE & FLOW #65: Franco streaming wars, new Spotify data, African fashion perception, and more

Africa streaming wars: TF1+ entered the chat

This month, the streaming wars heated up again, this time over francophone Africa, with the announcement of 2 consequential deals involving 3 behemoths: Netflix, Canal+ and TF1.

We look at what this all means in this edition of HUSTLE & FLOW.

Also: new data from Spotify, why is African fashion so damn expensive, developments in AI, TECNO new deal with CAF, and more.

Read, like, share and subscribe below 👇

STREAMING

It had been quiet for a while on the streaming front since Netflix announced it would cut down on funding originals from Nigeria.

But of course, there’s always some shadow moves - and Netflix surprised us with this one by shifting the gameplay.

🌍 The global streamer announced that it would be boosting its distribution into Francophone Africa by piggy-backing on Canal+’s solid presence in the region.

The two leading players have signed a strategic distribution deal that will see Netflix bundled into Canal+ subscriptions across 24 French-speaking Sub-Saharan countries starting this July.

This is not the first deal of this kind between Netflix and Canal+, but an extension of their existing partnership active in France and Poland since 2019.

So what does this mean in practical terms?

You won’t suddenly start seeing Netflix content on Canal+’s African linear channels.

However, Canal+ subscribers will be able to access the Netflix platform via their existing subscription, without the need for a new log-in.

For customers, this means a streamlined user experience.

🚀 For Netflix, it’s a huge boon: the streamer will now be able to leverage Canal+’s 8-million footprint across Francophone Africa to get in front of potential new users with the proven ability to pay for its service.

By tapping Canal+’s established billing rails, Netflix side-steps the payment friction and data-cost anxiety that typically slow down direct-to-customer rollouts. Also, bundling its content with Canal+ is likely to substantially lower customer churn.

Of course, the deal is great for Canal+ as well.

🔥Adding Netflix to 400+ linear channels (including 28 African ones) and its own VOD catalogue positions the group as the one-stop content gateway on the continent -- just as Canal+ is getting ready to absorb Multichoice.

But that’s not all.

🥐 On the heels of the Canal+/Netflix announcement, we are learning that French commercial broadcaster TF1 has also launched its platform TF1+ in 22 Francophone African countries.

Suddenly, sleepy francophone Africa finds itself the new battleground for the African streaming wars.

What does TF1 bring to the table?

TF1 is France’s top private broadcaster with big flagship programs such as reality shows Koh-Lanta and The Voice, which are well-known by francophone African audiences.

But besides its content, in this race TF1’s biggest weapon is that its VOD service is FREE.

This means that TF1+ and Canal+/Netflix do not quite play in the same league.

👀Canal+ sells a premium universe financed by subscriptions, while TF1+ arrives free of charge with targeted advertising, chasing the mass‑market eyeballs that SVODs struggle to monetise.

TF1’s value proposition is interesting for the market: its brand is familiar, its shows are unifying, and above all, access costs nothing (or close to nothing - there’s always the issue of data costs, but this can be resolved through telco deals).

Of course, Canal+ retains the advantage of sports rights and Netflix distribution, but its proposition targets an audience that is already bankable.

If TF1+ manages to offer a smooth, data-light experience rich in local content, it can capture that large segment of prepaid households that Canal+ reaches less well.

In terms of impact on the African streaming ecosystem, I see two key aspects:

1️⃣ The launch of TF1+ will first legitimize the AVOD model, still under-exploited in the region.

Advertisers will suddenly have a mass alternative to reach a francophone audience, which should push the entire market to refine digital audience measurement.

If this experiment is successful, we could see Netflix and other SVOD streamers learning from it and pushing AVOD options.

2️⃣ On the content side, TF1 will need original films and series to feed the platform.

Looking at Netflix, if its distribution deal with Canal+ brings in a strong enough francophone audience, it could very well motivate the streamer to put more money into local content from the region as well.

This, as we say in French, is “tout benef’” (all upside) for filmmakers in francophone Africa. Time to dust off your pilot scripts and pitch decks.

MUSIC

🎵 More on streaming, but make it music.

Spotify released its latest “Loud & Clear” dashboard, and once again it is full of useful data nuggets:

✅ The money is real, even if it’s still highly concentrated.

Yes, the combined $59 million paid to Nigerian and South-African rights-holders is microscopic compared to Spotify’s $10 billion global payout.

But it represents the steepest year-on-year growth of any region, and that’s something.

✅ The middle tier is maturing.

The number of artists making over ₦10 m ($6,500) / and between R100k-500k ($5,600-$28,300) sharply increased over the past 2-3 years.

This means that sustainable, data-driven careers are emerging beyond superstar level.

✅ Discovery engines favor African genres.

Afrobeats, Amapiano and other regional styles now sit in hundreds of millions of user-generated playlists, fueling both export growth (+49 % NG, +104 % ZA) and local streaming booms (Nigeria local demand +146 %; SA domestic streams +96 %).

✅ Language diversity pays.

In South Africa, non-English tracks are booking triple-digit royalty growth, proving that algorithmic curation no longer penalizes indigenous languages.

Through all this, Spotify is increasingly positioning itself as an enabler for African artists to build sustainable careers, instead of just another DSP.

🤔The question is: how to grow African payouts from their current (and embarrassingly low) less than 1% of the global pie?

The long-term answer will involve the industry rolling up its sleeves to implement major improvements across mobile data costs, payment rails and anti-fraud measures.

FASHION

👜 Why are African goods so damn expensive?

That’s the question MoonLook Africa tried to solve this month in this insightful article.

As Moonlook pointed out, we rarely ask this question about French or Italian products. We accept their premium pricing because we understand the story behind them: craftsmanship, heritage, and excellence.

In the case of African fashion, the truth is that the lack of infrastructure pushes production costs quite high, which means that designers have no choice but to target the luxury segment.

But Moonlook focuses on the perception around African goods and the persistent narrative that they somehow should always be cheap, when the reality is that:

• African-produced pieces are the result of meticulous, patient, sustainable processes

• African artisans master ancestral know-how passed down through generations

• African designers create unique pieces, not mass-produced standardization

• Every item carries a story, a vision, and a level of excellence that can't be compared to standardized products

🧵 While China dominates through massive scale and Portugal combines tradition with optimization, Africa brings something entirely different: authenticity rooted in centuries of craftsmanship.

Moonlook’s take is that -- at least until heavy industry catches up -- Africa shouldn’t compete on cost but on story, rarity, and responsible sourcing.

WHAT’S UP AI

😮 Everyone in Hollywood is using AI.

They’re just hiding it.

This piece from Vulture explores how generative tools are already being used - to write pitches, generate mood boards, cut trailers, and patch budget gaps - all behind closed doors.

If you think that AI hasn’t dramatically impacted the film industry yet, you are fooling yourself.

This is what’s been going on:

➡️ Artists are being asked to “clean up” AI-generated concept art—so it doesn’t look like it came from AI.

➡️ Studios are generating trailers for films they haven’t even shot to secure financing.

➡️ Executives are asking AI to repurpose existing IP into new formats—like anime versions, PG-13 cuts, or entirely new formats.

➡️ Directors are using AI to storyboard multiple versions of a shot—on deadline, without a team.

➡️ Visual effects teams are using AI to simulate explosions, landscapes, and effects, at a fraction of the cost.

Meanwhile in Africa, we are mostly just gisting.

We are starting to see a few initiatives that are encouraging the concrete uptake of AI tools in the African creative and media sectors:

🎬 Obinna Okerekeocha’s Naija AI Film Festival (NAIFF), which will take place in September in Lagos

🔎 TechCabal Insights’ new TCI Market Researcher, an AI tool trained specifically on African market research data. Join the waiting list here: https://insights.techcabal.com/waitlist/

🕵🏾♀️ The Rundown’s AI copilot for reporting in Africa, a master prompt to augment journalists to generate more nuanced, ethical, and accurate stories about the continent, developed by award-winning veteran journalist Zain Verjee: https://rundownstudio.substack.com/p/an-ai-co-pilot-for-reporting-on-africa

But, as I’ve written before, I’m concerned by the lack of urgency I can feel in most conversations on the topic on the continent.

Here’s one stark and personal example of how the arrival of AI has changed the future of some creative sectors:

Once upon a time about 3 years ago, I thought Africa could be the next hotspot for animation outsourcing.

India had established itself as the factory for Hollywood’s animation and VFX busy work in the 1990s by leveraging the labor cost arbitrage. Africa’s turn seemed to be next.

🔢 My equation at the time was:

Tons of creative, hungry, digitally-savvy young people + low labor costs + remote work = the opportunity to create an entirely new industry on the continent.

I had a whole plan for an “Andela for Animation”, which got some smart people interested.

😅 And then… let’s just say that I’m glad I procrastinated for a bit.

Because last year, GenAI entered the scene - and closed that window.

Out of all the sectors being disrupted by AI, animation and VFX is one of the first and hardest hit.

Jeff Katzenberg says that AI will slash movie animation costs by 90 %.

What once required teams of animators can now be accomplished by a couple people through AI-assisted workflows.

This isn't the end of Africa's animation story, but it’s probably the end of service work.

The new playbook:

🏗 For governments and capital allocators: Invest in servers, stable energy sources, and computing power, so Africa is not left behind once again.

🎓 For educators: Launch storyteller academies, not animation bootcamps. Teach narrative design + GenAI tools together.

🎨 For creators: Skip to the part where you do the actual thing. Export finished shows, not CVs or pitch decks.

The future belongs to creators who will combine cultural storytelling with technological fluency.

SPORTS BUSINESS

⚽️ CAF has named Chinese handset maker TECNO its Official Global Partner for AFCON 2025 (Morocco) and 2027 (Kenya/Tanzania/Uganda).

This expands on a first successful partnership during AFCON 2023 in Côte d’Ivoire in which TECNO was the exclusive smartphone sponsor.

Now, the Chinese company is doubling down with field‑renovation pledges (100 pitches by 2028) and deeper digital activations.

The deal is a win-win:

For CAF, locking in a consumer‑tech brand broadens revenue beyond the usual beer‑airline‑bank trio. It also cements AFCON’s rising profile as the biggest entertainment event on the continent.

For TECNO, besides the massive reach and very valuable brand association, AFCON will also give it the opportunity to showcase its new CAMON 40 Series – its latest flagship imaging product and “most advanced AI smartphone ever” - in 54 markets. Sounds interesting.

FINANCING THE CREATIVE INDUSTRIES

As you know by now, in my recent study for Proparco’s CREA Fund, my team and I profiled 12 successful African creative companies.

This month I showcased 4 more of these companies through individual case studies on LInkedin. If you missed them, you can find them here:

Kana TV - How Four Bold Founders Revolutionized Ethiopian TV

Landmark Center - From “Worthless” land to $200M Empire: The Landmark Center Story

Marodi TV - How a Failing VOD Platform Became a Media Empire in Senegal

Mavin Records - The Secrets behind Mavin’s $200M Deal: The Unlikely Partnership that Cracked the Global Music Code

The vast majority of these success stories are SMEs.

And yet, SMEs often get a bad rap, while tech startups get all the hype.

Why is that? Who decided that one was cool and not the other?

Sure, tech startups are innovative and fast-growing. They’re fixing big issues like payments and logistics. They give us hope in the future.

And so they attract billions in investment - $24 billion over the past 10 years to be exact.

It seems big.

BUT.

🤯 Over the same period, Small and Medium Enterprises in Africa have received roughly $1.3 TRILLION in financing, mostly through bank loans. And, according to MIT Sloan, they would need $300 billion more every year to meet their needs.

Not so small now, are they?

🎨 More than 90% of Creative sector companies are SMEs. They are your production companies, music labels, fashion brands, event management agencies, publishing houses, gaming and animation studios.

Here’s why I find them sexy:

1. They are profitable from day one.

2. They have realistic business models.

3. They create jobs, especially for young people and women.

4. They contribute to local economies.

5. They drive culture and soft power.

So let’s make SMEs sexy again😏

💡If you are a government, a bank, an SME or a micro-PE fund interested in investing in Creative companies, there are models and best practices you can emulate. Send me a DM - I’d be happy to talk.

HUSTLE & FLOW #64: Nigeria at Cannes, advances in AI, African podcasts, PFL Africa launch, and more

The mid-year mark is upon us. How do you feel about it?

⏰ Time for a new edition of HUSTLE & FLOW.

This month, I talk about Nigeria shining at Cannes, new advances in AI, the evolution of the African podcast ecosystem, the PFL Africa launch, and more.

Don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t already 👇

FILM

🇳🇬  After years of a characteristically un-Nigerian muted presence, the Nigerian delegation, led by its dynamic Minister of the Creative Economy Hannatu Musawa, came out en force this year at Cannes.

The Nigerians worked the Croisette, the Palais and the Market, shaking hands and signing deals.

🔦 But they were also there to support one of their own, as for the very first time, the very elite festival’s spotlight shone bright on Nigerian cinema.

Akinola Davies Jr.'s debut feature, “My Father's Shadow”, made history as the first Nigerian film selected for the Cannes Film Festival's official lineup, screening in the Un Certain Regard section.

🏆 The film was honored with a Camera d’Or Special Mention, and a cascade of rave reviews.

Deadline called it “one of the most moving and universally relevant and emotional films of any in this year’s fest.”

The poignant, semi-autobiographical film, was co-written by Akinola and his brother Wale. It explores themes of masculinity, familial relationships, and socio-political instability, set against the backdrop of Nigeria's annulled 1993 elections.

I haven’t seen “My Father’s Shadow”, but I have watched Davies’ 2020 short film “Lizard”, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and earned a BAFTA nomination. His talent was already unquestionable then.

For years, Nigerian filmmakers have voiced concerns about their lack of representation at Cannes. But, I would argue, they were not ready.

With “My Father's Shadow”, Davies provides a clear example of the caliber and storytelling that resonate with international audiences.

💡 Nigerians are well-known for their quick grasp of a winning formula when they see one. So we can expect “My Father’s Shadow” to inspire other filmmakers to lean more into the kind of understated emotional depth that connects with audiences beyond their cultures of origin.

The film was acquired before its Cannes showing by streaming platform MUBI for North America, the UK, Ireland, and Turkey, but as of now it’s unclear where the Africa rights will end up. Hello, Netflix?

WHAT’S UP AI?

The Cannes Film Festival is well-known as a bastion of arthouse cinema and the world’s glitziest movie gathering.

🤖 But this year, the real buzz on the Croisette was less about tradition and more about cinema’s uncertain future. More specifically, what everyone was talking about was AI’s fast-expanding role in the industry.

This is, indeed, the revolution we cannot ignore. So I’m introducing a new section in this newsletter to keep an eye on how AI is impacting the creative space.

The big news last week was Google ’s unveiling of Veo 3, the latest version of its generative video model, and it’s not just generating moving images anymore.

🎞 It now includes synchronized sound - music, dialogue, ambient noise. Veo 3 can now produce entire scenes from a single text prompt, complete with camera moves, realistic characters and audio.

Yes, this used to take a whole crew, months of work, and a substantial budget. And now it can be done in seconds.

According to Google, the tech is still in the research phase. But it’s already being tested by select artists and creators, and the results are mind-blowing.

While we are sleeping, Hollywood’s most forward-thinking filmmakers are embracing AI.

Case in point: Darren Aronofsky's new AI outfit Primordial Soup is behind “Ancestra”, a short film mixing live action with Veo3 images, which is set to premiere at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

The good news is, innovation can now come from anywhere.

Last month, Nigerian channel TVC introduced four new anchors in charge of delivering bulletins in Igbo, Pidgin, Yoruba, and Hausa. But none of them are real - they are all AI avatars.

💡With this thought-provoking move, TVC News aims to expand coverage in 5 major languages (an AI twin of real-life presenter Olamide Odekunle also handles the news in English) across Nigeria's six geopolitical zones, while maintaining editorial integrity through human oversight.

According to the network, each AI-generated segment undergoes rigorous vetting and includes digital watermarking to combat deepfakes and misinformation.

Is this the beginning of the end of language barriers in news and access to information?

😵💫 The speed at which our reality is turning into science fiction (or vice versa) is dizzying.

PODCAST

🎙 I am a massive consumer of podcasts (which makes my annual Spotify Wrapped very dull) and a regular guest on African business shows (listen to my latest interview on InsightsOut Africa’s Investment Readiness podcast).

So I was really interested to learn that Africa’s podcast space is maturing, thanks to this detailed analysis from Oritsejolomi Otomewo for Communiqué.

According to Otomewo, the ecosystem is evolving beyond independent creators into professionally structured networks.

🌐 Media brands like Pulse (with Terms and Conditions, Women Talk Sex, and Life in Naija) and OkayAfrica (with Afrobeats Intelligence, No Wahala, and To Be Clear), are now aggregating shows under a unified umbrella.

This approach enhances visibility, centralizes intellectual property, and makes larger advertising deals possible. It also ensures content continuity when hosts transition and scales impact across diverse listener demographics.

🗣️ We’re also seeing the emergence of new formats, besides the dominant conversational podcasts. Narrative-driven and documentary-style productions such as The Republic Podcast and 4th Republic are raising the bar with richer storytelling.

And as always, distribution matters as much as content. Reaching African listeners means meeting them where they already are: on social media and messaging platforms.

📱 A strategic approach to distribution means chopping up a long conversation into snackable clips and visual content optimized for socials. So it’s not a surprise that video formats drive more engagement and help spread the content virally.

There is still a lot of room for growth, but, as the title of the article says, “Maybe podcasts can scale in Africa after all?”

FASHION

Lagos-based VC firm Consonance released a welcome report prepared by Jadesola Campbell on Nigeria’s missed fashion opportunity entitled “Who is Dressing 220+ Million Nigerians?”.

The entire report is worth a read, but here’s what stood out for me:

🔍 Nigeria’s fashion market is massive but economically invisible.

Consumer spend reaches $2.5–6 billion annually, yet the sector contributes just 0.47% to GDP ($129M).

This means two things: consumers are spending massively on non-Nigerian fashion goods, and over 85% of fashion supply bypasses formal channels.

📦 Nigeria imports $6B+ in apparel and textiles (plus $1.2B in smuggled goods), while exports remain under $100M.

Local production accounts for less than 15% of the supply.

Just 5% of clothing is produced by formal Nigerian brands, and 9.9% through broader local production. Nearly 90% of “Ankara” consumed in Nigeria is imported, costing the country $3B.

This represents billions in lost value and missed industrialization potential.

🧵 The entire fashion value chain - from cotton farming to export - is fragmented.

Cotton processing is minimal and garment production is largely informal. Local brands must build infrastructure from scratch. Logistics and export support are critically underdeveloped.

💸 Self-financing dominates.

85% of the sector is informally funded and mostly made up of  micro-entrepreneurs relying on savings, co-operatives and family.

Only 15% of funding comes from formal finance (banks, DFIs, VCs).

🌍 The good news: global fashion lessons are transferable.

Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Turkey turned fashion into export engines using industrial clusters, export zones, and favorable textile policy.

Nigeria could emulate these strategies with local tailoring hubs, finishing tech, and export desks.

As the numbers show, the opportunity is enormous.

SPORTS BUSINESS

🤼 A few months ago, leading MMA operator Professional Fighters League (PFL) announced it had received the backing of Helios Sports & Entertainment Fund to expand to Africa with Cameroonian champion Francis Ngannou as its chairman.

Now, PFL Africa is ready to launch. The inaugural tournament is set for July in Cape Town, marking the first of four events planned for the year.

While the name of Ngannou is certainly bringing some credibility to the venture, I am more excited by the fact that PFL tapped media entrepreneur Elias Schulze as its Africa MD.

As co-founder of Kana TV, which revolutionized the landscape of Ethiopian television, Schulze already has a high-profile success behind him.

🔥In fact, Kana TV is one of the 12 African success stories I profiled in my recent report - keep an eye out for the case study coming out this week on my page.

Under Schulze’s leadership, PFL Africa is actively negotiating media rights deals with major pay-TV operators in East and West Africa, aiming to bring MMA into millions of homes.

These efforts complement existing partnerships with DAZN, Canal+, and MultiChoice.

PFL Africa also aims to explore mobile access and free-to-watch "people's fights" to make MMA more accessible on the continent and grow a new generation of fans.

MMA is just starting out in Africa, so another challenge will be to build a sustainable ecosystem for African fighters.

As exemplified by Ngannou’s life story, it is clear that African athletes have what it takes to compete globally. They just need someone to light that spark and show them the way.

CREATIVE SUCCESS STORIES

🤔 Have you downloaded my Proparco/CREA Fund study on African creative success stories yet?

TLDR - Prefer to get the gist in bite-size format on your phone? I got you.

I’ve been showcasing an individual case study every week with a visual (and downloadable!) carousel.

Click on the links below to read the following stories:

How Africori Conquered the African Music Scene

Chocolate City: From Campus Raves to Music Empire

Christie Brown: From Ghana to Global Fashion

How FilmHouse Transformed Nollywood

Coming up in June: Kana TV (Ethiopia), Landmark Center (Nigeria), Marodi TV (Senegal) and Mavin Records (Nigeria).

HUSTLE & FLOW #63: Success Stories; Music Touring; Fashion Tariffs; AI Panic; and more

Right off the digital press: HUSTLE & FLOW #63 is out 👋🏾

In this edition, I talk about success stories (the respectable and the taboo); the beginning of a continental music touring circuit; Morocco, the upcoming African sports capital; the challenges of exporting African fashion to Western markets; and more.

Share, subscribe, leave a note - it’s always great to read your comments and feedback 🙏

AFRICAN CREATIVE SUCCESS STORIES

You know it, and I know it: most studies commissioned by development institutions on the Creative Economy are useless.

Generating primary research data (meaning: asking questions to real people on the ground) is very long and very costly. So the vast majority of the studies produced in recent years have been based on the same basic information - just recycled, repurposed and repackaged.

The result: some vague document that gives a sense of an upward growth trajectory but no actionable insights.

But this one is different.

🧐 Over the past year, my team (Restless Global + PwC Nigeria + TFCC) spoke to the founders of 22 top creative companies in Africa and other emerging markets to identify and analyze their key drivers of success.

Conducted under Proparco’s CREA Fund initiative (part of the European CreatiFI programme), our study was designed to respond to a specific question we had received from investors:

What does success in the African Creative Industries look like?

The result:

🔥12 detailed case studies of successful creative companies in Africa, including Mavin Records, Triggerfish, AFRICORI, and Vivo Fashion Group

🔥10 detailed case studies of successful creative companies in other emerging markets such as Indonesia, Vietnam or Brazil

🔥The top 10 key drivers of success for creative companies in Africa today

🔥A practical assessment framework to help guide investors' and entrepreneurs' decision-making process

The study is available for download here, and you can watch the video of the introductory webinar here.

😴 For the lazy ones among you, over the next few months I’ll dig into each one of the Africa case studies here and in bite-size form. Stay tuned.

THE UNTOUCHABLE SECTORS OF THE CREATIVE ECONOMY

🫣 Among the success stories definitely NOT featured in the above study are those taking place in the sulfurous worlds of Betting and Adult Content.

These sub-sectors of the Creative Economy are racking up millions, and yet, no respectable investor wants to touch them.

🍑 While we’re all busy trying to turn our earnest music, film or fashion hustles into decent, bankable ventures, AllAccessFans - an African OnlyFans clone - quietly generated over $1 million in revenue in 2024, according to a recent article by Techpoint. Out of that juicy bounty, $748,000 was paid out to adult content creators.

🎰 Meanwhile, gambling sites like BetPawa, which processes over $130 million in bets annually across 12 African countries, or Bet9ja, which reportedly generates $80-100 million/year, boast margins that would make any startup founder green with envy.

Obviously, there are some very valid concerns over these industries’ potential for addiction and exploitation.

⛔️ And when I posted this on Linkedin, this is where most people stopped reading.

Then they went on to comment that these businesses were very bad indeed.

But that was not my point.

Part of thinking like an investor, but also like an entrepreneur, is being able to set moral considerations aside (for the sake of the MENTAL EXERCISE, people, calm down), to analyze why the Betting and Adult Content sectors work so well, when other similar businesses may not.

Contrary to any other creative business out there, Betting and Adult content platforms are not struggling to find customers nor to make them pay.

💡They succeed, because they tap into some of our deepest human impulses - the desire for (easy) money and the need for sex. THAT’s the real insight hiding among these piles of shameful cash.

But money and sex are not the only basic human needs that can be leveraged in business.

Others - less controversial - needs include survival and security, status, love and connection, autonomy, escape from pain, or personal growth.

🧠 This comes down to the psychological aspect of sales: by tapping into core human needs and drives, your product (or your marketing strategy) can resonate with your customers beneath the surface of logic, leading to better outcomes.

How is your product responding to these deep human needs? Asking yourself the question can only make your creative business better - try it.

MUSIC

Mavin Records, in partnership with Trace, ticketing platform HustleSasa, and WeOutside, has launched the East Side Tour, a new concert series aiming to build a viable touring circuit across the continent.

🎤 The inaugural “mini-tour”, which took place in April, included shows held in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, and featured rising Mavin acts Magixx, Bayanni, and Boy Spyce.

As Semafor Africa reports, Mavin’s move is part of a broader strategy to develop infrastructure and cultivate demand for touring within Africa.

🌟 While African music superstars are just as popular at home as they are globally, the reality is that they make the majority of their money from touring in Europe and North America.

On the continent, the scene is fragmented, and the absence of a proper “touring circuit” limits live show opportunities.

Mavin wants to change that by creating a pan-African network of regional concert stops, allowing its up-and-coming artists to tour profitably and consistently without having to look abroad.

💵 Another advantage of touring is that, contrary to the slow trickle of streaming revenue, it delivers immediate income through tickets, sponsorships, and merch sales.

Infrastructure challenges are real, but the timing could work in Mavin's favor. African governments are now investing more in creative economies. and initiatives like Move Afrika are helping to test whether local audiences are ready to pay for live music experiences.

If Mavin cracks this model, everyone wins.

SPORTS BUSINESS

🇲🇦 Morocco is fast emerging as the sports business capital of Africa.

In April, from the World Football Summit to AFCON U17 and the Basketball Africa League kick off, the who’s who of African and global sports met in Rabat.

⛹🏿 The Summit and GITEX attracted the sports business crowd, while some 200 international scouts roamed the AFCON U17 locker rooms, eager to spot the next African football star. The BAL expertly delivered a powerful combo of competition, entertainment, marketing and celebrity-power, demonstrating the effectiveness of a proper fan experience.

Overall, a win for Morocco, which is starting to attract global sports investment and talent. FIFA has already chosen Rabat for their Africa headquarters, for example.

MUST READ: #AfricaScores' partnered with the World Football Summit to publish the first Africa Football Outlook report, covering the 54 football ecosystems across Africa, from key competitions to football administration, infrastructure and corporate partnerships. You can download it here.

If you’ve been reading me for a while, you might know that I have this strange fascination with the world of traditional African combat sports.

🤼 This month, leading player AWFC (African Warriors Fighting Championship) made headlines again when it announced its new partnership with sports streaming platform DAZN.

Starting this June, DAZN will broadcast the AWFC's Dambe World Series to over 200 territories worldwide.

For those unfamiliar, Dambe is a traditional boxing sport with roots in northern Nigeria.

This partnership follows the success of AWFC's King of Dambe showcase in 2024, in which AWFC brought in the first white fighter (an intrepid wrestler from Birkenhead, UK) to take on the homegrown Dambe warriors (he lost the fight but not his life, which was a win in itself). The event drew 10,000 fans in Kano and millions more online.

FASHION

👚 African fashion's global runway is potentially facing a serious tariff challenge.

Indeed, the on-going global tariffs war does not only concern the US and China: it could significantly impact African fashion's access to its biggest export market as well.

Several African countries are targeted by Trump’s colorful tariffs list. Lesotho, which produces jeans for major American brands like Levi’s and Wrangler, was hit the hardest with a 50% tariff. Others include Madagascar (47%), Mauritius (40%), Botswana (37%), South Africa (30%) and Nigeria (14%). Everyone else will be subjected to a baseline tariff of 10%. If those come to pass, of course.

📜 Another concern is the future of the AGOA (African Growth and Opportunity Act), which has provided duty-free US access for thousands of African products since 2000. The Act expires in September 2025, and its renewal under current terms looks increasingly unlikely.

The stakes are high: Kenya exported $352 million in apparel to the US through AGOA in 2023, for example.

Up until now, the US had been the Western market of choice for many leading African fashion brands because of the complexity and cost involved in exporting to the EU.

😖 The EU does have a "duty-free" program, but it comes with such restrictive Rules of Origin requirements that few African fashion houses are able to meet them. And it doesn’t change the fact that EU countries still impose Import VAT (averaging 20%) on foreign goods including African fashion.

Either way you look at it, what should be a natural path of global expansion for African fashion brands - selling to the diaspora in Western markets - resembles an obstacle course.

Some designers are now looking at the Middle East as a more welcoming place.

In my view, this is a topic that the African Union should take on assertively. Negotiating preferential export terms for African creative products such as fashion is key to supporting the growth of robust creative industries on the continent.

FILM AND AI

You may have read the following post when I initially posted it a few weeks ago - it clearly hit a nerve so I’m sharing it again here.

A few days after the original post, I continued the conversation on the African Tech Roundup podcast with Andile Masuku. Together we dug deeper into the Good, the Bad and the Ugly that the AI revolution is bringing to African film:

✅ Independent creators are already producing professional-quality content with minimal resources

✅ Traditional production budgets and timelines are becoming increasingly unnecessary

✅ Technical specializations like camera operation and editing are being supplanted by creative vision

Listen to the full episode on:

Spotify: https://lnkd.in/dsSb239y

Apple Music: https://lnkd.in/dj7ZBUG3

SoundCloud: https://lnkd.in/duwySSic

As for the viral post, here it is:








African filmmakers: We need to talk about AI 👽.

⏱ While you’re spending hours in the edit suite, writing grant applications, or attending festivals, AI has already rewritten the script for the entire industry.

The disruption isn't coming at some point in the vague future - it's already here.

Yet, most filmmakers I meet on the continent are still treating AI as some distant Silicon Valley fantasy.

The most common answer I get when I ask them what their AI strategy is?

“At first I was scared, but now I use ChatGPT as my therapist.”

That’s not good enough guys.

🚀 In the time that it took me to wrap my head around this post, we’ve gone from AI picturing me as a Black woman with 6 fingers to ChatGPT 4o Image Generator going viral over its perfect one-try Studio Ghibli rip-offs.

This is what is happening to the film industry globally:

📝 Development can now be done in the blink of an eye: AI can produce storyboards, generate background scenes, and even draft scripts in seconds and at a fraction of traditional costs.

➡️ Your ideas are not ambitious enough (and this doesn’t mean that everyone should do superhero or epic films dear god)

📉 Production costs are getting slashed: It doesn’t make sense anymore to raise funding for production studios in Lagos, Cape Town or Marrakech when AI is enabling creators to generate a complex historical scene from their home computer.

➡️ Your production budgets and cost structures are outdated.

🗣️Language barriers are dissolving: Seamless dubbing is now possible in minutes. The good news is, this will help your content travel across borders. But…

➡️ Businesses providing dubbing, subtitling and voice acting are dead.

🖥 Post-production has undergone a quantum shift: What used to take a team of highly skilled people weeks or even months can now be done by AI that color-grades, edits, creates sounds and even suggests scene adjustments overnight.

➡️ Editors, VFX supervisors, but also animators and game designers, your workflow is obsolete. Your job as you define it today probably is as well.

AI is transforming African cinema before it even got its footing, and there is nothing we can do to stop this.

The question is whether African filmmakers will guide this process or whether it will be driven by outside forces.

The good news is that the same tools that major studios are using are freely available.

They can be the greatest equalizers.

But for this, you have to master them.

HUSTLE & FLOW #62: Content and Funding pipes, and how to build them right

🧐 Astute readers of HUSTLE & FLOW may have noticed that I skipped a couple editions in these early months of 2025.

I’ve been out and about, while churning out content in other formats: a keynote for Dakar Music Expo, a cool podcast episode with Ventures Valley, and interviews for Semafor and Escape Magazine.

But also, I’ve been thinking about how to refresh my writing, in order to keep delivering value to the ecosystem, while keeping me motivated enough to continue to spend my free time on it 😅

With the recent proliferation of African Creative and Sports industries coverage in the media and through specialized newsletters, there is less of a need for me to highlight news or showcase achievements from key players - others are now doing this very well.

Last month, HUSTLE & FLOW turned 5 years old 🤯, and I’d like to find new ways to have impact. I have some ideas, but I’d love to hear yours:

What would you like me to write or talk about?

What would you like this content to look like?

How would you like to consume it?

Tell me. I’m taking notes ✍️

In the meantime, you’ll find my thoughts about the past couple of months’ key topics below.

And if you don’t already, don’t forget to subscribe, so that you don’t get left out of what comes next.

BROADCASTING

📆 Canal+ has extended its MultiChoice takeover deadline by six months.

The merger timeline stretching to October 2025 isn't just regulatory red tape. It's six more months of uncertainty for an industry already navigating treacherous waters.

Here's what this delay actually means for African creators:

🤷🏽 Content commissioning decisions are likely stalled until the merger's fate is clear. That's potentially six more months of "we'll get back to you" for producers pitching new shows.

For context, Canal+ (with 9.69M subscribers in Africa/Asia but 26.93M worldwide) is attempting to swallow MultiChoice (with roughly 16M subscribers) to create the continent's undisputed pay-TV behemoth.

🕸️In the long run, with Canal+ aiming to quintuple subscribers to 100M globally, the merged entity would control an unprecedented share of Africa's limited distribution channels.

Less competition has rarely meant better deals for creators. Which takes us to…

CONTENT DISTRIBUTION

We have a distribution problem on the continent.

📤 In fact, distribution - not financing, not the skills gap - is the most pressing challenge stifling the growth of the African creative sector right now.

Because no distribution = no chance at monetization.

Film might be the clearest illustration of this issue:

With Amazon Prime and Netflix retreating from the African market, and the Canal+Multichoice merger further narrowing opportunities, who is going to buy premium African films?

Instead of investing your cash, sweat and tears into content that has nowhere to go, consider this:

1️⃣ Physical exhibition spaces matter: Nigeria's cinema growth shows the impact of theatrical releases on industry development. We need strategic investments in both traditional cinemas AND innovative community cinema projects that can reach underserved areas.

2️⃣ Mobile distribution remains unsolved: Previous attempts by telcos at video distribution have failed, but the opportunity remains massive. We need to try again.

3️⃣ YouTube remains king by default: Omoni Oboli’s latest film “Love in Every Word” was viewed by 12 million people in 7 days on the free platform. When premium filmmakers retreat to YouTube, it signals a market failure. But while we develop alternatives, there are also opportunities to better monetize this channel, starting by advocating for better CPMs.

4️⃣ Other global free platforms are untapped in Africa: Roku, Pluto TV, and Tubi have revolutionized ad-supported streaming elsewhere - their expansion to Africa could be transformative with the right partnerships.

5️⃣ Short-form isn't just for dance videos: Apps like ReelShort are gaining massive traction in Africa but are not priced for the local market and don’t yet showcase African stories. There is much to learn from this model.

6️⃣ Broadcasters remain powerful but underutilized: Major private broadcasters across Africa could be incentivized to increase local content investment through support programs such as tax rebates.

7️⃣ Too many local payment solutions: Netflix, Disney+, Amazon and others cite payment integration as a major growth bottleneck. We need to build products that consolidate the myriad of African payment options. Global platforms could make more of an effort too.

Distribution should be a priority for investors and operators - not an afterthought.

CREATOR ECONOMY

📜 Nigeria is moving forward with a bill requiring social media platforms to establish physical offices within the country, and this is a good thing.

Global platforms like Meta, TikTok, and the social network formerly known as Twitter are masters at avoiding local responsibility and taxes in-country by pretending they’re not even there.

Forcing them to establish offices locally is how governments can make sure their economies and citizens benefit from the business they help create.

💰Senator Ned Nwoko, who sponsored the bill, framed it this way: "This is not an attack on platforms, but a way of increasing revenue through the digital space."

The passed its second reading in the senate. If adopted, it would also require these platforms to maintain verifiable offices and employee records - bringing structure to a largely unregulated space, but also facilitating job creation, tech transfer, tax collection, and better content moderation aligned with local contexts.

😈 Of course, the devil is in the details. If this bill (which I haven’t read) is not well written, it could also end up making things worse.

MUSIC

Warner Music completed its acquisition of Africori, the independent powerhouse representing over 7,000 African artists, including Master KG of  "Jerusalema" fame.

This follows a strategic investment journey that began in 2020, progressed to a majority stake in 2022, and now culminates in complete ownership.

🏆 Founded in 2009, Africori’s growth picked up with WM’s investment. Africori artists have dominated South African radio charts for 11 consecutive weeks and currently occupy 6 of the top 10 spots on Apple Music South Africa.

⬆️ The two companies have already aligned systems to allow for "upstreaming" of African talent into Warner's global network - essentially creating a highway for continental stars to reach worldwide audiences. However, Africori will maintain its operational independence with Yoel Kenan continuing as CEO, reporting to Temi Adeniji of Warner Music Africa.

The news lands about a year after Universal Music Group's headline-making acquisition of Nigeria's Mavin Records. Who’s next?

🎵 IFPI released its 2025 Global Music Report, based on wholesale recorded music revenues (i.e. the money paid through to labels, distributors, and artists).

The worldwide numbers contain some good news for rights holders: subscription streaming revenues are up nearly 10% YoY, for example. But there are also some worrying elements. Ad-supported streaming is not pulling its weight, and the US market is recording a slump in performance.

🌍🚀 Meanwhile, Sub-Saharan Africa saw revenues surpass $100 million for the first time, and recorded a growth of +22.6% YoY - making it the second fastest growing region after MENA.

However, it still represents less than 2% of global music revenue.

💸 Although Afrobeats has propelled African music on the global stage, African artists and music operators on the continent are struggling to capture the value of their own creations.

In fact, Africa’s top artists like Burna Boy, Tems or Tyla make most of their revenue abroad - not at home.

Africa’s music industry’s challenges are well known. Instead of debating them one more time, let’s see how we can turn them into investment opportunities.

🌐 Fragmentation: The proliferation of small players in the market make it almost impossible for these businesses to achieve scale or attract structured investment.

Opportunity: Consolidate by merging players solving the same problem in a different country or region or players targeting a different segment of the value chain - or even both!

🎓 Skills Gap: The lack of formal education and training leads to technical but also business knowledge gaps that are holding the sector back.

Opportunity to develop specialized programs tackling topics like data analytics, digital marketing, distribution and AI integration applied to the music industry.

©️ Copyright Enforcement: The informal nature of many African economies makes the enforcement of copyright laws and the collection of royalties ineffective or even non-existent, impacting revenue streams for artists, and the attractiveness of the sector for investors.

Opportunity to leverage new technologies such as blockchain to modernize or even reinvent collective management organisations (CMOs) and processes.

🏗 Lack of venues: The lack of concert venues limits the potential for large-scale tours by established African and international stars, but also for emerging artists’ discovery and development.

Opportunity to invest in large-scale developments but also in small-to-medium multipurpose venues across the continent.

🎫 Weak support ecosystem: The lack of entertainment infrastructure also means that the rest of the live performance ecosystem is severely under-developed.

Opportunity for entrepreneurs to develop ancillary services such as event management solutions, ticketing platforms, or equipment rental companies.

FUNDRAISING STRATEGY

⚠️ If you run a Creative business, VC money is probably not right for you.

Here’s what many investors themselves won’t tell you:

When we think Creative Industries, we often think emerging businesses, and, in consequence, Venture Capital.

⛔️ But that's wrong.

The VC model is based on an expectation of exponential growth and oversize returns, that can only be achieved through the kind of rapid, massive scaling made possible by new technologies.

📈 When I say “model”, it is literally a business model - an excel spreadsheet that shows expected returns and that VC firms use to raise money from investors (VCs have investors too! They’re called LPs or Limited Partners).

VCs typically look for a return of at least 10x their initial investment over a period of about 5-10 years. If they bet on the wrong companies (including companies that grow, but too slowly), they won’t make money for their own investors, and they won’t be able to raise another fund - so eventually, they’ll be out of a job.

🏭 Meanwhile, more than 90% of Creative companies are not tech-centric. Rather, they are traditional SMEs - think of a music label, a production company or a fashion brand.

At best, they can be “tech-enabled”, but even that might not be enough to achieve the kind of fast and furious growth that works for VC.

💵 However, these businesses are usually profitable from the get-go and can thrive when given access to working capital or other kinds of debt.

They can also massively benefit from the hands-on operational expertise of business angels, and many are also well suited to a Private Equity approach, which can involve restructuring, streamlining costs and processes, and improving management.

Each business and each situation is specific. The key is understanding the true nature of the company and its best case scenario for success.

When I speak to an audience of Creative entrepreneurs, I like to use this slide to guide them through the process of self-assessment.

Once we start properly matching Creative sector companies with the type of investors that is right for them, we'll start seeing a lot more success.

HUSTLE & FLOW #61: 2024, the Year of the Reality Check

Me waving goodbye to 2024, according to AI.

A year ago, I wrote “2023 was the year where the Creative Industries officially landed on the radar of institutional investors. 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.”

🧐 Well, in hindsight, 2023 may have been the year of naive optimism. Twenty-twenty-four, in contrast, was the year of the reality check.

This doesn’t mean that we haven’t witnessed great success, reach, and talent in the African Creative and Sports space this year.

But (contrary to this image 👆 of me waving goodbye to 2024 according to AI) things are getting real.

In this last HUSTLE & FLOW edition of the year, I take a look at some of the hard lessons that 2024 taught us, but also at what has inspired us over the past 12 months.

👋 Read on, share, subscribe, enjoy the Holidays, and see you in 2025!

SHOW ME THE MONEY

🤔 In 2024, the surge of new funding announcements continued, but, as concrete results remained scarce, the industry’s response morphed from excitement to skepticism.

It would be easy to blame investors for this. Yes, they may have overreached by making these bold statements too early, but they have since recalibrated, working internally to gather knowledge and develop tools. The commitment remains.

On the industry’s side, however, a similar reckoning is yet to take place. The reality is that most creative enterprises are not yet investable - either because they lack a solid business model, a well-rounded team, or the ability to scale. 

🛠 Building up business expertise in the creative sector is an area where we should collectively put our efforts in 2025.

AFRICAN FILMS: THE DISTRIBUTION DILEMMA

Another harsh reality check of 2024 is the rug pull that Amazon Prime and Netflix performed on African filmmakers’ hopes and dreams.

⏸ With both global streamers hitting pause (or even rewind in some cases) on their investments in African Originals to refocus on a much less capital intensive licensing approach, African filmmakers are reminded once again of their precarious position on the world’s content chess board.

🌍 The real issue here is that an entire region’s film output cannot, should not, be dependent on the financial decisions of one or two foreign buyers for whom the region in question is not a priority.

(The fact that Netflix’s downsizing happened within weeks of the launch of two new African Film Funds is a serious case of bad timing for these funds.)

For a heartwarming example of what happens when the right content is put in front of the right audience in the right way, check out this video of the opening night for the Nigerian film “Everybody loves Jenifa” at the Odeon Greenwich in London, where the movie sold out 5 screens on December 20. This result was delivered by distribution veteran Moses Babatope and his team at the newly minted The Nile Group. 

🏗 Let’s hope that 2025 will bring a renewed focus on building out Africa’s own content distribution infrastructure, from cinema, to mobile, digital, and to the basket case that is the African broadcasting sector.

CONSOLIDATION MOVES

📺 Talking about the broadcasting sector, one of the biggest news of the year was the acquisition of Multichoice by France’s Canal+, which, once realized, will create a pan African Pay TV monopoly, uniting the previously separate English and French-speaking broadcast markets.

On one side, this means yet one less buyer for African producers, as the new combined entity plans to pool content budgets and teams.

🔀 On the other, it gives the new and boosted Canal+Multichoice and its platform Showmax a better chance at long-term survival, as the group navigates the painful but unavoidable transition to streaming.

The fact that two behemoths like Canal+ and Multichoice decided that they would be stronger together should remind us that for many businesses, including creative ones, scale is a key determinant of success. 

✊🏾 From content production and distribution, to music, to fashion, the African Creative sector is brimming with micro-enterprises essentially doing the same thing in their own little corner. The winners will be those who are smart enough to set their ego aside and come together, combining expertise and resources towards a greater goal.

2024’S BIGGEST SUCCESSES

Despite a challenging environment, 2024 also brought us some inspirational successes:

💫 Universal Music Group acquired a majority stake in Nigeria’s Mavin Records in the biggest deal that the African Creative Industries have seen so far. The story of how Don Jazzy, Tega Oghenejobo, and the Kupanda Capital team built and grew Mavin together is a serious case study of what it takes to achieve global success (spoiler alert: it’s not ego).

🎤 Still in the music space, 2024 was also the year where 22-year-old Tyla single handedly redefined African music to the world. Mark my words: Tyla will become to South Africa what Rihana is to Barbados - her country’s first global pop icon and very possibly, its first self-made creative billionaire. 

⚽️ Finally, the triumph that was the Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) in Ivory Coast showcased not only the exceptional talent present on the continent and the ability of African nations to host large-scale international events successfully, but also the true size of the African homegrown football audience and market. 

All eyes are on Morocco, the host of the 2025 AFCON which will kick off in December.

CAN THE CREATOR ECONOMY SAVE US ALL?

🤳🏾 A key bright spot this year was the emergence of the Creator Economy as a substantial growth sector for the continent.

With countries like Kenya (global #1!), South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana and Egypt leading the world in social media usage, the African Creator Economy is expected to grow from $3.08 billion in 2023 to $17.84 billion by 2030. 

💵 Already, tens if not hundreds of thousands of young Africans are making a living creating content online. Considering that the ecosystem remains nascent with few monetization options, this gives great hope for the future.

👽 However, the arrival of AI presents both opportunities and disruptions. These new tools have the potential to enhance content creation and engagement, but also threaten to outpace creators who lack access to them. 

As AI reshapes creative processes, the challenge will be ensuring that African creators can leverage these technologies to their advantage, rather than being sidelined by them.

MY WISH FOR 2025

The same as you: less talk and more action.

💪🏾2025 should be about execution. 

Happy Holidays!


* The cover image is DALL-E’s response to the following prompt: “Create an image of me waving goodbye to 2024, surrounded by African artists, musicians, filmmakers, and fashion designers.”