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.