“All those books that I read in my childhood, it’s all paying off. A day finally came when someone asked me questions about the things that I knew.”

Christine Mungai was in her third year studying biomedical science when a lecturer encouraged her to try out for her university’s team on the Celtel Africa Challenge, a televised general knowledge quiz for African university students. She made the team. They topped the Kenyan qualifiers, then competed against 155 teams from Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia and Malawi, and won.

That victory kickstarted Mungai’s path into journalism. In July 2026, she became editor-in-chief of The Continent, the weekly newspaper she joined as news editor in April 2025. Along the way, she has reported for The East African and Mail & Guardian Africa, spent a year as a Nieman Fellow, edited essays at The Elephant, and helped build Baraza Media Lab and the Africa Media Festival in Nairobi.

In her early years, she wanted to teach because she admired her teachers, but she was encouraged to pursue a better-paying profession. Science came easily, so she decided to become a doctor. She missed the university cutoff for medicine by one point and enrolled in biomedical science instead. She enjoyed it until her third year, when she had to undertake an industrial attachment training at a leading malaria research laboratory in Nairobi. Yet she struggled to get out of bed each morning. “I couldn’t understand why. I was supposed to be happy.”

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Around that time, Kwani, a Kenyan literary organisation, was holding a festival. Mungai loved its journals because they carried stories about the Nairobi she knew. She bought a student ticket, took a week off from the laboratory, and attended. At a beginner’s workshop, she listened as writers explained character, plot, structure, and suspense. She had written short stories before; one even appeared in the Daily Nation while she waited to enter university. But the festival made writing seem like something she could pursue seriously. That same year, the quiz show came. Together, the two experiences introduced her to possibilities beyond the career she had been preparing for.

A week after her final exam, the quiz-show producer invited the winning team to record promotional videos and asked about Mungai’s plans after school. She didn’t have one. The producer offered her a job writing questions for the next season. Mungai turned up without quite realising she had accepted a full-time position. “I was being paid to be on Google and Wikipedia. What a dream.” She stayed for about 18 months, until 2010, when the programme ended after its sponsor, Zain, was acquired by Airtel. Once again, she had no clear next step.

A few weeks later, a colleague’s former university classmate, then managing editor of The East African, called her to talk. Nick Wachira had watched her on the quiz show. He told her he had been trying to hire people who knew a lot about many things, and that journalism graduates didn’t always bring the depth of knowledge he wanted. Reporting and sourcing could be taught in six months, he said. The broader knowledge was harder to develop. “Either someone has that depth of knowledge, or they don’t. That’s the part that I can’t teach anyone.” Mungai accepted, at first, because she didn’t want to remain unemployed. But it didn’t take long for her to realise she had found the right work. “When I started working in the newsroom, I was like, yes, okay, I get it. This is it. I felt fulfilled, I felt challenged, I felt satisfied.”

The skills she developed as a science student also proved useful in the newsroom. She could work through lengthy reports quickly and was comfortable with numbers, which made her particularly useful when the newsroom needed to make sense of research. She was initially hired to help the newsroom avoid misreporting science, but she was also interested in concerts, music, and art. Politics, business, and economics followed. She did not want to limit herself to one beat. “Whatever I was curious about, I could actually write about it.”

After almost four years at The East African, she followed Charles Onyango-Obbo, an editor she had worked with on special projects, to Mail & Guardian Africa, the South African paper’s new Nairobi offshoot. Onyango-Obbo sent reporters on trips without a brief and expected them to return with stories. His only rule was that a piece had to be internally consistent. However speculative the argument, the data had to hold up. On one trip to Nigeria, Mungai noticed how many unfinished buildings stood in Abuja and wondered whether restrictions on moving naira out of the country had pushed people to park their capital in property. It shaped the journalist she wanted to be, one who starts with an observation and follows the evidence.

Soon after financial problems forced the Nairobi office to close, Mungai received a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard in 2017. The fellowship gave her time to consider what kind of journalist she wanted to become. She returned to Nairobi in 2018 with a stronger sense of direction and began freelancing. She also edited Reflections, a first-person essay section at The Elephant, where she worked with writers to tell personal stories that connected to larger political and economic questions. “Those were some of the best essays that I have ever published in my life.”

In 2019, her mentor Ory Okolloh, then at the funder Luminate, asked her to help create a media lab in Nairobi. The idea was to create a home for journalists alongside podcasters, filmmakers, cartoonists, and other storytellers, with space, training, and room to collaborate. “It’s what we now call the creative economy,” Mungai says. She had a young family and wanted stability, but she also saw a chance to explore what journalism could become. As founding curator, she helped shape the concept for Baraza Media Lab, which opened in January 2020.

In 2023, Baraza Media Lab launched the Africa Media Festival, which has become one of the continent’s most prominent media conferences. Mungai curated its programme for three editions. By late 2024, however, she wanted to return to a newsroom. She missed writing, editing, and publishing. Building institutions had been rewarding, but she felt she still had more reporting to do. “I had started feeling it inside, feeling like my work is not yet done.”

Her opportunity came when The Continent advertised for a news editor. Its co-founder, Sipho Kings, had been her Nieman classmate, and their organisations had crossed paths over the years. Mungai sent him a message the day before applications closed. She joined in April 2025, after curating one final Africa Media Festival.

The newspaper’s weekly production cycle gave her something she had missed while working on longer-term projects: a clear sense of completion. “The work is finite. It has a beginning, and it has an end. That feeling of completion is such an amazing dopamine hit on a Friday. I live for this cover when I see it.” When editor-in-chief Lydia Namubiru prepared to leave, she asked Mungai to succeed her. They worked through a handover, and Mungai took over in July 2026. She has also just turned 40 and says it has taken her years to feel fully like herself. When colleagues at The Continent scored each other in a team exercise, they ranked her highest for being “confident and relaxed.” It surprised her, but it fits where she is now.

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The Continent was five years old when Mungai joined. She admires the way it has grown while holding on to its editorial commitments. “I really admire spaces that are guided by values and principles, and people who are willing to lose. And by lose, I mean going against the grain of what is popular or what is trending for the sake of what you have seen and what you’re convicted about.”

Now she is responsible for helping the paper move into its next phase. “We’re getting out of the phase of being a startup and being more of an established publication. So there’s some growth work to do there.”

For her, one of the biggest questions is how to balance what already works with the need to try new things. Mungai wants The Continent to do both. “Sometimes it’s like we need to do more with less. We need better systems and processes, and we need to be more efficient. But in some other ways, it’s like we need to not lose sight of the innovation, and be ready to innovate our way, even in a way that could disrupt our own thing.”

Mungai knows what happens to institutions that stop moving. She points to Kodak, which built an early digital camera and then shelved it because it threatened the film business. “I don’t want us to be in a Kodak moment.” Beyond survival, she wants The Continent to become Africa’s paper of record. Getting there means growing subscribers, strengthening the team, getting editorial priorities right, and building a business that can pay for all of it.

“I don’t feel like I’m starting this role to just do more of the same, like my job is just to tread water and keep us afloat. I feel like we have to level up. And as part of the leadership of this organisation, I am part of that levelling up.”

Asked whether she would change anything about the winding route that brought her here, she says no, except perhaps to have been unapologetic about who she is sooner. Besides, she is more interested in what’s ahead: stories to report, investigations to publish, podcast episodes to record. “For me, that stuff is in the future.”

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1. Creative tech meets VC

Last week, Aries Media Ventures announced its first venture capital fund to invest in early-stage media technology startups. The fund launched in Africa, where it made its first three investments: Aktivate, a creator marketing platform; HustleSasa, an events commerce platform; and Book Mahali, a venue-booking and hospitality platform. Aries’s focus is on technology supporting industries such as film, music, television, gaming, sports and live entertainment, rather than financing content directly.

For Alykhan Kaba, Aries’s founding general partner, the fund culminates an ambition that began more than two decades ago. Kaba has spent much of his career working at some of the world’s largest entertainment companies, including Live Nation, Activision Blizzard, Entertainment One, and NBCUniversal. During those years, he became increasingly interested in opportunities outside the industry’s established markets, particularly in regions that global entertainment companies had paid little attention to.

With Aries, Kaba bets that his experience in more developed entertainment markets can help emerging market startups access the capital, industry knowledge, and commercial relationships they need to grow. He believes a gap exists between African entrepreneurs building promising media technology businesses and investors who understand how these businesses operate. Aries’s model also depends on global entertainment companies eventually buying the businesses it backs.

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2. The long walk

Growing up, Alykhan Kaba was fascinated by entertainment. He loved watching television shows, movies, and cartoons; playing video games; and reading magazines. He imagined spending his life working in the industry, but struggled to reconcile that ambition with his desire to do something meaningful. Like many children raised in immigrant households, he grew up around the expectation that a successful career meant becoming a doctor, lawyer or engineer. Entertainment, by comparison, seemed frivolous.

His understanding of the industry’s importance began to change after the September 11 attacks in 2001. Kaba was 11 years old and growing up in a Muslim household in the United States. In the years that followed, he noticed how the news portrayed Muslim beliefs and attitudes towards issues such as gender equality and religion, often in ways that differed from his own experiences. It made him realise how much influence the media had over how people understood other cultures and communities, and how those narratives could have even greater consequences in less developed countries.

Kaba became interested in how media could contribute positively to society, particularly in developing countries. He wanted to work at the world’s leading entertainment companies, learn how the industry operated, and eventually apply that knowledge in underserved markets. “I want to spend the rest of my career learning as much as I can about the entertainment industry from the best companies in the world,” he recalled thinking, with the eventual goal of helping “develop the media ecosystem in parts of the world that are undercapitalised and underserved.”

That interest eventually took him to Afghanistan, where he interned at Roshan, a telecommunications company that produced programmes such as Afghan Star, a televised singing competition, and an Afghan adaptation of Sesame Street. For Kaba, the experience demonstrated how entertainment could challenge social conventions, create economic opportunities and contribute to society. After beginning his professional career at McKinsey, Kaba moved into corporate strategy roles at Live Nation, Activision Blizzard, and Entertainment One. Until recently, he served as vice president of content strategy at NBCUniversal, where his team evaluated and planned unscripted television programmes, including Love Island, The Traitors and The Real Housewives franchise.

But while working at these companies, Kaba noticed that their international strategies focused largely on the United States and Western Europe. They often grouped markets outside these regions into a broad category, the rest of the world, with little attention to their individual characteristics and opportunities. He realised the role he had imagined for himself, helping major entertainment companies expand into emerging markets, didn’t exist as he had hoped.

Around 2021, Kaba began using his holidays to travel to countries including India, Tanzania, Kenya, Tajikistan, and Turkey. Before each trip, he contacted entrepreneurs building promising businesses in the creative industries but struggling to attract investment. Local venture capital firms largely prioritised sectors such as fintech, agriculture, and healthcare, while international media investors often lacked the knowledge and relationships needed to invest in emerging markets. In 2023, he launched Aries Media Project, a professional network connecting these entrepreneurs with investors, executives, and industry experts in global entertainment centres such as Los Angeles, New York, and London. Drawing on relationships from his career, he introduced founders to people at major media companies who could advise them on their businesses.* Over three years, the network grew to more than 1,000 entrepreneurs across over 40 countries, roughly half of whom were based in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Over time, Kaba began to see that the relationships he had built through Aries Media Project could serve a larger purpose. Beyond connecting founders with industry experts, he believed his experience and understanding of emerging markets put him in a position to identify and invest in promising businesses himself. “If you are experienced enough in the industry and you are culturally aware enough to know what questions to ask and how to navigate the political and cultural landscape, you can actually make early bets with a relatively high level of conviction,” he told Communiqué.

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3. Aries’s case for creative tech

Aries is targeting $5 million for its first fund. Kaba has not disclosed how much it has raised, though the fund has already made three investments. It plans to invest in 40 to 50 startups over four years, writing initial cheques of up to $50,000 and up to $150,000 in follow-on investments for companies that show strong growth.

Much of the institutional financing that has entered Africa’s creative industries has gone into IP or creative infrastructure. In Nigeria, MBO Capital has primarily financed film productions, while Volition Capital established its VEMA investment pool to back The Black Book, Netflix’s most-watched Nollywood film. CANEX Creations Inc., Afreximbank’s creative industry investment vehicle, has focused on commercialising African intellectual property while also supporting businesses addressing gaps in the industry’s infrastructure. But Aries is taking a different approach. Rather than investing directly in creative intellectual property or physical infrastructure, Aries focuses on the technology that supports the industry. Kaba believes these businesses are better suited to venture capital outcomes.

It is the right match. Investments in films, music catalogues, and other intellectual property can be profitable, but their returns don’t always meet venture capital investors’ expectations. Those investments often suit private equity or other financing arrangements better. A venture capital fund, by contrast, needs some portfolio companies to grow enough to return 50 or even 100 times the original investment.

For Aries, the numbers are demanding. A $50,000 cheque into a company valued at around $2.5 million buys roughly 2% of it. After two or three more funding rounds, that stake could fall to about 1%. Follow-on investments of up to $150,000 might double it in Aries’s best performers. Even then, a $100 million acquisition would return about $2 million, less than half the fund’s $5 million target.

That puts the weight of the thesis on acquisitions. Kaba points to HustleSasa, the Kenyan events commerce platform, as an example. Having worked at Live Nation, he believes the company’s ticketing and events technology resembles the kinds of businesses the global entertainment giant could acquire as it expands into new markets, and at a price that could give the fund outsized returns.

Beyond providing capital, Aries intends to support its portfolio companies through Kaba’s relationships across the global entertainment industry by connecting founders with executives at international media companies, offering advice on product development and expansion, and helping them understand the commercial opportunities available in larger markets. “I’ll never be the person to write you the biggest cheque,” Kaba told Communiqué, “but I can be a strategic investor in a way that I think other investors may not be able to.”

Kaba spent a decade waiting for the industry’s giants to take the road into markets like Lagos and Nairobi. They didn’t. Aries bets it can support the businesses those giants will one day want to acquire. The thesis is sound, but the arithmetic is brutal. At $50,000 a cheque, Aries needs a handful of its companies to sell for hundreds of millions of dollars in an industry that has produced very few exits of that size. Kaba’s network can open doors at Live Nation and NBCUniversal. But time will tell whether anyone on the other side of those doors is ready to pay for an acquisition worth waiting for.

*Disclosure: Communiqué has previously benefited from introductions made through the Aries Media Project network. Communiqué has no financial relationship with Aries Media Ventures.

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“They don’t understand our skin tone, they don’t understand our hair texture, they don’t understand how we walk, how we talk. So when you try to create something in AI, it’s off.”

Jason Harvey is describing a problem with the artificial intelligence tools increasingly used to create animation. For him, the issue is not simply whether the technology can generate images quickly, but whether those images accurately reflect the people and cultures they are supposed to represent.

After spending seven years helping build BET+, the streaming service associated with one of America’s most prominent Black media brands, Harvey is turning his attention to this problem. His new venture, Underscore Animation, is an AI-native animation platform designed to help creators produce culturally authentic stories and make animation more accessible. The ambition is not only to give more people the tools to create, but also to address the gaps in the datasets that shape how artificial intelligence generates characters and stories.

Harvey’s interest in this problem is personal, shaped by his experience as a father and his frustration with how few animated stories allow Black children to see themselves in a range of roles. But his path to building a company at the intersection of animation and AI began long before he entered entertainment.

Harvey grew up in Los Angeles below the poverty line, raised by a single mother. When he was 15, his mother became addicted to drugs, and he had to leave home. He slept on friends’ couches before one offered him a room where he could stay until he finished high school. He remained there for about two and a half years.

Harvey did not have a fixed career plan, but he had always set his sights on working in the entertainment industry. Growing up in Los Angeles, close to Hollywood, he was surrounded by friends working in the business, both in front of and behind the camera. He was also drawn to its creative possibilities. “A lot of my friends were in entertainment. Some were in front of the camera; others were behind it. I’m very creative.” But wanting to work in entertainment did not mean he knew how to get there.

What he knew was that he could communicate with people from different backgrounds, cultures, and socioeconomic classes. “I could talk to anybody anytime, and I was very convincing.” Having to fend for himself meant he unintentionally developed great public-speaking skills and the ability to get his point across to any audience. A high school teacher encouraged him to consider college, and he eventually won a scholarship to the University of Southern California, where he studied business and marketing.

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After graduating, he was not ready to settle into an office job. He had been called in for desk-job interviews but wasn’t convinced this was the direction he wanted to take. Then he accompanied a friend to the Peace Corps office. “We got there, and I started reading these pamphlets, and I’m like, oh, this is kind of interesting. I could travel.”

Travel was a major attraction. Harvey’s background meant he barely had the chance to fly. The Peace Corps offered an opportunity to see more of the world while working on business development. He was accepted into the programme and sent to Ecuador, where he worked on micro-lending and community banking initiatives, including helping women establish businesses. He stayed for more than two years, learned Spanish and later picked up Portuguese.

The experience broadened his perspective, but it wasn’t exactly helpful when he returned to America and was looking for a job. “Corporations weren’t valuing my experience in the Peace Corps as much as they should have.” He already had about $120,000 in student debt and couldn’t afford the low-paid entry-level jobs that might have helped him. He decided to pursue a master’s in business administration.

After his MBA, he joined Ford Motor Company’s marketing leadership programme. His work spanned brand marketing, content and incentive marketing, and regional marketing and sales. He later worked at an advertising agency, Google, and eBay, gaining experience in marketing, technology, and business development. Along the way, he helped launch several entertainment startups. One of these ventures was Active Video, an early attempt to deliver content directly to television set-top boxes before streaming devices such as Roku became commonplace. The company ran out of runway because the market and funding were not ready. He also co-founded a music and radio streaming service called Eighbox that struggled to raise enough money to compete. The ventures ultimately failed, but they prepared him for his later work at BET+.

The BET network originally recruited him as a consultant to help work out the technology and organisational structure needed to build a direct-to-consumer streaming service. “They said, hey, we’ve never done this D2C thing before. It’s different than cable. I was like, it sure is. So they brought me in to consult about how we build a technology stack.”

That work led to BET+, a streaming service that was devoted primarily to distributing content that elevated Black culture. It also fulfilled his secret long-running desire to get into the entertainment industry. “It took me 20-some odd years to get to entertainment, but when it did, it was the right place, right time.”

Building BET+ wasn’t easy. One central challenge was understanding the audience. BET had long spoken about representation, but Harvey believed the business needed better data on who was watching its content. “I think the biggest challenge for us was, you have this legacy business that was a company that wanted to talk about representation and wanted to talk about black content, but didn’t understand that you needed to build a data infrastructure to do that. I wanted to understand the exact numbers before I printed something. I wanted to bring all this data so that we had signals on every piece of information that we could possibly have. Who’s watching when they dropped off, what brought them in, what brought them back? Nobody had ever built an audience platform like this for our particular audience in the past.”

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When Paramount wanted BET+ to use shared technology to reduce costs, he pushed to maintain a separate data infrastructure. That decision gave the service access to first-party audience data, including 35 million unique users and more than two billion hours viewed. The team could track how subscribers found the platform, how content performed and how much it cost to acquire and retain customers. The data also changed how the business approached marketing. Instead of treating marketing primarily as a cost centre, the team used it to drive revenue. They leveraged the data to make informed decisions about marketing spend, content greenlighting, churn prediction, and customer retention through targeted communications.

Paramount’s decision to consolidate BET+ into Paramount+ marked a change in the business, but Harvey says he is proud of what the team built. He points to BET+ shows becoming some of the most-watched content on Paramount+ and does not want to speculate on the reasons behind the decision. By then, he was already thinking about what came next.

Animation had been on his mind partly because of his four children. He struggled to find stories where Black children could see themselves not just as sidekicks, but as heroes, villains, doctors, nurses, and lawyers. He believes those possibilities need to be visible early in life. In 2015, he wrote a children’s book about entrepreneurship to show young readers how they can make an impact. “If you can get young kids in the community starting their own businesses, that can change an entire community. So I wanted to let people know that, especially young kids and their parents, that, hey, you’re never too young to start a business. You’re never too young to make an impact.” He plans to develop the book into an animated series.

With Underscore Animation, he has a platform to pursue these interests. The platform is intended to serve different kinds of creators. Someone with no drawing experience could pay about $10 a month to start creating animated work, while professional animators could collaborate with engineers to fine-tune the AI models that power the platform. Harvey believes the technology could significantly reduce studios’ production costs. For example, a series that might traditionally cost $20 million to produce could potentially be made for $8 million.

But access to the tools is only one part of his plan. Harvey believes the models themselves need to better reflect the people and cultures whose stories they tell. He argues that much of the data used to train AI systems reflects Western, English-speaking and urban perspectives, leaving other experiences underrepresented. As a result, the outputs can misrepresent skin tones, hair textures, speech, and movement. He wants Underscore to help address that gap while building opportunities for creators in Africa. He wants to see African countries become animation hubs alongside established centres such as the Philippines, Thailand, and Japan.

As with his career so far, he wants to turn work he cares about into something bigger than a job. “Each step I’m getting closer and closer to having what’s not even a job anymore. Because if you’re working at something that you’re passionate about and love, it’s not a job.”

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1. Dave sets the stage

Over the weekend, British-Nigerian rapper Dave ended his The Boy Who Played the Harp tour with two shows in Lagos. The concerts, held on October 16 and 17 at the Wole Soyinka Centre for Arts and Culture, also featured appearances from Burna Boy, Zaylevelten, and Oxlade. The tour made 39 stops across Europe, North America, and Australia before arriving in Africa, where Dave first performed in Pretoria and Cape Town before wrapping up in Lagos. Live Nation presented the Nigerian leg of the tour alongside Nigerian concert promoter MASSIVE Dynamics, offering a useful glimpse into Live Nation’s approach to the African market.

Live Nation has operated on the continent for years. Its strongest presence is in South Africa, where its subsidiary Big Concerts has spent decades promoting international tours. The company has also produced global tours for African artists including Burna Boy, Wizkid, and Davido. But over the past few years, its activity on the continent has become more structured.

In June, Live Nation appointed Daniel Noake as Vice President of Market Development for Sub-Saharan Africa, giving the company dedicated leadership for the region. “We’ve been working in Africa for a while now,” Noake told Communiqué. “The only change is that we’ve just put dedicated leadership now around venues, sponsorship, ticketing, and touring.”

The appointment suggests that Live Nation is thinking beyond individual concerts. It is trying to build the infrastructure and relationships that could make more African cities regular stops on global tours, while using the same network to help African artists reach audiences elsewhere. The question is whether it can build that kind of business across African markets that remain very different in their infrastructure, economics, and readiness for large-scale touring. The company has faced this challenge elsewhere. Across Latin America and Asia, Live Nation expanded gradually, working with local promoters, investing in ticketing and venues, and building country-level operations over time. Africa is much earlier in that process, but Live Nation is beginning to lay the groundwork.

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2. A familiar playbook

By the mid-2010s, Live Nation had begun a more visible push into markets beyond its established businesses in the United States and Europe. Africa was part of that expansion. In 2016, the company acquired a controlling stake in South African promoter Big Concerts. The deal followed the same pattern Live Nation has used elsewhere. Rather than enter a market and immediately build a new operation from scratch, it often starts by working with an existing local promoter, then increases its involvement over time.

The reason is practical. Concert promotion depends heavily on local knowledge. Promoters need to know which venues work, which artists can sell tickets, what audiences will pay, which suppliers to trust, and how to navigate relationships with regulators, sponsors, and security providers. Live Nation provides relationships with international artists, access to capital, and experience moving shows across markets, while the local operator brings on-the-ground knowledge of how the business works.

In several countries, Live Nation has started with a partnership before moving to deeper ownership. In Japan, it formed a joint venture with promoter Creativeman in 2012 and bought out its partner two years later. In Thailand, it formed a joint venture with BEC-Tero in 2015 before acquiring its concerts and entertainment division in 2022. In the Philippines, it worked with promoter MMI for years before acquiring the company in 2022. In each case, existing management remained important to the business.

Latin America shows the same pattern, but on a larger scale. In 2014, Live Nation acquired a controlling stake in C3, the American promoter that owned the popular Latam music festival Lollapalooza. In Mexico, Live Nation bought a 51% stake in OCESA in 2021 and increased it to 75% in 2025. In Argentina, its 2018 acquisition of a majority stake in DF Entertainment gave it exposure to several parts of the business at once. DF was already involved in concert promotion, festivals, ticketing and held equity in local venues. Live Nation later expanded its venue interests further, taking a majority stake in Movistar Arena Buenos Aires in 2026.

That sequence is important. Live Nation does not always enter a market with ticketing, venues, sponsorship, and promotion already in place. Those parts often come in at different stages. In Asia, for instance, Live Nation had already spent years building concert operations before Ticketmaster made a bigger push into the region in 2020. Venues have tended to come later, once the company has enough evidence that a market can support a regular flow of events.

The same structure can also help move local artists outward. In Japan and Thailand, Live Nation’s local operations eventually became useful not only for bringing in foreign acts, but for taking local acts into other markets. More recently, it has used a similar approach in Latin America, acquiring a majority stake in Dale Play Live to strengthen its ability to promote local and regional artists.

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3. Replicating the playbook in Africa

Big Concerts gave Live Nation its first substantial base in Africa. Since the 2016 acquisition, the South African promoter has continued to bring major international acts to the country, including J. Cole, Ed Sheeran, Imagine Dragons, and Doja Cat. Since then, Live Nation has begun adding other parts of the live entertainment business around that base.

Ticketing is one example. In 2024, Ticketmaster acquired Cape Town-based Quicket, which already operated in Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Zambia, and Botswana. After the deal, Quicket remained a standalone business, giving Live Nation a ticketing foothold in markets where its concert promotion business was much less developed.

But Noake says the company does not expect the South African model to transfer neatly elsewhere. Instead, it is assessing countries individually and deciding which part of the business makes sense in each one. “It’s very much a deep market assessment of where we can add real value and support existing local businesses and the live economy through some of the skills and experience and resources that we have internally,” Noake told Communiqué. “And how is that going to create a long-term platform for not just us, but for the entire live music economy within a country?”

That has meant working with different partners for different purposes. In 2021, Live Nation signed a co-promotion agreement with Nigerian promoter Duke Concept, which had already built a business touring African artists including Burna Boy, Wizkid, and Davido in North America. Under the arrangement, Duke Concept promotes independently and handles production and logistics, while Live Nation provides operational support and access to its venue network. The partnership helped put on Burnaboy’s One Night in Space at Madison Square Garden and Davido’s We rise by lifting others tour before ending in 2023.

Live Nation is also beginning to add venues to its African blueprint. In 2025, it opened the 10,500-capacity Dome in Johannesburg in partnership with Stadium Management South Africa and Gearhouse South Africa. As part of the partnership, Live Nation brought in international experts to train the venue’s staff. “It’s pointless having a fantastic piece of infrastructure if you don’t have a top-end venue operations team,” Noake told Communiqué. “So we brought some of our global experts to provide training around crowd management, security, and production.” In Lagos, Live Nation is also one of several partners, alongside Persianas Group, the Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority, and Oak View Group, developing a 12,000-capacity arena that is expected to become operational in Q4 2028.

The live entertainment sector is heating up across the continent. Governments and private investors are funding new arenas to attract concerts, sports, and other large events. In Tanzania, President Samia Suluhu Hassan announced plans in 2025 for a 15,000-capacity indoor arena in Dar es Salaam. In Kenya, Zaria Group is developing a 10,000-capacity arena as part of the Nairobi Railway City project. Nigeria has its own growing pipeline. Alongside the 12,000-capacity Lagos Arena, Landmark Group has announced plans for a 20,000-capacity Dream Theatre Entertainment Centre in Lagos.

As more of these projects come onstream, Africa could have considerably more capacity to host large international tours and sporting events. More promoters, venue operators, and investors will also look for events capable of filling those rooms. But large arenas solve only one part of the problem.

For a live entertainment market to develop sustainably, artists also need places to perform before they can sell 10,000 or 20,000 tickets. That means clubs, theatres, and mid-sized venues where local acts can build audiences and promoters can take smaller risks. “We want to grow local artists from a thousand-cap venue, club venues, maybe even smaller, into 5,000-cap venues, then 10 to 12,000-seater arenas and then onwards,” Noake told Communiqué.

That may ultimately be the harder part of Live Nation’s African expansion. The company has already found a base in South Africa, added ticketing, begun working with promoters across different markets and joined new venue projects. But building a touring circuit goes beyond a handful of large arenas. It will require enough venues, promoters, and audiences at different levels and in different cities to allow artists to move from one stage to the next, and enough African cities where tours can stop repeatedly. For Live Nation, the long game in Africa will depend on whether those individual markets can eventually connect.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to clarify that Live Nation’s partnership with MASSIVE Dynamics covered only Dave’s two Lagos shows. It also corrects the description of Live Nation’s former relationship with Duke Concept, which was a non-exclusive co-promotion agreement that ended in 2023, and clarifies that Live Nation already had exposure to venue ownership in Argentina through DF Entertainment before its 2026 investment in Movistar Arena Buenos Aires.

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“I have insane ambitions. I feel like everybody says they have serious ambitions, but if you can see what’s in my notes and in my head, it’s like, yeah, actually crazy. There’s no way this can happen.”

Demilade Ademuson knows how improbable his ambitions sound. He’s building GEMS, an investment company that owns businesses and intellectual property across Africa’s media, entertainment, gaming and sports industries. His model is Berkshire Hathaway, the American conglomerate Warren Buffett built. For now, GEMS makes minority investments and advises creative businesses on raising money. But Ademuson imagines a future in which it acquires companies, owns valuable entertainment assets and uses the income they generate to buy even more.

One of the media properties he owns is Daily Bread. Inspired by the American business newsletter Morning Brew, Daily Bread tells the stories of Nigerian companies and entrepreneurs, using newsletters, videos and humour to help readers understand how businesses operate and how the economy works. Ademuson runs the publication alongside his full-time job at Netflix.

It is a lot for one person to take on, especially someone who has spent much of his career trying to figure out where he belongs. Before Netflix, Daily Bread and GEMS, Ademuson had tried building a fashion business, running a tech startup and becoming a filmmaker. Most of these ventures failed. By 2019, he was unemployed, struggling with depression and questioning the decisions that had brought him there. His ambition to build GEMS is not entirely new. At thirteen, Ademuson had already decided that he wanted to become an investor like Warren Buffett.

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Growing up in Ikeja, Lagos, Ademuson was academically gifted. But he also had a creative side. He staged one-man plays for his mother, built imaginary scenes using stones and played basketball well enough to nearly represent Nigeria at the under-17 level. At the time, people rarely treated academics and creativity as equal pursuits. His academic abilities drew the most attention, while he explored his interest in the arts privately. “I always felt like there were two sides of myself,” he recalls.

His fascination with business began when an uncle gave him a comic book about Warren Buffett. The uncle also taught him to read the stock market pages of newspapers. Ademuson began collecting newspapers daily, studying share prices movements. When the now-defunct Oceanic Bank was preparing for an IPO, he presented his father with an investment proposal, supported by thirty newspaper cutouts. He explained the bank’s prospects and why buying its shares made sense. His father agreed and bought small amounts for him and other family members. Ademuson had found his calling. He wanted to become an investment banker, make a fortune and return to Nigeria to invest in its development. At thirteen, he believed wealth offered a better route to changing society than politics or activism. But his plans changed after secondary school.

Ademuson moved to the United Kingdom for his A levels, and subsequently studied economics at the University of Birmingham. Several of his closest friends gained admission to more prestigious universities, while his applications to Cambridge and the London School of Economics were unsuccessful. For someone accustomed to academic recognition, the experience was unsettling. He felt he was falling behind and began looking for another way to distinguish himself.

Technology offered Ademuson an alternative route to achievement. With a friend, he started Malakh&Sco, an online fashion retailer selling Nigerian designer clothing in Britain. He envisioned a site where people could browse clothes with friends, try outfits on digitally and recreate the social experience of shopping in a physical store. Ademuson believed the world would buy Nigerian fashion if more people could see it. “I’ve always been a super patriot. I’m like, ‘Nigeria is the coolest thing.’ So I was like, ‘If only the world could see what we’re making, they would definitely buy it.’” But Ademuson and his friend learnt that exposure was not enough. The economics had to align too. Importing the dresses and running the business made them expensive for buyers with little exposure to the brands. Eventually, they shut it down. By then, he had abandoned his childhood dream of investment banking. The global financial crisis had made the industry lose its allure.

He returned to Nigeria for his compulsory national service, after which he joined a friend to build Fibre, a shared-housing platform that lets young people rent monthly rather than shoulder the large upfront rent costs typical of Nigeria’s housing market. The company raised venture capital, acquired buildings and attracted thousands of prospective tenants. But running Fibre proved far more difficult than attracting customers. Before the company launched, Ademuson’s uncle warned that its polished, Airbnb-inspired website would create expectations the business could struggle to meet. Landlords, electricity providers and other parts of Nigeria’s housing system would undermine the premium experience it promised.

Ademuson ignored the advice, but his uncle was right. Transformers failed, tenants complained, and buildings developed problems outside the company’s control. Some customers sued Fibre. On one occasion, security officers entered one of its shared apartments looking for a tenant suspected of internet fraud. As the co-founder responsible for product and customer experience, Ademuson had to deal with the complaints. Eventually, he became so exhausted that the prospect of acquiring another building filled him with dread. “At some point, I actually didn’t want the business to progress because I was already anticipating the wahala that’s going to come on my plate.”

He eventually left Fibre, but the decision troubled him. His co-founder was also a close friend, and walking away meant leaving him to deal with the problems they had created together. For a long time, Ademuson felt he had failed him. With his enthusiasm for technology fading, he decided to pursue the creative interests he had carried since childhood. He took an online filmmaking course at New York University, wrote a screenplay, submitted work to Sundance and produced a fifteen-minute short film about depression, It Is Not Yet My Turn Today. He also helped establish Irin Journal, a culture magazine intended to document African cities through their history and contemporary creative life. But these projects offered neither a stable income nor a clear career direction.

By 2019, the gap between the life Ademuson had imagined and the one he was living had become too difficult to ignore. Ten years earlier, he had been a gifted teenager preparing for a career in finance. Now he had left a startup and had no steady employment. Meanwhile, the friends he had once compared himself with were progressing in their careers. On New Year’s Eve in 2019, feeling overwhelmed, he wrote a note to God asking for a chance to pause and reconsider his life. 2020 gave him that opportunity.

In early 2020, he talked his way into a job at Bolanle Austin-Peters’s BAP Productions to write film scripts. He started out editing scripts, but his previous technology experience quickly became useful. He helped improve the company’s operations, introduced digital tools and supported the launch of its YouTube channel. During that period, Austin-Peters told him in a conversation that she didn’t think he belonged on the creative side of the film industry. She encouraged him to build an entertainment company rather than become a writer or director. Then his uncle, the same one who gave him the Buffett comic, also echoed similar advice. Ademuson had told him about the film work, and the conversation went almost the same way. “He said, ‘This is interesting, but why are you trying to be the talent when everything I know about you is strategy? Why don’t you go to the business side?’”

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He started applying for business and strategy roles at entertainment companies. A promising Disney+ opportunity in New York ended abruptly when the company learnt he was Nigerian. Another application to Netflix in Amsterdam ended unsuccessfully after numerous interviews. Six months later, he received an unexpected LinkedIn message about another Netflix opportunity. The company had retained his details from the earlier interviews. This time, he got the job. At Netflix, Ademuson initially joined Creative Labs, where he analysed how images, trailers and other promotional materials influenced what subscribers chose to watch.

Working at Netflix brought Ademuson closer to the business of entertainment. It also sharpened an idea he had long held about Nigeria: that better access to information could change how people understood and engaged with the country. “I’ve always had this idea that the more Nigerians know about our country, the more we can blow up Nigeria,” he says. He believed that knowing more about what was happening beyond their immediate surroundings could help Nigerians engage with the country and contribute to its development.

Inspired by the business newsletter Morning Brew, Ademuson set out to make business and economic news more accessible and entertaining. Nigeria already had publications doing this for pop culture and technology, but he felt there was room for a similar approach to business. The result was Daily Bread.

Distribution, however, proved difficult. Unlike media founders who could rely on an established social media following to attract readers, Ademuson had to find other ways to reach an audience. Inspired by the Acquired podcast, the team experimented with weekly video deep dives on Nigerian companies. A few videos later, Daily Bread’s social media following had grown from just under 300 to more than 1,000.

For Ademuson, the lesson was tone: information didn’t have to feel like a lecture to be useful. “Why are we trying to make people geeks? They don’t want to be geeks. They want to laugh. They want to listen to Layi Wasabi and enjoy themselves. So let’s meet people where they are.”

The business remains a work in progress. Ademuson has largely financed it through his Netflix income and hopes to develop a model in which brands sponsor individual programmes. His experience at Fibre has also made him wary of venture capital, which he believes places unrealistic growth expectations on media businesses.

Daily Bread is connected to his larger ambition, GEMS, the umbrella organisation for all his creative pursuits. The company has already made small minority investments in sports, hardware technology and internet gaming businesses. It also advises creative companies seeking capital. But Ademuson wants to move beyond investing to outright acquisitions of businesses and intellectual property. His interests include film catalogues, podcasts, YouTube channels and other media properties that can generate income over time. He hopes to bring outside investors and experienced partners into individual acquisitions, eventually building a portfolio of African entertainment assets.

GEMS is still far from the company he imagines. Its investments are small, its acquisition plans remain largely unrealised, and the scale of what Ademuson wants to build will require far more capital and expertise.

For much of his life, Ademuson treated his interest in business and his love of creativity as separate pursuits, moving between them as he tried to find his place. Now he wants to bring them together. He believes African creativity can generate enormous wealth. He is now dedicating his career to proving that thesis.

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1. Accidentally on purpose

On October 8, Vincent Ehindero, a counsellor finished a therapy session and got paid. What made it unusual was where he had met his client: inside Lagos Life, the browser game that had taken over Nigerian social media.

Vincent the Therapist, as he is known online, joined the game on October 5. He explored the virtual city, then told people on X that a therapist was now available there, offering short sessions in exchange for in-game tokens. Messages followed. Some people wanted the free 15-minute sessions; others went on to book full ones. One client, he wrote on X, paid the balance in real naira into his OPay account.

Vincent told Communiqué that anonymity was part of the appeal. On WhatsApp, a client sees a phone number; on Zoom, a face or an email address. In Lagos Life, people could talk without revealing who they were. “I was trying to create this safe environment for them where they also want to speak, where they also want to tell their stories,” he said.

He says he has since received more than 300 messages and held more than 140 sessions, totalling over 2,000 minutes. More than 40 became paid sessions, and dozens of clients have subscribed.

For another player, the game has become a creative outlet. Dreamgirl, as she is known on X, joined on October 3 after seeing it all over her timeline. Sending large sums of in-game money around was part of the early fun. What kept her was decorating homes and building stories around her character’s life, which she turned into videos without appearing on camera, and without paying for locations, transport, or equipment.

Those videos have drawn some of the highest engagement on her account, she says, adding more than 1,000 followers within days after posting just two. She is now considering making money from content for gaming audiences. “If I had seen it as just any random game, I would have lost interest,” she said. “The ability for the game to be diverse, in the sense that you can interact with people, makes it really look like a real-life world, and that is what keeps me there.”

Vincent and Dreamgirl are using Lagos Life for more than play: one to meet clients, the other to build an audience. They are not the only ones finding commercial uses for it. In the same virtual city, businesses pay for billboards, Chowdeck appears on every character’s phone, musicians pay to have their songs played in clubs, and players buy in-game currency with real money. The game already supports several kinds of commercial activity, some its creator never intended.

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Shalom Rayhamen, the developer, started building Lagos Life at 9 pm on September 30 and released it at 7 am the next morning, Nigeria’s Independence Day. By October 8, it had recorded 4.3 million sign-ups, according to TechCabal. By October 10, Rayhamen said it had passed 7 million. She incorporated Vatar Inc. with two co-founders on October 6. Three days later, the company closed a $500,000 angel round at a $10 million valuation. Investors include Flutterwave CEO Olugbenga Agboola, through his fund Resilience17; Oo Nwoye; Terra Industries CEO Nathan Nwachuku; and Mono CEO Abdulhamid Hassan. Vatar says the round closed in a day. More investors are queuing for a chance to get on the cap table, according to well-placed sources.

The obvious question is whether Nigerian games can become commercially successful. But Lagos Life poses a more interesting one: what happens when a game starts functioning as a media business, a social platform, and potentially a marketplace?

Within days, Vatar attracted millions of registrations, secured paying commercial partners, and began hosting activities beyond conventional gameplay. These developments are related, but they are not the same achievement. A large audience does not automatically produce a profitable business, and a busy virtual world is not yet an economy. Lagos Life is an early test of whether all three can grow together.

2. The business within

Rayhamen told TechCabal that Lagos Life has five revenue streams, ranging from selling audience access to collecting money from players.

Businesses rent billboards and plots within the virtual city. Musicians pay to have their songs played in its clubs. Company deals, including Chowdeck’s presence on every character’s phone, bring sponsorship and brand integration into the game. Football streaming introduces a broadcasting-like activity, though its commercial potential depends on what is being streamed and whether the rights are in place. Players can also top up their in-game cash, putting Lagos Life in the market for virtual goods and microtransactions that sustain many free-to-play games.

These businesses share one environment, but each needs its own evidence of demand. Advertising depends on an audience brands want to reach. Music promotion depends on artists believing in-game exposure has value. Virtual purchases depend on players having reasons to spend. Streaming raises questions about rights and distribution.

Vatar says it has earned and contracted more than $170,000 since launch, up from about $46,900 in its first four days. It has not disclosed how that splits across the five streams, how much it has collected, or how much remains tied to signed agreements. Those distinctions matter: contracted revenue is not necessarily cash in the bank.

Even so, businesses have been willing to spend money on a product that barely existed two weeks earlier. What the figure does not yet tell us is whether that spending will recur, how much it costs Vatar to deliver what it sells, or whether launch-week interest can become a predictable stream of income.

The model suits Nigeria for a simple reason. An entry fee would shrink the audience in a market where consumers have many competing demands on their money. A free game can instead earn from business customers and from players who choose to spend.

But this is not simply the economics of a free newspaper or radio station transplanted into a game. Lagos Life gives commercial partners access to an environment where users spend time, interact, and make purchases. The longer-term opportunity is to build several income streams around that activity, rather than rely on a single advertising format.

The challenge is that five revenue streams don’t automatically diversify a business. If they all depend on the same burst of launch-week attention, they could weaken together. Vatar will need to show that each stream has a reason to exist after the headlines move on.

3. A recipe for attention

Lagos Life didn’t need a long marketing campaign. Its launch coincided with a moment when Nigerians were already discussing a similar game, and its distribution made it easy for that conversation to turn into deeper engagement.

Lagos Run, a danfo-themed browser game, had gone viral days earlier. Rayhamen saw it on X and built Lagos Life in response. People were already familiar with the idea of a Nigerian city turned into a game. Lagos Life gave them more to do and a much wider social world to explore.

Its browser format also helped. Players can follow a link and enter without downloading an app or freeing up phone storage. As WeeTracker has argued, access may have been what held Nigerian games back. Lagos Life supports that argument, though one viral hit cannot settle it.

Then there is the world Rayhamen built. The in-game clock follows Lagos time. Quilox and Amala Shitta appear on the map; players ride danfos, buy generators, pay rent, and start life with different levels of money and connections. These are not just background details. They give players a shared set of references for understanding the game and talking to one another.

The game has also attracted users beyond Nigeria. After Nigeria, the largest shares of sign-ups reportedly come from the US, the UK, Ghana, Canada and the Netherlands. For the diaspora, it offers a digital version of a place they know, rather than a fictional world they have to learn.

4. When players become the content

Vincent shows where Lagos Life could go next: a virtual city as a place to find clients. But the money he earned left the game through OPay, and Lagos Life earned nothing from the transaction. Dreamgirl’s story is similar. The game is her set, but the followers she gains belong to her own account, not to Vatar.

Rayhamen seems to see the opportunity. On October 10, she announced on X that Vatar would release APIs so developers can bring their games into Lagos Life, letting players “join with their existing accounts and spend their in-game money in your games.” If it works, Lagos Life becomes less a single game than a hub other games plug into, the way Roblox grew beyond its own titles. It also means Vatar would have to pay developers for what players spend, turning its in-game currency into something closer to a wallet, with all the questions about fees, payouts, and oversight that come with one.

A therapist finding clients and a player building an audience are small things. They are also the kind of signals platforms are built on.

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5. The investors’ gambit

A $500,000 round at a $10 million valuation is a striking outcome for a company incorporated three days earlier. It raises a fair question: what exactly are investors betting on?

The registration count alone cannot explain it. Investors are betting that the team can build on its first audience, grow the commercial relationships already in place, and create products people keep using. Lagos Life could expand into new cities and titles. The risk is that the cultural fluency that powered the first one won’t apply to other. Maybe it doesn’t need to.

Vatar has offered an early signal. A dashboard Rayhamen shared on October 10 showed 1.4 million people active the previous day, about one in five of everyone who had signed up. It is self-reported, and one day in launch week is not a habit. Still, it shows how quickly and deeply people took to the game.

There are precedents for digital worlds becoming valuable businesses. Viacom paid about $160 million for Neopets in 2005, and Disney paid $350 million upfront for Club Penguin in 2007, with more tied to performance. Both had established communities and proven commercial appeal. Their histories show what is possible, not what is guaranteed.

HQ Trivia offers a different lesson. It drew enormous attention and was once valued at nearly $100 million before shutting down in 2020. A product can dominate the conversation without building a lasting business.

Vatar is still at the beginning. Its reported earnings and contracted deals suggest commercial demand, but there isn’t enough data yet to judge whether the model is sustainable. The $10 million valuation reflects terms the company and its investors agreed to, not proof that the business will justify the price.

The bet, then, is on execution. Can Vatar turn a burst of attention into a product people come back to? Can it persuade businesses to renew? Can it build the systems a virtual economy needs without losing control of the experience? And can it stay culturally relevant once Lagos Life is no longer new?

If it can, this round may look like an early entry into a much larger opportunity. If the audience disappears as the novelty fades, the launch figures and the speed of the fundraise will matter far less.

Lagos Life has secured something no founder can guarantee in advance: a dominant place in the public conversation. The investment case now depends on how the company uses that social capital.

6. The anomaly

It is tempting to turn Lagos Life into a formula for Nigerian game development: build quickly, localise the experience, distribute via a link, and sell advertising inside it. That would be the wrong lesson.

The circumstances were unusually specific. A developer with nearly a decade of experience saw Lagos Run on X and built a new virtual world overnight while caring for her four-month-old baby. She released it on Independence Day, when many Nigerians were off work and online. The game arrived as people were already discussing a similar idea, businesses were willing to pay for access to the audience, and investors moved quickly.

Change those factors, and the outcome might have been very different. The game could have been well made and culturally resonant without reaching millions of people in its first week. That is part of what makes the success hard to reproduce.

Copycats illustrate the point. PH Lifestyle and London Red Bus adopted the format within days, but copying the mechanics does not recreate the audience, timing, or commercial relationships that helped Lagos Life take off. Code is only one part of a product’s success.

That does not make Lagos Life a one-off for Nigerian games. More hits will come, and some may build businesses that last longer or become more valuable. They may look nothing like this one, just as Lagos Life looks nothing like the danfo and okada games Nigerian studios have spent years building.

The opportunity is not for every developer to build a browser game or sell virtual billboards. It is about noticing where people already spend their attention, what they want to do together, and what existing products have failed to give them. The next successful game will likely come from a different audience, a different frustration, or a different cultural reference.

Lagos Life is an important case study, but not yet a proven formula. Its lasting significance will depend on whether Vatar can turn an extraordinary launch into a durable business, and whether other developers can learn from its success without simply trying to copy it.

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Triggerfish, an animation studio based in Cape Town, South Africa, has spent nearly three decades navigating those constraints. From its early work in stop-motion to becoming a full-suite Computer Graphics (CG) studio, it has built a business that now works with global platforms and studios including the BBC, Netflix, Disney+, and Lucasfilm. Its work has grossed more than $50 million worldwide and earned BAFTA, Emmy, and Annie recognition.

Getting there, however, was far from straightforward. Triggerfish had to confront the huge constraints of building on the continent. It had to reinvent its production model, find creative ways to finance ambitious projects, and build the talent pipeline it needed to grow.

In this episode of Creative Capital, we trace how Triggerfish navigated that growth, and what its journey reveals about building a world-class animation business from Africa.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How Triggerfish rebuilt itself as a full-CG studio when stop-motion, its specialty, went out of fashion.

• The novel and creative ways Triggerfish had to develop to finance their projects.

• How Triggerfish came to play an important role in developing a talent pipeline in Africa’s animation industry.

• The policy gaps that hold back Africa’s animation industry.

Watch the full episode on YouTube here.

“We thought that by 2016 or 17 the music business would be a billion-dollar business in sub-Saharan Africa. Today, according to IFPI, the business is worth $120 million.”

Yoel Kenan made that projection when he relaunched Africori as a digital music distribution company in 2012. On paper, the ingredients seemed obvious. Africa’s population was growing. Most of it was young. Millions of people were moving into cities. Mobile phones were becoming more important, and digital music was beginning to replace the physical business Kenan had spent much of his career working in.

His timing was very wrong, but the underlying bet was not. Over the next decade, Kenan helped build one of the institutions that paved the way for African music’s global growth. This willingness to take calculated risks is integral to how he approaches life. “I’ve always liked a challenge. I see an opportunity. I say let’s take it. Let’s see what we can do.”

Growing up in the suburbs of Paris in what he calls a sweet and sheltered childhood, Kenan’s first big curiosity was advertising, and he decided early that it was what he wanted to build a career in. At 15, he subscribed to a trade magazine and followed the industry closely. Music and radio were another consuming interest. A local state-owned station called Radio 7 introduced him to jazz, dance, hip hop and funk, and gave him a taste for the medium.

In 1981, France’s new socialist government deregulated the broadcasting industry, allowing private local radio stations to operate. Kenan and two friends quickly got in on the action, purchasing a radio kit from Italy to broadcast funk music around their neighbourhood. They called the station W Funky, borrowing the naming style of the American stations they admired. Young and inexperienced, they could not sustain it, and within months they had to stop. But a local station offered them a slot on Fridays from nine to eleven, which they kept for about a year.

Radio taught him the pleasure of discovery. It also introduced an idea that would follow him throughout his career: finding something interesting and helping it reach people who might otherwise never encounter it. In business school, where he was studying marketing after completing his first degree in economics, that instinct became his first business.

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Kenan befriended students obsessed with British music and began helping them organise concerts in Paris. Their first show attracted about 2,000 people and earned a full-page feature in a national newspaper. Soon, they were bringing three British acts a month into 500-capacity rooms. Organising the concerts let him practise what he was learning in class. He persuaded a big local media company and a retail chain to sponsor them. They also tried to imitate the English pub culture. “The idea was like you get a beer or two and you come to listen to some bands; you might be coming to see one band, and you’ll discover two more bands that you didn’t know about.”

Eight months in, Kenan suggested they start a label: if they were already introducing British artists to French audiences, why not license some of that music themselves? By his final year in business school, the label had five employees.

Eventually, Kenan had to leave to complete France’s compulsory military service. When he returned, he stuck to his original plan to work in marketing, which he had studied, and got an advertising internship in London where he worked for a year. He enjoyed the work but quickly realised something was missing. “As much as I love advertising and marketing, it didn’t give me the same kick that I had working on music.”

Kenan joined BMG France in 1991 and worked in its marketing department, helping promote artists such as Whitney Houston. He moved to MCA soon after and later joined the team that launched Universal France. By the late 1990s, his interest in digital music had taken him into Universal’s international digital operations, where he became head of digital music outside North America. A few years later, French media conglomerate Vivendi, Universal’s parent company, acquired MP3.com, a fledgling digital music company, and asked Kenan to move to San Diego to run it.

The experience was new and challenging. MP3.com was more of a technology company than a music label. Kenan had to manage a company of 300 people, about 200 of whom were engineers. But it was also an educational period. The data MP3.com had on how people consumed music was far ahead of what Kenan had seen inside the traditional industry. For someone attracted to change, it was an ideal place to be.

But the same digital shift that excited him was also destabilising the industry around him. Napster, LimeWire and other file-sharing services were eating into physical music sales. Executives in Europe and America were trying to protect a business in decline.

Then Kenan came to Lagos. Around 2002, while working as a senior executive at BMG Europe, MTN invited him to visit Nigeria, having recently launched in the country. Kenan treated the three-day visit almost like a holiday. He arrived unprepared and left fascinated. “I fell in love with Lagos. I fell in love with the energy.”

Part of it was the confidence he encountered. South African executives visiting Europe would sometimes introduce their music apologetically, he remembers, worrying that it did not meet international standards. In Lagos, entrepreneurs approached him with the opposite attitude. They would tell him their artist was better than Usher or Alicia Keys. “That assurance and drive that they had, I said, well, this is refreshing.”

More importantly, the economics of music in Africa seemed to run opposite to the markets he knew. In Europe and America, music executives were watching revenues decline. In Nigeria and other emerging markets, telecom companies were growing quickly and telling him that customers loved consuming music on their phones. He began to wonder whether the major labels should focus more attention on emerging markets, but faced significant opposition back home. “We were not always able to implement some crazy ideas because it could affect the current business, which was already under attack.”

Convinced that the opportunity was too big to ignore, Kenan resigned to start Keevision in 2005. Keevision became a laboratory for his experiments: ringtones for telecom companies, a licensed alternative to piracy for traders in Lagos’s Alaba market, a Pop Idol-style television concept in Zambia and artist management. Ultimately, Keevision failed to become a successful business.

Eventually, family considerations took him back to London. He joined Jazz FM and helped the radio business look for revenue beyond advertising. The company launched awards, a dating service and, with partners, the festival that became Love Supreme, now one of the UK’s biggest jazz festivals. But Africa kept calling. Friends in Nigeria and South Africa began contacting him about an old idea.

Kenan had first launched Africori in 2009 as a platform for licensing African music for film and television. He wanted to simplify a process in which several middlemen could quote different budgets and commissions for the same song. The platform offered pre-cleared music and automatic pricing, but buyers still preferred to call and negotiate directly. When Kenan returned to the UK, he put the idea aside.

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By 2012, a different problem had emerged. African artists and labels were struggling to get their music onto digital platforms or receive meaningful support from international distributors. Kenan saw an opportunity to rebuild Africori around that gap. Instead of licensing music for film and television, the company would help African labels and artists distribute their music digitally.

Africori secured a direct deal with Apple, but the harder problem was convincing the industry to use it. Some labels still relied heavily on physical sales and did not believe streaming would become significant. Others were wary of handing their catalogues to a new distributor. Technology alone would not solve that problem. He had to build trust in person. Kenan spent as many as 20 days a month travelling across Africa, explaining digital distribution. Gradually, individual relationships began changing the company’s position. MI Abaga and Chocolate City came on board in Nigeria. Sauti Sol joined in Kenya, and Gallo Records in South Africa, with one of the continent’s largest catalogues, began to work with Africori. The company also became good at identifying artists early, working with acts including Nasty C and, later, Tyla before their breakthroughs. The first five or six years were difficult. It took even longer for Africori to become properly profitable. But this time Kenan stayed.

By 2020, the competitive landscape had changed. Large international distributors had started investing heavily in Africa. Kenan worried that if a few important clients were attracted away by large advances, years of relationship-building could unravel quickly. Around 70% of Africori’s revenue also came from outside Africa. The company could distribute African music globally, but Kenan felt it did not yet have enough international infrastructure to support a record once it started travelling. Warner offered both.

Africori signed its first deal with Warner in April 2020. Three months later, Master KG’s “Jerusalema” showed the value of the partnership. Open Mic Productions had discovered Master KG and owned the song. Africori distributed the music and reacted quickly as the song gained momentum, investing in digital campaigns and independent promotion across markets. Warner provided the larger international machine to push the song.

For Kenan, the deal marked a change in what Africori needed to survive. Independence had helped the company grow, but competing with larger international distributors now required more capital and global reach. He does not regret it. “In the position that we were in, that was definitely one of the best options.” But he would not necessarily make the same decision with another company. “If I’m able to avoid having to get an external investor or a major, I would try to avoid it. I still think there’s a lot to gain from being independent.”

In April 2026, Kenan left Africori. His next project is African Music Rights. Kenan originally started the company in 2014 as a joint venture with telecom group Millicom. The idea was to acquire African catalogues and find better ways to generate revenue from them. When Millicom exited the continent, the project went dormant. He is now bringing it back.

African Music Rights already controls music from several African markets, including a South African catalogue of about 11,000 songs. Kenan wants to acquire more rights and use new technology, including AI, to find opportunities for music that might otherwise sit quietly in catalogues. More than a decade after Africori began, the problem has changed. African artists no longer need convincing that digital music matters. African songs travel internationally with increasing regularity. The new question is how much value can be extracted from the intellectual property behind them, and who gets to keep it. It is another market whose eventual size Kenan cannot completely know. But that didn’t stop him before, and it won’t stop him now.

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1. A meeting of great minds

All successful events are alike; each unsuccessful event is unsuccessful in its own way. For Bloomberg’s Africa Business Media Innovators, which has been running for ten years now, success comes from the quality of people and conversations it’s been able to pack in without much of it feeling like a chore. I followed the event as an outsider-slash-observer for a few years. 2026 was the first time I got to attend and experience it in person. It was great: a perfect balance between panels and networking sessions. Not too many, not too few.

My biggest takeaway was the depth of thought and innovation across Africa’s media landscape. For instance, I learned more about the work The Republic is doing with Atlas to protect IP and all kinds of creative work on the continent and globally. I learned about Trevor Struurman’s Manor Africa and how it is providing a multimedia platform for creatives in South Africa (and the continent) to experiment with new concepts, ranging from journals to magazines, events, and a bookstore. I also learned more about how BellaNaija is incorporating artificial intelligence into its work. It brought back Damilola Olatunji as Head of Monetised Content & AI Growth, and now fields an AI avatar that presents content on camera.

These are just a few of the people and projects I came across. It is encouraging to see how innovative the media ecosystem is, a sharp departure from the outlooks of doom and gloom that often overshadow conversations about African media.

This is not to say that there is nothing to worry about (we will get into some of that shortly), but there is so much to be optimistic about, as long as we, the people, continue to push forward with resilience, collaborate more often with one another, and think more deeply and deliberately about the future we want to see.

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2. Lessons to boot

As much as I enjoyed meeting people at ABMI, I also took away some valuable lessons for my publication and the ecosystem at large.

I. AI and distribution

Of course, we will start by talking about AI. It is unavoidable these days.

Two years ago, I would have bet heavily on newsletters as the future of media distribution. We built Communiqué on that bet, and it’s helped us grow quickly and distinctively. But I would be lying if I said the ground isn’t moving under all of us.

AI tools are now answering the questions our journalism and research used to answer, often using our content to do it. The readers get a summary, the AI platform gets the engagement, and we publishers get close to nothing in return. For newsrooms that already depended heavily on search and social for traffic, that is a serious threat.

That said, panic, however tempting, is the wrong response. Instead, we must stop depending on any single route to reach our readers. Present at ABMI were people building their own apps and chatbots trained on their archives, testing more newsletter verticals for specific audiences, hosting more frequent live events, big or small, and creating videos in every format and length their audience actually watches.

For us at Communiqué, the question going forward with every piece of content we put out is: Does it bring us closer to the reader, or does it put another layer between us? The goal is to expand how we reach people without giving up any ground we already hold.

II. AI and monetisation

One of the most compelling arguments I heard, on stage and in one-on-one conversations, was that African publishers need to be far more proactive about protecting their IP from AI crawlers. Yes, we want our work to be discovered. But discovery that only enriches the company doing the discovering is extraction.

When you look at who is pushing back on the big AI companies, you’ll find that almost every major lawsuit and licensing deal involves Western publishers. African publishers hesitate, and understandably so. On its own, a mid-sized newsroom in Lagos or Nairobi can’t just up and go against a trillion-dollar company. But together, players across the continent with decades of archives, a wealth of languages, and original reporting are much harder to ignore. This is where national or regional press and media coalitions can be more impactful: setting standards for what we allow crawlers to take, designing common licensing terms, and pooling legal and technical resources so that no publisher has to face this alone.

The idea that this “AI future” we are heading toward is inevitable is a fiction, sustained by heavy marketing spend. Karen Hao’s book Empire of AI does a good job of surfacing this.

III. The tension between legacy media and creators

For many media companies, creators represent a frightening future. Newsrooms bind themselves to professional ethics and editorial standards; creators answer mostly to their audiences. That doesn’t mean creators have no ethics. Many of the best ones hold themselves to standards some newsrooms should envy. But it explains why the relationship often looks like a tug of war when it really shouldn’t.

Each side has something the other badly needs. Legacy media, old and new, brings decades of professional practice: verification, accountability, and the patient work of building worlds readers can trust. Creators bring speed, irreverence, and an instinct for what audiences want and how they behave that most newsrooms still lack.

The audience does not care about our org charts. They move freely between a newspaper, a podcast, and a creator’s feed. The information ecosystem will be healthier when both sides stop treating each other as rivals and start working out where they can build together.

IV. Humans as taste makers

As AI tools get better at producing content, the value of producing content falls. What rises is judgment: knowing what is worth making, what is true and good, and what is missing. That is taste, and it is quickly becoming the currency of our industry.

Much of the slop we see online isn’t purely a machine problem. It’s what happens when we don’t have enough people with taste at the wheel. The tools take direction from people, and the output can only be as good as the direction it gets. That puts a responsibility on editors and media professionals, and on all of us as humans, to take quality control more seriously and be more honest about our own biases.

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3. Looking ahead

ABMI came at the right time for me personally, as I continue to think about what Communiqué will look like in 2027 and, more immediately, how to make our event in New York next week more valuable.

In many ways, ABMI has already shaped how I’m thinking about both. The questions of distribution, ownership, and how legacy media and creators can work together are not abstract for me. They sit at the centre of what we are building at Communiqué, and I look forward to sharing more of that with you in the coming months.

Our New York event on October 15 is where some of these conversations continue. In partnership with Syracuse University, Malindi Press, and Chapter IP, we are hosting a closed-door discussion on the evolution of the media and creator economy. If ABMI taught me anything, it is that the best conversations happen when you get the right people in a room and give them the freedom to speak candidly. That is exactly what we are aiming for. And if it goes well, you can expect another set of notes from me in two weeks.

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“My biggest skill set is that I know how to identify what is cool. I don’t think I can create the coolest things, but I can spot what is cool. And being able to spot it is as good as creating it.”

From childhood, Jide Ojewunmi has understood a fundamental tenet of life: people want things that make them stand out, and he was good at finding those things. At school, he supplied sweets his classmates could not buy at the tuck shop. At university, he sold T-shirts and organised parties. Each venture brought him closer to a career built around recognising what people wanted and finding a way to provide it. Today, that instinct runs through DefEar’s, the talent management and marketing business he founded. Its work spans musicians, content creators, brands and now film.

Ojewunmi grew up in Gbagada, Lagos, in an upper-middle-class family. His parents were accountants who also ran a business together. He spent summers in the UK, swam, rollerbladed and went to Ikoyi Club, where his father was a member. His parents cared deeply about his education and sent him across Lagos to Corona School, Victoria Island, believing it would offer a better environment than Corona Gbagada, which was closer to home.

Corona was fertile ground for creativity, giving pupils room to explore their interests beyond the classroom. Several would go on to make their names in Nigeria’s creative industries. Burna Boy was Ojewunmi’s junior, while Krowd Kontrolla, whom he would later manage, was his classmate. Visual artist Dennis Osadebe was also among the school’s alumni. School life made space for activities beyond the classroom, and pupils took them seriously. “They didn’t let us play with sports and extracurricular activities,” he says. “We did a lot of those, and it was very competitive.”

Ojewunmi’s skill set, however, was more tuned towards business. In boarding school, pupils used vouchers instead of cash. Parents deposited money, which was converted into booklets of ₦50 slips redeemable at the tuck shop. Ojewunmi found another use for them. He brought in contraband sweets and sold them to classmates, and with the proceeds, he bought his first phone. “I’ve always been a hustler.”

While preparing for his SATs, he found another opening. His tutorial centre sold photocopied textbooks, but he knew where to buy the original and make better copies. He began supplying other students at a cheaper rate. When the tutor discovered the competing business, Ojewunmi was expelled.

Behind the enterprise was a change in his family’s circumstances. He began living with his mother, who could not provide all the creature comforts he had become accustomed to. “When you have so much access to money and all of a sudden it’s taken away from you, the reality of life hits you because your taste is still high. But your pocket cannot keep up.” Earning money from his various business pursuits became a way to sustain some of the life he knew.

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Lagos Island was his business school. His grandmother lived close to the market, and visits to her brought him into contact with the traders there. Sometimes, he waited there for his mother to finish work. Walking through the market, he recognised clothes he had seen people wearing elsewhere, now available at lower prices. He began learning where to buy things and what other people might pay for them.

Ojewunmi came to see two sides of his upbringing as complementary. At home, television and access to international media fed his imagination. On Lagos Island, the market sharpened his eye for value. “I was watching Sky Digital at home, and that was feeding my creativity. Then this other side, the street, was feeding my business acumen.”

For university, his mother wanted him outside Lagos, away from its distractions. He went to the University of Ibadan, initially enrolling in civil engineering. About a month into his studies, the university discovered that he had not taken physics in his entrance examination. He was transferred to food technology. He completed the degree, but he had already lost interest in formal education. Instead, he began to focus on business.

His first business was Metro Inc.; he made custom T-shirts and also brought clothes from Lagos Island to sell on campus, using the market knowledge he had acquired. Another venture, Strictly UI, was an unofficial website for students. Ojewunmi worked on it with two friends and brought what he called its social angle: live polls that pitted students against one another in popularity contests. Some people paid to improve their ratings. The feature made the site popular, but it also made it fraught. As students became upset about their results and people discovered who was behind the platform, the situation became threatening, and the group eventually shut it down.

Entertainment offered a more lasting direction. Before university, Ojewunmi had helped organise parties in Lagos with a group of his friends called Blend. In Ibadan, in partnership with a club, he began throwing parties, charging at the door and learning how to draw a crowd. Parties led to artist bookings. Other organisers began asking him to secure performers for their events, paying him a fee for the service. He brought Burna Boy to Ibadan shortly after the singer released his breakout single, “Like to Party”. He also brought 2Baba and organised a Mayorkun concert, where Davido made an appearance.

But he didn’t want to stop at just organising events in Ibadan. “It always rang in my head that anything I did in Ibadan didn’t have the impact like Lagos had,” he said. “And I didn’t want to be a local champion.”

After university, he returned to Lagos and continued working in entertainment, attending events and building on the relationships he had made. Concert promotion had already introduced him to talent management. He first worked with Blackmagic through merchandise, making T-shirts for the musician’s concert. Later, after Ojewunmi brought him to perform at his university and handled the arrangements, Blackmagic asked him to become his manager. The roster of artists he managed grew to include Krowd Kontrolla and Skiibii. For years, the operation was effectively Ojewunmi himself: the person artists and collaborators called to make things happen. Eventually, he wanted to build something that could handle more talent than one manager could.

A trip to Ethiopia with Skiibii gave that ambition a shape. On the trip, he met Damilola “Dapper” Akinwunmi, who was then managing Ice Prince. As two young managers accompanying their artists, they found plenty to discuss. The friendship continued after they returned to Nigeria and soon became a working relationship. Their skills complemented each other. Akinwunmi handled music distribution, while Ojewunmi worked on promotion. When Akinwunmi had a project that needed publicity, he brought it to Ojewunmi.

During one conversation at Akinwunmi’s house, they began discussing the shortage of good talent managers. They imagined building something like Def Jam. At first, they planned to do it together. But Akinwunmi already had his own business, and Ojewunmi wanted something he could develop independently. DefEar’s formally began in 2020. Ojewunmi developed the name with his late brother, drawing partly on the Def Jam reference and the promise that people would eventually hear them. The company gave a structure to work he had spent years doing as an individual. It also gave him room to take on opportunities that did not fit neatly into artist management.

Successful promotions brought enquiries from people outside music. Someone working at a company would hear a song, ask who had pushed it and approach Ojewunmi with a campaign of their own. Could he help promote a jingle? Could he develop a campaign for a brand? The requests slowly turned DefEar’s into a creative agency. Ojewunmi describes it as a 360-degree business spanning talent management, promotions, marketing and merchandising. “It’s an ecosystem that we’ve built that helps everything in the creative economy,” he said.

The move into creator management followed a similar pattern. While trying to promote Skiibii’s “Baddest Boy” remix with Davido on TikTok, he connected with Teniola Oyewole, who was TikTok’s Nigerian country manager at the time. They developed a campaign together that helped the song trend on TikTok, and then began collaborating on other campaigns.

After several campaigns together, Ojewunmi asked Oyewole to join DefEar’s as a partner. She was already mentoring creators; that work developed into managing them. She brought that to DefEar’s and helped establish a division dedicated to representing creators, including Softmadeit, Purplespeedy, Crispdal and r0dn3y.

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Ojewunmi is particular about how these creators are described. He resists calling them “TikTok influencers”, even when the platform accounts for their largest audiences. They work across other platforms, and the label can narrow how people understand their abilities.

His latest venture, DefEar’s Originals, grew from that frustration. Ojewunmi saw that some of the company’s creators wanted opportunities in film, but being known primarily for short-form video made it harder to be taken seriously by the traditional film industry. Rather than wait for someone else to cast them, DefEar’s has begun developing its own films. “If they’re not going to expose your talent to the world,” Ojewunmi said, “we will do it ourselves.”

He is also working on Hustle, a platform to connect brands and creators directly. At the time of the interview, it was still in development. The plan is for brands to send briefs, negotiate with creators and receive completed videos through Hustle.

It is a larger version of the instinct he first exercised at school: notice what people want, understand what stands in their way, and build a route between the two. Back then, it meant finding things his classmates were willing to pay for. Today, it means helping creative talent secure opportunities that might otherwise remain out of reach.

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1. A little personality goes a long way

During the week of September 21, as heads of state and their delegations descended on New York for the 81st United Nations General Assembly, African fintech firm Flutterwave staged its own gathering on the sidelines. The payments unicorn hosted public- and private-sector leaders to discuss how to improve cross-border trade and payments in Africa. Pictures and videos from the gathering filled its social media pages, including a video of its chief executive, Gbenga Agboola, casually strutting through the city.

This was not the first time in recent weeks that Flutterwave had leaned on the personalities of its executives to tell its story. An earlier “most likely to” game with Agboola, Bankole Falade, the company’s legal and public policy chief, and other senior staff drew thousands of views across social media. Taken together, the posts point to a communications strategy that increasingly prioritises giving audiences a glimpse of the people running the company as it continues to prepare itself for an elusive IPO.

The shift may owe something to Oluchi Ezeugo, who joined Flutterwave in June as executive communications lead. Ezeugo previously led corporate communications at Helium Health and headed communications in the chief executive’s office at Sand Technologies. Her brief was to shape how the company’s leaders present themselves to the world: what they say, how they say it, and what audiences come to understand about the business through them. Flutterwave’s recent content shows how much that can involve beyond speeches and formal announcements. An executive’s humour, personality, and interactions with colleagues can give people a way to connect with a company whose products might otherwise feel abstract. Executive communications is one strand of that story. The job of holding all the strands together is one that companies around the world are now scrambling to fill: the corporate storyteller.

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2. Storytelling moves in-house

A company contains the raw material for many stories. There is the founder’s account of why it exists, the employee who can explain a difficult product decision, and the customer whose experience lends credence to the company’s reason to exist and serves as a testimonial for prospective customers. The corporate storyteller’s job is to gather all these stories into a coherent account of the business: what it believes, what it is building, and why anyone should care.

The title is enjoying a global renaissance. In December 2025, The Wall Street Journal reported that the share of LinkedIn job postings mentioning “storyteller” had doubled within the previous year. About 50,000 marketing listings and more than 20,000 media and communications listings included the term. Separately, FactSet counted 469 mentions of “storyteller” or “storytelling” on earnings calls and investor days through December 11, 2025, compared with 359 in 2024 and 147 in 2015.

Corporate storytellers matter now because the institutions that once helped companies earn attention and trust are weakening. Previously, businesses could rely on traditional media to explain who they were. But newsrooms have shrunk, audiences are scattered across feeds, and trust in institutions, including the press, has fallen. Brands can pay podcasters, creators, and celebrity ambassadors to bridge the gap, but those relationships can be expensive and fragile. The audience belongs to the creator, and once the partnership ends, the brand loses access to that audience too. Also, with AI making content more abundant, a recognisable voice, a specific experience, or an honest explanation of a decision can give audiences something more substantial to connect with. Companies are increasingly bringing storytelling in-house to build those connections themselves.

3. Have we been here before?

African tech companies producing their own content is nothing new. In 2021, a wave of editors and writers left traditional media companies to build content engines inside startups newly flush with venture capital. Communiqué tracked the shift at the time. In April 2021, Paystack advertised for a managing editor to help build what it called “Africa’s largest digital business media network.” Some of those engines worked. PiggyVest is the clearest example of what that investment could produce. Its content team developed articles, comics, animations and research around Nigerians’ experiences with money. Others did not. When the tech bubble burst in 2022, many of the writers and editors who had crossed over returned to the media companies they had left.

The corporate storyteller belongs to this same lineage, but it is not the same job. Nor is it corporate communications, though it borrows from both. The three roles share tools: writing, a feel for audiences, and command of owned and earned platforms. What they do not share is purpose. A content marketer uses content to help attract, convert, and retain customers. At a payments company, that could mean publishing guides that help merchants run their businesses, then encouraging those readers to try its payment tools. The work is connected to a customer’s decision to use the product. The corporate communications manager owns relationships and the record: press releases, media relations, regulatory correspondence, and crisis statements. Their audience is mostly the press and, through it, everyone else. The work is custodial and often reactive, measured in coverage secured and crises contained.

The corporate storyteller owns the narrative and entire channels. Their responsibility is to develop the company’s account that runs through all its activities. They look for the experiences, people, and decisions that explain what the business stands for, then determine how to tell those stories across different settings. Their work can support both content marketing and corporate communications, but it’s rarely the same as either.

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4. Where is all this heading?

As Africa’s leading tech companies outgrow their challenger status, corporate storytellers will become even more necessary. A startup can win supporters by presenting itself as an ambitious outsider taking on an inefficient industry. Its audiences forgive a founder who speaks off the cuff, because candour is part of the appeal. An incumbent has no such licence. It answers to regulators, employs thousands, and serves millions. It needs a clear and cohesive account of itself, one that holds regardless of who is speaking. Some tech companies have already learned this the hard way.

In May, Tosin Eniolorunda, the co-founder and chief executive of Moniepoint, drew public ire after an appearance at The Platform Nigeria’s Workers’ Day edition. Eniolorunda said the company struggled to find candidates who met its global standards. Critics, who heard a broader dismissal of the Nigerian talent pool, reacted swiftly. They argued the problem lay in pay and in companies unwilling to train junior staff. Several pointed out that Eniolorunda himself had been shaped by years at Interswitch. He later clarified that he meant a shortage of experienced technical professionals, citing emigration and weaknesses in the talent pipeline, and pointed to Moniepoint’s investment in training and its predominantly Nigerian workforce. But the damage was already done.

The gaffe was all the more unusual because few companies in Nigerian tech have invested as heavily in corporate storytelling as Moniepoint. Its team draws on experience across television, film, advertising, and agency communications. And the work shows. Its Informal Economy Report, first published in 2024, was welcomed by the federal government as a basis for policy. The 2025 edition added an AI chatbot for exploring its data and a documentary series on the people who run Nigeria’s informal businesses. Across it all, Moniepoint tells a story of faith in ordinary Nigerians: their resilience, their enterprise, and their capacity to build. Then its CEO told a different story about Nigerian workers on Workers Day.

If a company that has built this much narrative infrastructure can still have its story contradicted by its own leader, then the lesson is not that storytelling investment is wasted. It is that even the best-resourced operations slip when nobody is guarding the script. That is the corporate storyteller’s job: not to produce more content, but to hold one account of the company steady across all touchpoints.

Chowdeck faced a similar reckoning this month when an older interview with its co-founder, Femi Aluko, resurfaced. In it, he said the platform’s bicycle riders earned an average of ₦100,000 a week. He compared this to doctors’ monthly pay. The comments provoked backlash for seemingly overlooking the conditions under which riders earn that money: the risks on the road, running costs, and earnings that fluctuate week to week. The comparison with doctors, in a country where professional pay is a sore point, struck critics as distasteful. When Chowdeck was a challenger looking for riders, talking up earnings made sense as a recruitment pitch. But Chowdeck now leads its category. At that size, a recruitment pitch becomes a statement about how the company treats the people who deliver for it, and riders, customers, regulators and the wider public are all paying attention.

Still, a better story would not have solved Chowdeck’s problem on its own. If riders feel they earn less than the company says, no amount of good writing will change that. There is a limit to what storytelling can do. It cannot fix a business problem, and it will not save a company from a bad reality. The storyteller’s most valuable skill may be telling leaders when the story and the reality have drifted apart. As a result, much of the hiring for this role will be reactive, following public stumbles rather than preventing them.

What happens after the hire will matter more than the title. The storyteller needs enough experience to understand the business and communicate its values, enough access to know what is changing, and enough authority to challenge the people running it. If they are only invited into the room when a decision needs announcing, they will spend much of their time explaining choices they had no opportunity to question.

Proving the value of this work will be difficult. The evidence may lie in easier hiring, stronger relationships with regulators, smoother fundraising, or an emerging problem addressed before it becomes a crisis. As African tech companies become institutions that people depend on, their stories become promises about how they will behave. The corporate storyteller’s job is to help the company make those promises clearly and tell its leaders when they are failing to keep them.

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“I really believe in the things I get involved in. That belief inspires a duty of care, a commitment to excellence, and the delusion that it can work. Because without belief, what are we doing here, man?”

For Joey Akan, belief is not a vague idea or a motivational slogan. It is a working principle. It has made him leave well-paying jobs and stay with projects that demanded more than they gave him. For him, the distinction is whether he can still see a reason to keep doing the work. If he stops believing in something, he leaves. “It was fun to do it as long as I believed in it,” he says of his time at Pulse. “I believed in Pulse. I believed in the people around me. And the moment I stopped believing in that, I just walked away.”

That pattern has shaped his career. Akan has worked as a writer, editor, A&R executive, television producer, and media entrepreneur. He has written about African music for local and international publications such as the New York Times, worked at Universal Music, and founded Afrobeats Intelligence, a platform that has grown from a publication into a podcast, video project, and live experience. Now, he is expanding again with The Joey Akan Experience, a wider media project built around conversations with people working across culture and the creative industries.

Akan was born and grew up in Port Harcourt, southern Nigeria. He was orphaned early, and much of his childhood was marked by solitude. He spent much of his time alone, often with books. “I read and read until one day I decided, how about I just create words of my own or stories of my own?”

Books offered escape, but they also taught him how to think. He read mostly novels and was drawn to the way fiction could make a reader hold conflicting ideas at once. They were also accessible. He did not have much money growing up, but books were easier to find than many other forms of entertainment. People discarded them during house moves. They could be borrowed, passed around, and collected.

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Akan studied biochemistry at the University of Uyo after coming through secondary school with a science background. But he never expected the degree to become his career. “I knew biochemistry was not what I wanted to do. Even though I did not know [what].”

He did know, though, that he wanted to write. In his second year, he saved up from his feeding money and bought a laptop. Then he bought an internet modem and went online. The internet opened up a new world. Writing had always carried prestige, especially in newspapers, but Akan was not interested in the traditional route. “The internet gave me blank canvases everywhere to write,” he says. “You can write on Facebook; you can write on WordPress.”

He began publishing essays on Facebook and blogging. He wrote about ideas, art, and the things around him. In his final year, while at a beach in Oron, he received a call from someone recruiting writers for Pulse. “I was having a bottle of Heineken, my phone rang, and some guy with a British accent was courting me for Pulse.” He went through the interview process and was hired while still in school. After graduating, he returned briefly to Port Harcourt before moving to Lagos.

At Pulse, he started as a writer covering general news. He didn’t take long to grow restless. He moved into music because it brought together two things he already loved: writing and art. But he was not satisfied with the kind of entertainment coverage he found around him. Much of it focused on celebrity possessions, scandals, and controversy. He wanted to take the music itself seriously. “When I started, entertainment journalism existed, but I didn’t find enough spaces where people were concerned about the art,” he says.

So he taught himself. He read publications such as The Fader, Complex and DJBooth. He studied music criticism, opinion writing, and long-form reporting. At Pulse, he learned how to distinguish high-traffic stories from high-impact ones, while building his own approach to music journalism. “A lot of the work I did there was self-taught,” he says. “I was teaching myself every day.”

By the time he left Pulse, Akan had established himself as one of Nigeria’s leading music writers. He had built relationships within the industry and earned recognition for his work. But instead of settling into the position he had created for himself, he began looking for the next challenge. Afrobeats was also beginning to travel internationally, and Akan could see a story developing around it. He wanted to help tell that story to a global audience. So he resigned and took a role at Universal Music, which was expanding its presence on the continent.

At Universal, he worked on projects involving artists such as WurlD and Tekno, among others. The attraction wasn’t simply the job itself, but the chance to understand how the machine worked. “What makes a lot of opportunities important for me is how much I could learn from them. So the potential to improve my knowledge base is bigger than anything else.” He learned how the industry operated from the inside, and the experience gave him a deeper understanding of the business he had spent years covering.

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Once he felt he had learned what he needed to learn, however, he became less interested in staying. He had discovered that he did not particularly enjoy “looking under the hood” of the industry from the position he occupied there. Again, the decision was less about whether the opportunity was objectively good and more about whether it remained meaningful to him.

Before he left Pulse, Akan had started writing for international publications. After Universal, he leaned further into freelancing. Working with editors outside Nigeria improved his craft, but it could be exhausting. He pitched stories repeatedly, wrote for uncertain outcomes and waited to be paid. One rejection from Genius stayed with him. He had been commissioned to write a piece, but the publication rejected it twice. The larger problem was that he had grown tired of writing the same introduction to Afrobeats for international audiences. Too many stories began from the same place: African music as a discovery. “I discovered that I’d introduced Afrobeats for way too long,” he says. “It felt like the narrative was stunted and I didn’t enjoy it.”

His friends urged him to launch a Substack publication. He called it Afrobeats Intelligence. It was initially a place to publish opinion pieces, which did reasonably well but didn’t get the response he hoped for. Then he returned to some of the interviews he had accumulated over the years. He published an interview with singer Asa, and the response shifted the project’s direction. “It went crazy. People loved it!” That response showed him what his audience wanted: thoughtful, detailed conversations with artists and cultural figures.

Akan followed that signal. And Afrobeats Intelligence became a space where he could apply the editorial standards he had developed internationally to stories much closer to home. The project expanded gradually. He bought podcast equipment, put them in his car, and began recording audio versions of the interviews he was already conducting for the publication. Eventually, the project expanded into video and a team formed around it.

“There was no grand plan to be this,” Akan says. “The live shows came as an if, as a natural order of things. You do things online, people love it, people identify with it. And you could put them in a room and do the same thing.”

There were other stops along the way. Akan joined News Central, a Lagos-based broadcaster, to run the entertainment desk when it started in 2019. He helped develop programmes for the station, but he soon left because television work didn’t suit him. He preferred depth and long-form storytelling, while television’s demands pushed him toward shorter, faster formats. He knew the arrangement was unlikely to last because the format didn’t fit the way he wanted to work. He also worked at The Conversation Africa, a role that put him at the intersection of academia and the public.

By the time he launched his Afrobeats Intelligence podcast, all these acts had to end, and he had to focus squarely on the work. At some point, the project had to stop because of creative differences with his partners. Akan could not find a version of the project he believed in. “If I don’t believe in this, then why am I doing it?” Untangling himself from the relationship took a year and significant resources. But he left.

Right now, Akan says he feels fortunate to be working from a position where he has access to people, resources and funding, and where others are willing to believe in what he is building. That creates another responsibility: to make that trust worthwhile by getting better and building more carefully.

The Joey Akan Experience is part of that effort. It extends the same curiosity that shaped his music journalism into a broader media project, letting him explore people, ideas, and culture beyond music. “The Joey Akan experience, it’s my gift to the media space.” He argues that music has benefited from dedicated media projects such as Afrobeats Intelligence, while other parts of the culture have yet to receive the same depth of attention. “I use the word gift because music has enjoyed too much. Think about it. Do we have an equivalent of Afrobeats intelligence for Nollywood? No, we don’t.”

The uncertainty doesn’t bother him as much as it might have earlier in his career. But he trusts his judgement, his team, and the market enough to keep moving. On a personal level, he doesn’t know exactly what comes next. He knows only that he believes in it. For Joey Akan, that has usually been enough.

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1. The kids are alright

In October, Kenyan media platform Mtoto News plans to bring a children’s news bulletin to NTV, one of the country’s largest television stations. Mtoto News helps children report on the world around them: they propose programmes, choose subjects and conduct interviews, while adults provide training, production, and editorial support.

The partnership represents a bigger commitment to television. Last year, Mtoto partnered with Akili TV to broadcast two of its programmes. One, Mission Accomplished, featured two 12-year-olds interviewing people about their careers, giving other children a window into adults’ working lives. The other was a legal-literacy programme in which children questioned lawyers and policymakers about the laws meant to protect them.

The aim was to introduce these programmes, which began on YouTube and have attracted audiences across East Africa, to more viewers and learn how families responded. That family audience is central to Mtoto’s interest in NTV. In its view, it is doubling down on what already works: giving children space to tell their stories and bringing those stories into family homes. Mtoto hopes the bulletin will make children’s concerns part of the wider national conversation as Kenya’s elections draw nearer, while giving young viewers the chance to see children like them asking questions and explaining the world.

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Children’s media is usually understood as content made for children, with adults deciding what they should know and what will hold their attention. Mtoto News gives children a role in those decisions.

For Mtoto, television offers a way to build on years of helping children make themselves heard. Its partnerships give that work access to larger audiences without having to build those distribution networks itself. Advertising could eventually help cover production costs, alongside the grants and consultancy income that already support the organisation. The question is how Mtoto can fund this wider ambition: reaching more children, supporting more of them to create, and keeping their ideas central to the work.

2. Origin story

Mtoto News launched in 2017 when Jennifer Kaberi, a child development specialist in Nairobi, noticed a problem with the media her daughter consumed. Many of the characters did not look like her, so Kaberi decided to fix it. Mtoto, the Swahili word for “child”, was the result.

Mtoto News started as an X (formerly Twitter) account sharing child-friendly content. Its first programme was News Insights. A child would come into Mtoto’s Nairobi office to present news items, while the team gathered footage around the city. The segments were packaged as a show: news made by children for other children. X was not the best place for this, so YouTube became the main distribution platform, alongside TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook.

Growth came through training. Mtoto began hosting digital-literacy sessions that attracted children who wanted to write, host podcasts, or present shows, and the organisation developed outlets for those interests. Alongside its YouTube shows, it began publishing two quarterly magazines, one for 13- to 17-year-olds and another for children under 12, alongside storybooks. Children submit stories, which staff edit and design. Copies are sold through an online shop or printed with partner funding for distribution to schools.

Mtoto also produces around ten shows and podcasts led by children. Its Student Press Action Network establishes journalism clubs in Kenyan schools. It has also expanded into events. Children working with Mtoto proposed a gathering where young people from across the continent could compare experiences. Mtoto’s first African Children’s Summit brought between 300 and 400 children to Nairobi in 2023. Participants voted to hold the next gathering in South Africa, and a third is planned for Sierra Leone in 2027.

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3. Who pays the piper?

The global children’s media market is worth billions of dollars, but much of that value is captured by organisations that make media for children, not children making media for themselves. The latter has a basic problem: the content is hard to monetise. Advertisers want to reach children, because children shape much of what their parents buy. But that money goes to whatever holds children’s attention longest, which is usually cartoons and entertainment, not shows in which a 12-year-old questions a lawyer. On YouTube, videos marked as made for children cannot carry personalised ads, so they earn less. Organisations that have tried to live off the content alone have struggled.

Recognition is not enough. Children’s Express, the American news organisation staffed by young reporters, won Emmy and Peabody awards but closed in 2001. At its closure, the Kellogg Foundation provided 95% of its income. YR Media in Oakland won two Peabodys and placed stories on NPR. It shut down in 2024. Prestige did not translate into income. Mtoto already has this problem: its Akili partnership did not generate revenue and only provided access to a wider audience. If the NTV deal follows the same pattern, the broadcaster gets the programme and the goodwill, while Mtoto carries the cost.

Mtoto has built relationships with children, parents, and schools. Those relationships, combined with its production skills, could become its strongest commercial assets. Helping children create journalism generates several kinds of value: children learn, schools gain teaching programmes, broadcasters receive content, and institutions gain a better understanding of young people’s experiences. The challenge is finding buyers for each without auctioning off the children’s freedom to speak.

A solution is to charge for teaching the skills that make production possible. IndyKids in the United States offers an example. Founded in 2005, it publishes journalism produced by children and runs workshops where participants pitch, report, write, and edit with professional mentors. Its advertised autumn workshop costs $240, with scholarships available. IndyKids’s content pipeline gives the training a clear path: children make something that people beyond their classroom can read. The organisation can charge for that learning experience without requiring the newspaper itself to cover every cost. But it exists in a market with a more robust media ecosystem and audiences with significant ability to pay for content.

Grants and consultancy work provide most of Mtoto’s income. Its services include child-friendly materials on subjects such as cyberbullying and climate change, training for journalists who report on children, and, through Kutunga, a sister design academy co-founded by Kaberi, training for developers, designers, and other technologists to build digital products with children’s safety in mind. Mtoto has also run workshops in which children advised TikTok on safety and content. However, this work comes one project at a time, mostly from development organisations whose budgets rise and fall. Mtoto could turn it into repeat services with set prices. These could include a trained panel of children that companies consult before launching products, regular research on how Kenyan children use media, and safety reviews for platforms and edtech firms under growing pressure to show they protect young users. Those clients have bigger and steadier budgets.

Mtoto has a plausible path to sustainability. Its strongest prospect is a business in which training and consultancy help pay for journalism made by children. It already earns money from those services. What remains unclear is whether customers will pay regularly, and enough to cover both the services they buy and the editorial work that generates little income. In recent years, the answer has been: not likely.

The international funding environment that supports organisations like Mtoto is shrinking. That brings greater pressure to find commercial income just as development organisations, which make up a large part of its likely consultancy customers, face tighter budgets themselves. More television exposure will not resolve that question unless broadcasters or advertisers contribute to production costs.

Mtoto also faces limits on what it can sell. A consultancy client must be able to hear criticism of its product. An advertiser must accept that children’s concerns will not always make comfortable television. If winning contracts requires Mtoto to narrow who participates or what they can say, it risks weakening the very work that makes it useful.

Diversification therefore matters, but several unreliable income streams do not automatically make a sustainable business. Mtoto needs repeat customers, contracts that cover the full cost of delivery, and enough income left over to support its journalism. It has created a way for children to participate in media. Its next task is to prove that enough institutions will consistently pay to keep that participation possible.

Editor’s note: We have updated this article to clarify that Mtoto News’s television partnerships are primarily intended to expand its reach, rather than generate revenue. Following feedback from the organisation, we revised passages that placed too much emphasis on television revenue as a factor in its financial sustainability. The article’s broader analysis of funding and sustainability remains.

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“The first thing that I ever wanted to become was a novelist.”

Selly Thiam first imagined a career as a writer when an author visited her school in Chicago. She was eager to hear about the work and had plenty of questions. By the end of the visit, she knew it was what she wanted to do. Her teachers had already noticed her writing ability and encouraged it through programmes where she read, discussed literature and learnt how stories worked.

Her mother had a question of her own: how would this pay the bills? She was a schoolteacher who encouraged her daughters’ curiosity, took them to arts programmes, and suggested careers in medicine and law. Both went into the arts. Thiam remembers the suggestions as just that; her mother had given them considerable room to imagine other lives.

Making a living from that imagination would occupy Thiam for years. Today, it is the question behind AQ Studios, the company she is developing to invest in African creators and help them build businesses around their work.

Thiam grew up in a politically engaged household. Her Senegalese father and African American mother shared a pan-Africanist outlook and taught their children that Black people’s lives were connected across borders. When Nelson Mandela was released, her mother made Thiam and her younger sister sit through the television coverage. Even buying fruit involved a political choice: the family avoided grapes in solidarity with California farm workers.

Another consequence of this high political awareness was that Thiam also grew up surrounded by people from different parts of the world. Her father’s African community in Chicago included Nigerians, Haitians, Senegalese, and Ghanaians. Jackson Park, home to the University of Chicago, brought professors and families from Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America into her orbit. For Thiam, Africa was part of family life long before she began writing stories about the continent.

Though her parents nudged her towards becoming a doctor, it was clear early on that Thiam had a gift for writing and telling stories. She began aspiring to be a writer when she attended a career talk in grade school where a writer spoke. “I was hooked. I had so many questions for her. I decided that this is what I was going to do.”

She began to pursue writing seriously, and it soon got her her first job teaching poetry classes for young children while she studied creative writing at university. Then she got a job in a Chicago public high school. The classroom demanded more than lessons. Some students were hungry; others had parents in prison. After Hurricane Katrina, children displaced from New Orleans arrived carrying experiences their classmates had not shared. Thiam used the arts to help them talk and tried to make the classroom a safe space. She loved the work, but eventually, she got exhausted.

Before she left, however, something outside school began pulling her toward another profession. One day, she stopped at a restaurant near her apartment and picked up the Windy City Times, a local queer newspaper. On its cover was a report about FannyAnn Eddy, a lesbian activist murdered in her office in Sierra Leone. Thiam was shaken not only by the crime but by the silence surrounding it. “There’s also just an absence of stories from this region. Where are the queer people? Where’s the story being documented? What is people’s lived experience? It woke up something in me where I realised I had no idea what was going on.” She wanted to change that.

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Thiam began by interviewing Africans in the diaspora. At a conference in New Orleans, she met a friend of Eddy’s and arranged to interview her in Toronto. A public radio producer lent her recording equipment and showed her how to use it. A fellow teacher lent her a car. That interview reached National Public Radio (NPR). It was Thiam’s first step into audio journalism. It was also the beginning of None on Record.

The name came from an earlier interview with a Nigerian priest seeking asylum in the United States. Thiam had asked whether there was a word for gay or lesbian people in his language. He told her he had “none on record”. The phrase stayed with her. For Thiam, None on Record became a response to the claim that queer people did not exist in Africa, or that queer histories on the continent had no past. “The first step in this is to create an oral history,” she says. “One thing people can’t say is that we didn’t exist because we exist.”

Around the same time, Thiam saw a job ad from StoryCorps in Brooklyn, New York. The organisers were preparing to launch an initiative to document the oral histories of African Americans across the United States and archive them in the Library of Congress. They needed a producer on the project. Thiam got the job and moved to New York.

When her contract at StoryCorps ended, she took a role at PBS, then went to graduate school at New York University for a master’s degree in journalism. While there, she became a Carnegie Fellow and an investigative journalism fellow for ABC News. For her graduate thesis, she made a documentary shot in the UK called Seeking Asylum, in which she followed African asylum seekers through the British asylum system.

After graduate school, Thiam briefly worked at The New York Times. She had the training and connections to keep building a career in New York. But the prospect was becoming less appealing. Thiam speaks warmly of her Times colleagues. Her frustration concerned the wider climate in America and journalism as racial justice protests gathered force. She recalls Black journalists being considered too personally invested to cover stories involving Black people, while white journalists’ objectivity went unquestioned. “I don’t want to lend my genius to this,” she remembers thinking. “I want to go build something and see what happens.”

She moved to Kenya to build None on Record. Activists there had already asked for help establishing an organisation around the work. She had to take responsibility for fundraising, staff, safety assessments and programmes. Keeping stories on record now required keeping an organisation running. In 2018, the team launched AfroQueer, bringing years of documentation into a documentary podcast. Thiam says it attracted hundreds of thousands of listens and earned awards. Invitations followed, and people began asking about the wider possibilities for African podcasting.

The team could use what it had learnt to support other storytellers. AQ Studios took its name from AfroQueer, retaining a connection to the work that had made it possible. One early project was adapting the blog Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women into a podcast. Production began during the pandemic. For a team accustomed to travelling to collect audio, it meant figuring out how to produce documentary storytelling remotely. But it also taught Thiam something more important: how to build value around intellectual property that wasn’t originally hers.

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The success with AfroQueer attracted interest from production companies looking to adapt the IP into films and television series. So Thiam met with Hollywood executives and filmmakers to discuss what the podcast could become. And naturally, she became curious and wanted to understand the mechanics. “How do I move IP along a value chain? How do I take an audio podcast and turn it into a film? Or how do I take an audio podcast and turn it into a book and then turn it into something else so that the IP can continue to grow and expand?”

She had moved back to the US during the pandemic. So she began meeting with writers and others in the entertainment industry. Then the writers’ strike happened, and for her, it was a blessing and a curse. Though that period stalled much of the work and deals that could have happened, it also gave her access to people who would normally have been too busy to speak with her. “It opened my eyes, really, to thinking about how IP functions as a valuable asset. And how you can take IP and turn it into so many different things.”

Eventually, she got the opportunity to put what she had learned during this period into practice. The Adventures podcast later morphed into a live show held twice in London, with guests like Yvonne Orji, Kelechi Okafor, and Mona Eltahawy. By 2022, however, Thiam felt ready to move beyond None on Record. By then, she had been on the project for over a decade.

At the same time, she could see the media business changing. Raising money had become harder, podcasting was evolving, and resources for creative projects were shrinking. But Thiam saw the problem slightly differently. “I was like, there’s money, but how do we get the money to the people who actually know how to make these really incredible things?” The problem wasn’t simply a shortage of ideas, but building an efficient value-exchange system around them. Creators needed help understanding how to monetise their work, identify audiences, approach streamers, use platforms such as YouTube, build sustainable businesses, and turn audiences into revenue.

This realisation drove Thiam to figure it out. So she, once again, decided she needed to go back to school. She went looking for an MBA for creatives and found the Creative Business Master’s programme at the National Film and Television School in London. By the end of her first year, she had a clearer idea of what AQ Studios needed to become: a venture studio.

This newfound focus became the new mission for a new iteration of her company. It would now invest in African creators regardless of where they were based, providing them with capital and, most importantly, production expertise, networks and business support. It would also take a stake in some of the intellectual property it helps develop, depending on the level of investment.

For Thiam, it represents another evolution in a career built around storytelling. She spent years documenting stories that she believed needed to exist. Now she is trying to build the businesses that allow those stories to survive, grow, and create value.

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1. Brave new world

On 23 May earlier this year, Funke Akindele released Omo Ghetto: The Saga on her YouTube channel. The film arrived in two parts; together, they have since gathered more than four million views. Five years earlier, Omo Ghetto saw a very different kind of success. Released in cinemas in December 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, it went on to earn more than ₦600 million at the Nigerian box office and became the highest-grossing Nigerian film of all time.

It held the top position until Akindele took it back from herself. The films that eventually displaced it—Battle on Buka Street, A Tribe Called Judah, and Everybody Loves Jenifa—were largely her own. Omo Ghetto now sits seventh on the all-time list. But even five years later, it remains one of the clearest examples of Akindele’s ability to turn Nigerian films into mass-market events.

A film like Omo Ghetto follows a fairly predictable journey. It spends a few months in cinemas before moving to television or a streaming platform where it begins a second commercial life. Omo Ghetto did this too. After its cinema run, the film became available on Netflix. Then, in May, it appeared on YouTube. It was particularly interesting that Nollywood’s most commercially successful producer would eventually put one of her biggest films on a platform anyone could watch.

But this is the brave new world Nollywood now inhabits. Over the last few years, YouTube has become one of the most important pieces of infrastructure in Nigerian filmmaking. Every year, over 1,100 films are released on the platform. Some are uploaded by filmmakers with a few thousand subscribers. Others come from channels with audiences in the millions.

Around those channels, an entire industry has formed. Producers such as Ruth Kadiri, Uduak Isong and Omoni Oboli have built businesses that increasingly resemble independent film studios and television networks at the same time. They commission scripts, finance films, assemble casts, hire directors and crews, oversee post-production and release new movies directly to audiences they have accumulated themselves.

The films have created their own stars. Actors who may not regularly headline Nigeria’s biggest cinema releases can appear repeatedly before millions of viewers. Writers, directors, cinematographers, editors, production managers, sound engineers and marketers move between productions designed specifically for these channels. A film can be written, shot, edited, packaged and uploaded within weeks before much of the same machinery begins working on the next one. This is the essence of the Nollywood YouTube industrial complex: the network of filmmakers, production companies, actors, crew members, and audiences that has grown around producing Nigerian movies for YouTube. And increasingly, this is where Nollywood operates as an industry.

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2. Home videos find a new home

To understand the Nollywood YouTube industrial complex, however, you first have to understand what came before it. Nollywood has always favoured direct-to-consumer distribution.

In Communiqué 54, we explained why.

“Nigeria underwent a structural adjustment programme in the late 1980s that transformed its foreign exchange and trade policies. The resulting inflation and currency devaluation hit the cinema and film industry particularly hard. Cinema operators found it difficult to maintain their facilities and import new films as middle-class Nigerians, the primary customers, could no longer afford tickets. The film industry began developing against this backdrop, prioritising a direct-to-consumer distribution model that excluded the cinema middlemen altogether. This model favoured high-volume, low-cost, low-quality productions distributed via VHS tapes and later CDs for home viewing.”

This version of Nollywood first appeared on YouTube. Distributors who had already released films on VHS, VCDs, and other distribution channels began uploading old catalogues to the platform. One of the earliest examples was NollywoodLove, the YouTube channel that eventually became iROKOtv. Its catalogue of old Nollywood films showed that there was an online audience for Nigerian movies.

In the early 2010s, commercial banks began building their own media operations on YouTube. GTBank launched Ndani TV in 2012, UBA followed with REDTV in 2015, and Access Bank launched Accelerate TV in 2016. These channels were marketing engines before they were media businesses. Their primary goal was not to earn advertising revenue from YouTube, but to associate the banks with culture and reach a younger audience spending more time online. Because the banks had marketing budgets, they didn’t need the channels to be immediately profitable. They could finance original web series and release them for free. Early shows such as Skinny Girl in Transit, Gidi Up, and The Men’s Club helped set the expectation that audiences could watch original Nollywood content directly on YouTube. This is the foundation the industry currently stands on.

At the same time, independent filmmakers began to realise that they could bypass traditional distributors and go direct to the audience. In 2017, Ruth Kadiri decided to try. She was already producing films for outlets like DStv and iROKO. Kadiri had two films ready for distribution. Rather than sell both, she let a distributor take one and uploaded the second one to YouTube. The numbers were not massive, but they were encouraging enough for her to keep at it. Many producers would eventually follow her. As the economics of African streaming grew more uncertain and international platforms reduced investment in Nigerian originals, that trickle of filmmakers moving toward YouTube became a wave.

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3. Inside the complex

YouTube’s economics have shaped the way films are made. Nollywood producers strive to make them as cheaply and as quickly as possible. Average production costs range from ₦12–15 million. “The unofficial rule of Nollywood YouTube is that you cannot spend too much money. If you do, you may not make your money back,” Oma Areh said to Communiqué. That pressure compresses production. Some producers can shoot an entire film in four days. The consequences are visible in the films themselves. There is less time for rehearsals, elaborate set-ups, multiple locations or long shooting schedules.

The larger production houses have found ways to make that model even cheaper through economies of scale. Rather than assemble a new crew for every film, some maintain a stable group of directors, writers, editors, cinematographers, sound teams and, in some cases, actors on salaries. That removes the cost and uncertainty of repeatedly hiring freelancers. Location is particularly important. Renting houses and other spaces repeatedly can quickly inflate a budget, so some production houses buy or lease properties and reuse them across several films. “The challenge is making the same places look different.” Precious Kadiri, a producer at Ruth Kadiri Films, said to Communiqué. “A producer may redress a house, change the interiors or occasionally move exterior scenes elsewhere, but if you produce frequently you will have to rent out a separate location so viewers do not feel as though every film is happening in the same world.”

Then there is the question of length. The web series that helped establish Nigerian filmmaking on YouTube have increasingly given way to full-length films. A 30-minute episode provides fewer opportunities to insert ads than a film running for 90 minutes or two hours. Series still exist, but they have been stretched. Many now run for as long as 90 minutes, the average length of a feature film. So producers concentrate on making a single long production, market it heavily and try to maximise the first few days after release like a theatrical opening weekend.

For an established channel with over a million followers, four million views can be enough to cover the cost of production. But four million views are not always worth the same amount. A million views can earn between $1,500 and $5,000, depending on your audience’s location. Large channels with significant foreign audiences can earn as much as $10,000 per million. Producers therefore build release schedules around the diaspora. “A lot of releases are also timed around when they know that these people are going to be awake and they will have a break from work,” Areh said. At the top end, the numbers become significant. A large channel releasing a film every week can generate between $80,000 and $150,000 a month.

Beyond YouTube advertising, producers are increasingly monetising through brand placements. Remittance companies are particularly active because many of these films attract large Nigerian audiences in the US, UK and Canada, which make up a significant percentage of their users.

There are also parallel French-language channels. The same films are subtitled in French and uploaded separately for Francophone Africa and the French-speaking diaspora, allowing one production to earn twice. These parallel channels can generate an additional $20,000 to $50,000 a month.

The National Film and Video Censors Board is now trying to bring the Nollywood industry on YouTube more firmly within its control. The Board says films released on YouTube must be classified before distribution and has warned that unclassified titles could face takedown orders. In August, the Board moved against Living in Colours, a Prism House Studio film set to be released on YouTube, citing both its unclassified status and the Same-Sex scenes in the trailer contravening Nigeria’s Same Sex Act. The Board was able to stop the film’s physical premiere in Lagos and filed a suit to block its release, but it has since been released on YouTube.

Classification matters for the industry. It will introduce another step into a production cycle designed to move from script to release within weeks. This could mean additional fees, longer timelines and more compliance work, costs that larger production houses may absorb more easily than smaller filmmakers. But it could also formalise an ecosystem that already employs actors, writers, directors, editors, cinematographers and marketers at significant scale.

The bigger question is what happens as YouTube filmmaking stops being treated as a side market and becomes recognised as Nollywood itself. Producers can now own their audiences, earn in foreign currency, build catalogues that generate revenue long after release without depending on cinemas or streaming commissions.

Yet that independence comes with a different kind of dependence. The industry is heavily exposed to one global platform: its algorithms, advertising rates, monetisation policies and ability to deliver valuable diaspora audiences. Producers must also work out whether they can improve production quality without breaking the low-cost economics that made the model possible.

Nollywood has once again built a distribution system around the limitations of the one before it. The Nollywood YouTube industrial complex is already here, but it’s not yet clear how it will shape the industry’s future.

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When we announced the Communiqué IRL Global Tour, it was driven by the belief that the future of Africa’s media and creative economy will be shaped not only on the continent, but wherever Africans are building, creating, investing, and influencing industries around the world.

In June, we took that first giant step.

Our London edition marked Communiqué IRL’s first international gathering, and it became yet another reminder of why this work matters. We welcomed founders, executives, researchers, investors, and ecosystem builders from across Africa and the diaspora for an evening of thoughtful conversations, meaningful connections, and new collaborations.

This October, Communiqué IRL heads to New York City in partnership with Syracuse University’s Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, Malindi Press and ChapterIP.

Together, we’re convening founders, investors, platform leaders, media executives, researchers, and policymakers to explore the evolution of the media and creator economy across Africa and the United States.

As Africa’s media and creative economy continues to mature, there has never been a more important time to strengthen connections between African and global ecosystems.

New York provides the perfect backdrop for exchanging ideas, building relationships, and exploring how creators, media companies, platforms, investors, and entrepreneurs can shape the industry’s next chapter together.

The evening will feature:

• An exclusive intelligence briefing on the state of Africa’s media and creator economy.

• A panel discussion exploring the future of media entrepreneurship, creator-led businesses, and cross-market collaboration.

• A curated networking reception designed to spark meaningful conversations and lasting connections.

Registration is now open. If you’re based in New York—or plan to be in the city this October—we’d love you to join us.

Seats are limited, so we encourage you to register early.

If you’re interested in partnering with us on this edition of Communiqué IRL, we’d love to hear from you at partnerships@communiquehq.com.

“Two days before the trip I was called and told, ‘Can you be in Nairobi in two days?’”

Jocelyne Muhutu-Remy was 26, a junior reporter at a Paris-based magazine called L’Autre Afrique, when the Office of the United Nations Secretary-General called. Kofi Annan was about to begin his first trip to Africa as Secretary-General, travelling to 10 countries across the continent. Muhutu-Remy had heard about the trip and called his office to ask if she could join the press contingent.

At first, she was dismissed. She was young, unknown, and working for a small publication. But the delegation was about to leave without much African representation in its press corps. Someone remembered the junior reporter who had asked to come. So, with barely any notice, she packed.

That instinct to ask even when the obvious answer is no has shaped much of Muhutu-Remy’s career. Over three decades, she has moved from journalism into media sales, entertainment distribution, global content deals, technology partnerships and music streaming. She has worked at Reuters, Viacom, Disney, and Meta. Today, she is Managing Director, Sub-Saharan Africa for Spotify.

On paper, the moves can look unexpected. In her own telling, they connect to a much older idea: Africa should be able to tell fuller stories about itself.

Muhutu-Remy was born in Ethiopia to a Rwandan mother and Burundian father. Her mother worked at the Organisation of African Unity, now the African Union. The institution was not just her mother’s workplace; it was part of Muhutu-Remy’s childhood.

They lived close to it. Her family doctor was there. She spent time in its corridors and compounds, surrounded by people from across the continent. At school and at home, she met people from different countries, languages, and cultures. She learned to read from the reports her mother brought home: documents on human rights, development projects, and the Pan-African project. But beyond her corner of the world, Ethiopia was living through a brutal communist regime. She also remembers the famine coverage that came to define the country internationally in the 1980s. “The only thing the world could talk about with regard to Ethiopia was the famine, when the picture on the ground was actually much more nuanced.”

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When the time came to choose a career, Muthu-Remy’s options were relatively limited. Diplomacy, journalism, or conference interpreting were the obvious paths, and at first, the latter won. “I wanted to become a conference interpreter. It was a very common job around me. People were either translators or conference interpreters. And that was really the Holy Grail: to become one.” After receiving an OAU scholarship to study in France, she started a programme in French, English, and Spanish literature, preparing for a career in interpretation.

Then she saw what the work would demand. “Conference interpreting was a very lonely job,” she says. “You travel all the time; you go from conference to conference.” Two years in, she decided to switch to journalism. It made more sense; the press had always been around her. As a child, she read magazines like Jeune Afrique and The Economist. She listened to the BBC and Voice of America. She was curious about politics, geopolitics, and the world beyond her immediate environment. Writing came naturally too; she graduated from high school with the top mark in writing.

She applied to journalism school and passed the competitive entrance examination. There, as the only black student, she imagined covering French politics for a major newspaper or broadcaster. Her professors and classmates suggested African publications instead. She recalls their advice: “That’s more suitable for you.” L’Autre Afrique nevertheless offered work she wanted to do. She wanted to cover the continent beyond familiar headlines and stereotypes. There, Muhutu-Remy began to see “narrative change” as more than an abstract idea.

Then came the Kofi Annan trip. For Muhutu-Remy, the most difficult stop was Rwanda, four years after the genocide. Annan’s role at the UN during that period made the visit emotionally charged. The delegation was not warmly received. For a young journalist with personal ties to Rwanda, it was a painful and defining experience.

After France, she and her fiancé, now her husband, decided to move to Nairobi. They worked as freelancers before she joined Reuters.

At Reuters, she first worked on Africa Journal, an English-language television programme adapted for French-speaking audiences. She translated and helped produce stories before becoming a reporter and producer. The role let her work across the continent. Reuters had the resources to send reporters to places many African newsrooms could not easily reach. It also taught her how to manage freelancers and stringers remotely: finding the right people, giving clear instructions, and turning material from different places into a coherent story.

For years, she was happy with her job, but then she began to notice the limits of her experience. She could report on the world while knowing little about the business practices that shaped the media industry. When a colleague working in sales at Reuters resigned, she saw her chance to understand the business of media.

She had never worked in sales. But she understood the product because she had helped make it. She knew the African media landscape through her reporting network. And she spoke French and English, useful in markets across the continent.

The transition was difficult. Suddenly, she was dealing with budgets, revenue targets, quarterly projections, and Excel spreadsheets. But the job gave her a new view of African media. She travelled constantly, meeting broadcasters, newspapers and other media companies.

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By her late thirties, she had a family and a settled life in Nairobi. She began to worry that comfort could become stagnation. “I knew nothing will happen if we stay in Nairobi,” she says. “We will continue doing the same things for another 10 years. Be happy for sure. But we needed discomfort. We needed the unknown.” She and her husband moved to South Africa.

There, she attended the first African Leadership Network conference in 2010 and met Alex Okosi, the current managing director of Google Africa, who was then working at Viacom. Among bankers, investors and consultants, they recognised each other as media people. In May 2011, he called about a distribution role at Viacom. The company needed someone to negotiate distribution agreements for MTV, MTV Base, and Nickelodeon across African markets. Muhutu-Remy knew news content, not entertainment. But the skills travelled.

At Viacom, she learned the entertainment business: licensing, contracts, negotiations, and distribution. The move later prepared her for Disney, where she worked on larger and more complex content deals involving major properties including Marvel, Star Wars, and Pixar. Disney gave her exposure to global entertainment deal-making. It also clarified what she needed from her work. At Reuters and Viacom, she felt African media and entertainment had something to prove. It wasn’t the same feeling at Disney. “I would never again do work where the desire to elevate Africa is not at the centre,” she says.

Facebook offered a route back to that purpose. The company was changing its relationship with news after the Cambridge Analytica scandal and was building a partnerships function. Muhutu-Remy’s experience across news and entertainment made sense for a role supporting African publishers and creators.

Her work included helping media organisations adapt to a changing digital environment. It also included creator partnerships, at a time when many African creators were building audiences but had limited ways to earn from them. In Nigeria, she pushed to make in-stream advertising available to creators. It was one of the most satisfying parts of her time there. “Seeing these people coming from all parts of Africa, but Nigeria in particular, really take on the opportunity,” she says, “that was my biggest satisfaction.”

Then Spotify came calling. The streaming platform had only just launched in Africa. To Muhutu-Remy, Spotify was initially just a global company she admired from afar. She wasn’t even thinking about working for it. The recruitment process lasted through eight or nine interviews. As she spoke about the creative economy and the challenges facing African markets, she began to see the possibility.

The role required breadth. Spotify was building its African operation after the pandemic. There was no office yet, and even the legal structure was still being set up. Muhutu-Remy needed to move between compliance, people management, contracts, marketing, artist support, business targets, and local partnerships. She sees that range as one of her strengths.

At Spotify, her work has centred on two connected goals: helping take African music to the world, and helping build habits of legal music consumption through streaming across the continent. Spotify’s arrival has coincided with a period of extraordinary global growth for African music, especially Afrobeats. The company has also invested in local teams, local payment methods, events and artist programmes. “We are really pushing this startup called Spotify Africa,” she says. “We are building it for ourselves.”

Her thinking now extends beyond music. She is increasingly interested in the infrastructure that supports creative work: royalty systems, regulation, standard recording codes and the systems that help artists track and receive income.

She is also thinking about artificial intelligence.

Her concern is that AI systems may reproduce a narrow view of Africa because so much available information about the continent is framed through development, crisis, or aid. Plenty of information exists about water access, for example. But far less exists about the everyday lives of urban Africans: loneliness, changing family structures, work, leisure, and new social habits. “If you want information about water access in Africa, you’ll find quite a bit,” she says. “But that is because that comes from a development angle.”

For Muhutu-Remy, the next chapter may still be part of the same story. The platforms may change. The industries may change. But the question remains: who gets to define Africa, and with what information?

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1. Afrobeats heads to Toronto

On the evening of August 28, Nigeria’s music, entertainment and media communities gathered at the Canadian Deputy High Commission in Lagos for The Headies: Road to Toronto, an event announcing the next international chapter of Nigeria’s most prominent music awards. After being held in Atlanta twice in 2022 and 2023, the biggest night in Nigerian music was moving again—this time to Toronto.

Toronto, however, is not an entirely new frontier for Nigeria’s creative industries. Increasingly, the city is becoming an overseas base from which Nigerian music, film, and other forms of entertainment can reach audiences across Canada and the wider North American market.

In Communiqué 107, we reported on Snag Productions, a Canadian film distribution company helping African films find a home in North American cinemas. Its strategy is to take films that had already found audiences in Nigeria and other African markets and help them reach African audiences abroad through theatrical releases in Canada and the United States. “For now, Snag Productions’ strategy is still in its early stages. But the first results suggest that the experiment may be working. When Behind The Scenes sold more than 8,000 tickets, it generated over $140,000 in box office revenue. Toyin Abraham’s Oversabi Aunty also found an audience, selling roughly 4,000 tickets and grossing more than $70,000 during its run,” we wrote.

So far, individual artists, promoters, and companies such as Snag Productions have driven much of this crossover. They have identified an audience and built their own routes into the Canadian market, often without a formal structure connecting the creative industries of both countries. But the Canadian government wants to change that. It is now taking an active interest in Nigeria’s creative economy and exploring partnerships across music, film, animation, and other parts of the sector. Through these relationships, Canada wants to move from being simply a destination for Nigerian creativity to becoming an active business and investment partner, using the creative economy to build stronger ties between both countries.

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2. Connective tissue

Following the success of the Headies’ two editions in Atlanta, Carlos Rojas-Arbulú, Canada’s deputy high commissioner in Lagos, sat down with Headies founder Ayo Animashaun in late 2024 to discuss how they could bring the awards to Canada. The conversation began over coffee with a “what if?” — What if the Headies could build on its experience in Atlanta and establish another international base in Toronto?

The awards are one expression of a broader position the Canadian mission has taken on Nigeria’s creative sector. “The strategy that we have at the High Commission in Abuja, and here at the Deputy High Commission, is that we intentionally decided to focus on the creative industries because we understand that the creative sector is a vector for economic development,” Rojas-Arbulú told Communiqué. “We accept the notion that many of these film directors or musicians or companies behind those are in many instances themselves business people who are looking for opportunities to grow their business and also to collaborate and extend partnerships to other sectors of society.” This means engaging Nigerian creatives not only as artists but also as founders, employers, and investors. A musician travelling to Canada for a performance may also have interests in technology, hospitality, agriculture or energy. A filmmaker attending a festival may be searching for distributors, investors, or production partners. Canada’s emerging strategy is to use these moments to connect them with Canadian companies and institutions.

Music is only the latest part of that effort. Film has been one of the Canadian government’s most consistent points of engagement with Nigeria’s creative economy. Over the last five or six years, the mission has organised four delegations of Nigerian filmmakers to the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), which has become Nollywood’s most reliable window into North America. Nigeria’s presence in the programme grew from a single film in 2022 to five in 2025, before settling at three in 2026. Those selections have included some of the most celebrated Nigerian films of the period: Biyi Bandele’s Elesin Oba: The King’s Horseman, Afolabi Olalekan’s Freedom Way, Akinola Davies Jr.’s My Father’s Shadow, the Esiri brothers’ Clarissa, and EbonyLife’s adaptation of Lola Shoneyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives, selected for this year’s festival ahead of its Nigerian release in December. Toronto also hosts the Toronto International Nollywood Film Festival, where commercial Nollywood titles screen for the diaspora.

These appearances do different jobs for the films involved. Some arrive in Toronto for their world premieres, while others use the festival to secure North American attention, meet buyers, or build momentum ahead of their commercial releases. TIFF’s new industry market could make that commercial role even more important by creating a formal space for acquisitions, sales and investment.

Canada has also applied the same thinking to food. The Deputy High Commission has twice hosted Toronto-based food creator Raquel Fox, the founder of Island Girl Foods, in Nigeria. Island Girl Foods began exploring conversations with Nigerian partners to help distribute its Canadian products and expand production to Nigeria, including the possibility of operating from one of Lagos’s free zones.

Canada has also set its sights on animation. It already has a globally recognised animation industry, with production clusters in Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia, benefiting from a deep pool of artists, specialist training programmes, and production companies like Nelvana, Mercury Filmworks, and Jam Filled Entertainment, which have experience delivering work for global entertainment businesses. The Canadian government wants to matchmake these studios with Nigerian animation studios. “We’re trying to see how we can better connect the dots with technology and creativity. For instance, with animation, we have great companies out of Montreal, Vancouver and Victoria. And I think that’s probably the next round. We have to get to the place where we have clearly outlined what our pool of companies is and how we better match them with those Nigerian companies that are looking for partners, investors, and a certain level of expertise,” Rojas-Arbulú said.

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3. Reverse cultural diplomacy

When governments use the creative industries as a diplomatic tool, the most familiar model is outward-facing. A country exports its music, films, fashion and other cultural products to build influence abroad. South Korea’s use of K-pop, television and film to strengthen its global image is perhaps the most commonly cited example.

But cultural diplomacy can also work in the opposite direction. Instead of just exporting its own culture, a country can position itself as a platform for another country’s creative industry. It can open its stages, festivals, institutions, funding programmes, and business networks to foreign creators. The visiting creatives gain access to new audiences and markets, while the host country builds goodwill and develops commercial relationships with an influential industry it did not create.

France’s engagement with Africa’s creative industries offers one of the clearest examples of how this can evolve. In July 2018, during a visit to the New Afrika Shrine in Lagos, French President Emmanuel Macron announced plans for an African cultural season in France. Macron promised that the programme would introduce French audiences to contemporary African fashion, film, music and art, with African professionals shaping how the continent was presented.

The result was the Africa2020 Season. Originally scheduled for 2020 but delayed by the pandemic, the programme eventually ran from December 2020 until September 2021 under Senegalese curator N’Goné Fall. It was designed to invite French audiences to understand the world from an African perspective. The season extended beyond conventional exhibitions and performances. Its programme covered art, science, technology, entrepreneurship and education, with projects developed jointly by African professionals and French institutions. According to the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs, Africa2020 included more than 1,500 events across 81 French cities and attracted over four million spectators. Building on the success of Africa2020, the French government launched Création Africa, a programme to move the relationship closer to investment and market access.

Institut Français runs Création Africa on behalf of the Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs, funded through the Fonds Équipe France Création, and delivered with the AFD, Expertise France, Bpifrance, and the French cultural network on the continent. Where Africa2020 was a season, Création Africa is a pipeline: it covered 16 priority countries at launch in 2023 and 33 by 2024, including Nigeria, and it finances work across fashion, audiovisual, music, gaming, esports, comics and contemporary art. Unlike a cultural festival organised primarily for an audience, Création Africa was designed to bring African creative businesses into the same rooms as French investors, institutions, and potential commercial partners. The first forum took place in Paris and drew more than 600 participants. They included 323 African guests from 35 countries and representatives from 80 French companies.

The second forum moved from Paris to Lagos in October 2025. Organised in collaboration with the Lagos State Government and Nigeria’s Ministry of Art, Culture, Tourism and the Creative Economy, it brought together more than 1,000 participants from over 40 African countries and Europe. Across three days, the forum hosted roundtables, masterclasses, concerts, and pitching sessions, including a showcase of the Lagos x Paris Fashion and Design Accelerator. The Fashion and Design Accelerator provided Nigerian brands with several months of training and support as they prepared to enter international markets.

Canada is still at the beginning of this journey. Unlike France, it does not yet have a Création Africa-style programme that combines cultural exchange with funding, training, and structured access to investors and markets. What it has is growing demand for Nigerian culture, a large diaspora, established film connections and a government that now sees creative industries as part of its economic relationship with Nigeria.

The Headies will therefore be an important test. Its Toronto edition can prove that a Nigerian cultural event can create opportunities beyond ticket sales, performances, and publicity. But the deeper measure of success will be the partnerships, investments and market access that survive after the ceremony ends.

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Did you know selling 10,000 copies of a book is more than enough to earn you bestseller status in Nigeria?

With figures that low, it’s no surprise why publishing in the country is often described as an industry with too many problems and not enough money. Distribution is fragmented, purchasing power is weak, and piracy is an issue that never seems to go away.

Yet, there are numbers like these: 25,000 copies of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count were sold in Nigeria within days of release, while Femi Otedola’s Making It Big sold 16,000 copies in Nigeria and another 4,000 in the UK within three weeks.

These figures might look like isolated successes. But dig deeper, and you find that the same publisher was behind both. Then the question becomes how one publisher managed to sell books at this scale in such dire market conditions.

That publisher is Narrative Landscape, and in this episode of Creative Capital, we break down the decisions that helped turn it from being just a boutique publishing outfit into one of Nigeria’s most interesting publishing businesses.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How the founders used publishing services as a low-risk way to finance their business before moving into traditional publishing.

• The value of accruing relationship capital in the African book publishing industry.

• Why Narrative Landscape treats book launches as 360-degree marketing experiences.

• How the company worked around Nigeria’s broken distribution infrastructure using independent bookstores and direct-to-consumer fulfilment.

Watch the full episode on YouTube here.

“I realised I love art. I love creative stuff, but I was not a very good artist.”

Sam Onyemelukwe made that discovery during his first two years at the University of Southern California. He had chosen Fine Arts because he loved drawing, jewellery, and making things. But art school placed his work alongside that of people with gifts he knew he lacked.

He could have walked away from creativity. Instead, he looked for another way to remain close to it. Whenever Onyemelukwe reached the limits of what he could do as an artist or musician, he found that he was better at building the machinery around the work. “I’m more creative as a businessman,” he says.

It took him from computer graphics and Disney to a clothing company, a rap collective, a Nigerian record label, MTV and, eventually, TRACE. Together, the moves became an education in how creative businesses are built. Today, Onyemelukwe is one of the main reasons the TRACE brand became synonymous with African music. He was instrumental in pushing it out of a single generalist channel into genre-specific arms like TRACE Naija and TRACE Gospel. But his journey to this converging point is much wilder and more winding than this role might initially suggest.

Onyemelukwe was born in Lagos in 1971, the youngest of three children. His father rose from a village childhood to become the first Nigerian chief electrical engineer at the Electricity Corporation of Nigeria. His American mother came to Nigeria with the Peace Corps in 1962. They met and built their life in the country.

At Hillcrest School in Jos, Onyemelukwe studied with Nigerians and the children of missionaries from around the world. When he had to leave for the United States at about 16, he was heartbroken. America was not completely unfamiliar; his mother was from there, and he had lived there briefly as a child, but it changed how other people saw him. Some Black Americans treated him as white; some white Americans treated him as Black. In Nigeria, people called him Oyinbo.

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He found a place among the creative students. He grew dreadlocks and was given unusual freedom by a father who had tread a more conventional path. Years later, his father admitted that some friends thought he was mad to allow it. “Secretly, I felt like the cool dad because I had this cool son,” he told him.

His father carried that same openness into Onyemelukwe’s decision to study Fine Arts at the University of Southern California. He did not necessarily know what his son would do with an arts degree, but he trusted that he would find his way.

At USC, Onyemelukwe came to a difficult conclusion. He loved drawing, making things, and working with his hands. As a child, he had made jewellery and crafts with his mother. But he could also see the gap between his own work and that of peers who were likely to become exceptional professional artists.

“I couldn’t paint, I couldn’t draw,” he says. “I looked at some of my friends’ work, and I was like, ‘Guy!’”

Instead of walking away from art, he changed the way he engaged with it. USC allowed students to create independent-study courses, so Onyemelukwe proposed one focused on computer graphics. His plan was simple: travel around Los Angeles and meet artists working with computers. At the time, he did not know much about computers. He was not a programmer and had no deep technical background. But he sensed there was something worth exploring.

For his final project, he made a portrait pixel by pixel on an early Apple program. The image was less than an inch wide, but when enlarged, it resembled an impressionist painting. More importantly, the project led him to an artist who knew someone at Disney running post-production and looking for an intern. A few weeks later, Onyemelukwe was working there.

The opportunity did not become a career in Hollywood. Onyemelukwe had taken classes at USC’s film school as a student and worked on student productions, sometimes handling production design, but discovered that he disliked movie sets. Not long after, a friend who was starting a clothing line asked him to create a digital catalogue. Doing that led him to take a larger role within the company, and he left Disney.

Music was developing alongside this work. Onyemelukwe played bass in Dark Leaf, part of a Los Angeles rap scene that included groups such as Jurassic 5 and the Black Eyed Peas. “The funny thing is I actually also wasn’t very good at bass guitar. In fact, if anything, my better instrument should have been percussion drums. But I played it in bands with friends. At that point, it’s not always about being the best instrumentalist in the band.” But he did not need to become the star to understand the opportunity around the music. He wanted to help make it and build a business around it.

That opportunity arrived through his elder brother, China Onyemelukwe, a finance executive who also loved music. The brothers and their friends started DKG Music. One of their early acts was KUSH, the Nigerian gospel group made up of Lara George, TY Bello, Emem Ema, and Dapo Torimiro. “The idea that we had was to bring KUSH to the US and take them to perform in churches and sell CDs in front of churches at $10 a piece.”

Before doing that, however, they needed to create demand at home. Onyemelukwe returned to Lagos to build the group’s image and audience. His earlier experiments suddenly became useful. Friends from the clothing business helped create KUSH’s graphics and branding. Onyemelukwe worked on the video for “Let’s Live Together,” sourcing archival footage of the Nigerian Civil War from NTA. Then he spent six to eight months pushing the group onto television and live stages. The video entered heavy rotation on NTA, AIT, and Silverbird, while KUSH headlined some of MTN’s earliest Yellow Fests.

The American tour never happened. One member could not travel because her mother wanted her to remain in school, and the plan unravelled. The disappointment strained relationships, but the months in Lagos gave him a working knowledge of Nigeria’s entertainment industry. He now had an unusual combination of experience. He understood the American entertainment industry, but he also knew the Nigerian market and the people who could make an international media company work locally.

That trait was quite important to Alex Okosi, who at the time was putting together a team to establish MTV Africa. “Me, Alex, and somebody in the industry that’s around till today had a meeting. Towards the end of the meeting, the guy was laughing, and he said, ‘Alex, this is your guy.’” Okosi hired him. Onyemelukwe spent the next year and seven months helping set up the systems and sell the network’s channels to local television operators.

After MTV Africa, Onyemelukwe was looking for his next move. TRACE, then best known as a French music channel, appeared to have a larger opportunity in Anglophone Africa. Onyemelukwe found an employee’s number on the company website and called. She tried to arrange a conversation with the founder, but weeks passed without a meeting. So he bought a ticket to Paris. He had one day in the city and managed to arrange lunch with TRACE’s chief operating officer and several executives. He pitched a larger commercial and cultural presence in Anglophone Africa. By the end, he felt he had won them over.

Rather than accept a job, Onyemelukwe founded Venator Partners to handle advertising and sponsorship sales for TRACE and other media clients. In 2011, the company secured the master licence for TRACE in Anglophone West Africa. As the TRACE business grew, Venator focused more of its attention on it, helping to localise the brand and develop channels, including TRACE Naija and TRACE Gospel.

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The partnership eventually became something more permanent. While TRACE was changing its shareholders, its co-founder, Olivier Laouchez, proposed bringing Venator fully into the group. TRACE acquired the company after negotiations. Onyemelukwe received an equity position and joined the group’s management.

Building TRACE Nigeria at scale presented a problem that Onyemelukwe’s previous ventures had not. He had run projects, but leading a team exposed how much he still had to learn. He carried a precise picture of how every task should be completed and constantly checked whether people had followed it. “I was stressed out all the time,” he says. He began studying performance management and putting clearer systems in place. The harder lesson was allowing people to produce good work in ways different from his own. It took years, but the organisation slowly became less dependent on his presence. “Life became a lot easier.”

Now Onyemelukwe wants to apply that experience beyond TRACE. He sees creative entrepreneurs with strong ideas but little experience building investable companies, and investors who want exposure to entertainment but struggle to find their way into it. “I want to be a bridge between the creative community and investors,” he says.

He is also interested in the work required to strengthen Nigeria’s creative economy: management systems, capital, intellectual property and coordination between business and government. He points to South Korea, which spent decades developing its cultural industries. Nigeria cannot repeat that path, but he believes the private sector can build more of the missing structure while engaging the government where possible.

It is the same problem Onyemelukwe has been solving since art school. He may not be the person painting the picture, playing the bass line, or standing at the front of the stage. His skill is seeing what the creative work needs around it, then finding the people, money and systems to help it travel.

He never became the artist he wanted to be. Instead, he became an operator, and one could argue the industry needed this version of him more.