1. First movers

In March, EbonyLife Group announced it was entering the microdrama market with Love Me Twice, a vertical short starring Tobi Bakare, Atlanta Bridget Johnson, and Shine Rossman, and directed by Kayode Kasum, which will be released on EbonyLife ON Plus, the producer’s streaming platform. Around the same time, Toribox, which markets itself as Africa’s first microdrama platform, stepped up promotion ahead of a planned launch later this year.

Taken together, the two developments signal that Africa’s microdrama economy is beginning to shift from speculation to market formation. In Communiqué 104, we argued that the continent was structurally positioned to participate in this shift:

“Africa has yet to get in on the game. The continent has a natural affinity for the format. Many of the systems and values that underpin the explosive growth of microdrama—fast production cycles, dialogue-driven narratives, emotionally charged storytelling, and serialised output—are the same strengths that built traditional African film industries like Nollywood. But what will be the continent’s place in the global market?”

That question is now becoming more concrete. The entry of an established producer such as EbonyLife suggests that microdrama is beginning to attract institutional attention, while Toribox’s positioning points to early attempts at building local distribution infrastructure rather than relying solely on imported platforms and formats. To understand whether these moves mark the beginning of a viable industry, we must examine the economics taking shape beneath them: what it costs to produce microdrama in Africa, where revenues are emerging, and which parts of the value chain are most likely to scale first.

2. Counting the cost

In Nigeria and across Africa, it currently costs about $20,000 to produce a 60-episode microdrama. This compares to roughly $100,000 in the United States and around $50,000 in China. At the lower end of the market, newer platforms are beginning to accept shorter, 30-episode formats in a bid to reduce barriers to entry. These can be produced for as little as $10,000.

The cost differential is not accidental. China’s microdrama industry has already undergone several cycles of iteration and scale. Production pipelines are standardised, talent pools are specialised, and infrastructure is optimised for speed. As a result, the ecosystem benefits from economies of scale that newer markets have yet to develop.

In Africa, costs are still being discovered—and one of the most significant drivers is location. Microdramas tend to trade in fantasies of wealth, social ascent, and domestic intrigue, which means they often need to be shot in houses, offices, and environments that can credibly signal status. Renting a suitable location, usually a house, can cost between $370 and $590. Since shoots usually run between five and seven days, location costs alone can quickly become one of the biggest line items in the budget.

After location, the next major cost is the cast. Microdramas tend to avoid A-list actors. The format prioritises narrative intensity over star power. What keeps audiences returning is not the recognisability of faces, but the momentum of the story itself. That has helped keep acting costs relatively contained, while also allowing producers to test new faces. Daily actor rates range from about $110 to $183, depending on the performer. A budget for three lead actors at $147 each over seven days comes to $3,079.

Also, the format deliberately restricts the number of actors. Microdramas tend to keep the principal cast to three people, or at most five. Beyond that, the story risks becoming too complex. The format depends on speed and a tight, dramatic arc. Too many characters create narrative drag and add cost.

After the location and cast comes the crew. This is another area where the format’s apparent simplicity can be misleading. A microdrama may be short, but it still requires a crew able to work quickly and understand the pacing demands of the format. Crew costs can reach $3,665 for a seven-day shoot, with a minimum of $2,932 for a five-day shoot.

Equipment is another major expense. Rentals range from about $366 to $733 per day, depending on the setup. Some productions can be done with two cameras; others require three. Over seven days, equipment costs range from $2,565 to $5,131. Then there is the script and post-production. A good writer costs about $623 at a minimum. Post-production, which includes editing, colour correction, and sound design, starts at around $2,500. In practice, editing is especially important in microdrama because cliffhangers, emotional beats, and paywall tension have to be engineered with precision. The format compresses production, but it does not remove craft.

3. Money trees

Monetisation is what ultimately determines whether the microdrama industry becomes viable. While production costs set the barrier to entry, revenue defines whether that barrier is worth crossing. In Africa, that revenue model is still taking shape—and it begins earlier in the value chain than expected.

Even before producers recoup their investment from finished episodes, the first lever of monetisation is scriptwriting. Microdrama has created a parallel market for high-concept, serialised storytelling, in which writers are commissioned to develop scripts capable of sustaining dozens of short episodes. In this emerging market, African writers are already earning as much as $1,500 per script, depending on the platform and the strength of the idea. “We commission writers, alumni of the academy, on behalf of global platforms to write microdrama scripts.” Ifeoma Areh, convener of the Digital Creator Academy for Africa, told Communiqué. “This is more than their counterparts in Nollywood make.”

Over time, however, the larger monetisation opportunity is expected to come from global microdrama platforms acquiring content from African producers. This model has already taken hold in more mature markets, where platforms fund production or license completed series to fill their content pipelines.

In Africa, this has not yet begun to happen at scale. But when it does, the economics become clearer. Producers expect to earn in the region of $30,000 per project from platform deals, enough to recoup production costs and generate a margin. The implication is that profitability will depend less on direct audience payments and more on the ability to supply content into a global distribution system. For now, the industry remains in a proof-of-concept phase, with producers still testing the economics of local production and platforms still figuring out how African stories fit into global catalogues.

Africa’s microdrama economy remains early and experimental. But the outlines of a business are beginning to emerge. Production budgets are low enough to allow entry, even if they remain high by local standards. Scriptwriting is already functioning as an early monetisation lever, while platform licensing appears to be the most likely path to scale. What is missing is industry maturity: specialist crews, repeatable workflows, financing structures and distribution systems that can turn isolated projects into a continuous market.

Microdrama offers African film industries a rare chance to enter a global format before its hierarchies fully harden. The question is no longer whether the continent has the storytelling instincts for it. It does. The more important question is whether producers, platforms and creative talent can build the systems required to convert that instinct into a durable commercial advantage. The answer will determine whether microdrama remains a niche experiment or becomes a genuine new growth sector.

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1. Farming content

In September 2025, Tech Safari, a publication that had built a reputation for explaining African tech to an international audience, launched a weekly newsletter focused on agriculture across Africa. Ag Safari, the new publication, promised to tell stories about agribusinesses in the same way Tech Safari had covered technology startups, breaking down opportunities that investors and operators might be missing.

Choosing agriculture wasn’t accidental. Across the continent, the sector contributes significantly to GDP but remains underinvested and under-innovated compared to others like fintech. Ag Safari started by profiling startups from the German development agency GIZ’s agritec programme, grouping them by sector to tell broader industry stories. One early piece examined Africa’s dairy industry and why most Africans drink powdered milk instead of fresh milk. However, the newsletter has since evolved beyond startup spotlights to focus on the economic opportunities and systemic challenges that hold the sector back. Within seven months, Ag Safari has grown to over 3,000 subscribers, with more than 80% being C-suite executives and senior stakeholders in agribusinesses.

The agriculture newsletter represents just one part of Tech Safari’s broader business evolution. Earlier this month, the company cemented that evolution with a rebrand that repositioned it from a single publication into a parent brand overseeing multiple entities. Tech Safari now operates recruitment services, runs specialised summits, and has launched programmes targeting the African diaspora. What began as a tech newsletter is quietly becoming something more expansive: a multi-vertical media and services company using information, talent, and convening power to shape key African industries.

2. Origin story

Tech Safari started in 2022. Its founder, Caleb Maru, was travelling across the continent after leaving his job in post-conflict reconstruction. He had spent three years helping to stabilise countries after wars, but found the work wasn’t delivering the impact he had hoped for. He saw bigger opportunities in Africa’s growing tech sector.

Maru began writing LinkedIn posts about his observations of the tech industry. The content resonated particularly with international audiences. A breakthrough came with a single post: Maru created a graphic showing all the people who had left Nigerian payments company Paystack to start their own companies, calling it the “Paystack Mafia”. The post went viral, attracting founders, investors, and media professionals who wanted to connect. That response convinced Maru that something bigger was happening.

He quit his job and moved into his parents’ spare room in Australia for three months, committing to writing about African tech every day. The experiment worked. His posts consistently went viral, building an engaged following of industry insiders and international observers. However, Maru wanted to test whether this digital engagement translated into a real-world community. In 2023, he travelled to the United States and organised meet-ups in San Francisco, Washington DC, and New York. Expecting perhaps 15 people at each event, he was surprised when more than 100 attended almost all of them.

The meet-ups proved that Maru had built something more valuable than a publication; he had created a community of people working in African tech who wanted to connect. That realisation shifted Maru’s thinking from creating content to gathering people, setting the stage for everything that followed. The challenge then became figuring out how to turn that community into a sustainable business while continuing to serve the audience’s needs.

3. The Tech Safari playbook

In Communiqué 75, we wrote about how media businesses can build adjacent businesses on top of their core media product:

“The concept of media as a means to an end is simple: media companies can use the skills they’ve developed in audience engagement, trust, and distribution to test, build, and scale other business ventures. It is the idea that content doesn’t have to be the final product. Instead, it can serve as a platform—a lab, if you will—for testing ideas that have the potential to scale.”

Tech Safari’s growth has closely followed this trajectory. The company first created successful events and helped other organisations tap into its community. Those early meet-ups evolved into more structured gatherings across African cities, consistently drawing hundreds of attendees. This success led to a more focused offering: the Tech Safari Summit, which brought together growth and marketing professionals helping companies figure out how to scale across Africa.

Next came talent, driven by what was already happening within its ecosystem, where people came together to collaborate, connect, and consistently find jobs, investment, and partners at Tech Safari’s events. This organic networking pointed towards the company’s next business line: talent sourcing. Recognising how effectively its community connected job seekers with employers, Tech Safari formalised these interactions into a structured offering called Talent Safari.

“We ran a test to see if we could build a recruitment business,” Caleb Maru told Communique. “We said let’s try it for a few months, and we ended up trying it out for a year. It worked, became a six-figure business, and is profitable.” Talent Safari now operates as a mid-level recruitment platform, leveraging Tech Safari’s community to help employers find candidates across African markets. Some of its clients include Paystack, HoneyCoin, and Turaco.

The agriculture vertical emerged differently. Rather than growing organically from its existing audience, Ag Safari launched through a partnership with GIZ and the World Bank. These organisations have long been involved in unlocking Africa’s agricultural potential. The reasoning was clear: agriculture remains one of the continent’s most important sectors, yet it continues to face coordination challenges.

“There are a number of partners trying to mobilise in this space and struggling,” Maru said. “Given the billions of investment going into the space, if you can create a trusted platform and spaces where you bring people together, you can provide real value to these organisations.”

Building on Ag Safari’s media product, the company launched the Ag Safari Summit, bringing together agribusiness executives, development agencies, and investors for focused discussions on scaling agricultural innovation across the continent. The event attracted partners, including GIZ, the World Bank, and the United Nations, who funded the summit to facilitate connections between financiers, government officials, and agritech companies.

Alongside tech and agriculture, Tech Safari has also begun building a third vertical focused on the African diaspora. This is a natural extension of its early audience. From the beginning, Tech Safari’s content resonated strongly with Africans living abroad—people working in global tech ecosystems but interested in opportunities back home. The early U.S. meet-ups were proof of that demand.

Now, the company is developing programmes specifically targeted at this group. Its diaspora initiative, Building Back Home, targets African diaspora professionals, particularly those in Europe and North America, to help them relocate to the continent to build meaningful ventures. The programme goes beyond typical “move back to Africa” initiatives by focusing on economic impact rather than cultural connection.

The initiative recognises a significant opportunity: millions of Africans living abroad have accumulated capital, skills, and networks that could accelerate development if deployed on the continent. However, most lack the local knowledge, connections, and support systems needed to make the transition successfully.

Building Back Home provides structured support through a fellowship programme that helps diaspora professionals identify opportunities, navigate regulatory environments, and build local networks before making the move. The programme represents a long-term bet that diaspora talent and capital can become a major driver of African economic growth.

Tech Safari’s evolution from newsletter to multi-vertical platform reflects broader changes in how media companies can build sustainable businesses in emerging markets. By focusing on trust and community rather than traditional advertising models, the company has created multiple revenue streams while serving specific industry needs.

This “Media as a means to an end” model appears scalable. Each vertical follows a similar playbook: identify an underserved market, create high-quality content to build credibility, and then develop services and events that address that community’s practical needs. This approach has allowed Tech Safari to generate revenue from day one.

As African economies continue developing, demand for specialised business intelligence and networking will likely grow. Companies like Tech Safari that can combine content, community, and services around specific sectors are positioning themselves to capture significant value in this evolution.

1. A boom masking a quiet bust

By most measures, 2025 was a great year for Lagos-based publisher, Masobe Books. Sanya, a mythology fantasy novel by author Oyin Olugbile, won the prestigious NLNG Nigeria Prize for Literature, taking home its $100,000 prize. Of the 11 books longlisted for the prize last year, five were written by Masobe authors, reinforcing the publisher’s position as one of the most influential players in Nigeria’s resurgent literary scene. It was the kind of momentum that typically signals a publishing house in ascent: critical acclaim, industry recognition, and growing commercial returns. But when Othuke Ominiaboh, Masobe’s founder and CEO, sat down to review the company’s numbers for the year, they told a more complicated story.

Sales volumes were slipping. Masobe sold roughly 40,000 copies of its titles in 2025, down from nearly 60,000 the year before. Yet, paradoxically, revenue had reached an all-time high. On paper, the business looked healthier than ever. In reality, the foundation it depended on, an active, growing base of readers, was beginning to erode. “It looks like we are making more money right now,” Ominiaboh said to Communiqué. “But what do you think it will be in the next five years? Because that pool is going to keep shrinking, especially with our economic realities.”

That contradiction between rising revenues and a shrinking readership captures a deeper structural tension within Nigeria’s book industry. As inflation climbs and disposable income tightens, books are increasingly treated as discretionary spending, pushed further down the list of everyday priorities. For publishers, this creates a fragile equilibrium: higher prices may sustain revenue in the short term, but they risk accelerating the long-term decline in readership.

It is this tension that has pushed Masobe to experiment beyond traditional publishing. In late March, the company launched a subscription-based mobile app, offering readers access to its book catalogue, with audiobooks expected to follow. More than a new product, the app represents Masobe’s attempt to answer a question that has long haunted the Nigerian literary ecosystem: how do you build a sustainable reading culture and a viable business in an economy where books are increasingly becoming a luxury?

2. The making of Masobe

Masobe Books was built on the promise of expanding access to Nigerian stories. For Othuke Ominiaboh, that idea was deeply personal. Filled with a new zest for life after surviving a kidney transplant, he decided to self-publish his novels. But printing books was only half the problem; getting them into readers’ hands was the other half. Ominiaboh took matters into his own hands. He embarked on a cross-country road trip, physically distributing his books across Nigeria. Along the way, he encountered a pipeline of writers just like him, talented but unpublished. “I came across some very solid manuscripts, and it dawned on me there was a gap in the market,” he told The Guardian in 2025. Established publishers, he argued, “were looking outwards, not inwards”, focusing on reprinting titles already successful in Western markets while local writers struggled to get their voices heard.

That realisation became the foundation for Masobe. With a $7,000 loan from his sister, Ominiaboh set up the company, positioning it as a home for contemporary Nigerian fiction. In its early years, affordability was central to the model. Books were priced between ₦3,000 and ₦4,000, within reach for a growing base of urban readers. But the economics that made that model possible would not hold.

The cause of Masobe’s predicament is one shared by nearly every consumer-facing business in Nigeria. When the company launched, the naira traded at roughly ₦300 to the dollar. Today, it hovers around ₦1,400. For a business dependent on imported paper, ink, and printing equipment, the impact has been severe. Titles that once retailed for ₦3,000 now sell for ₦13,000 to ₦15,000. In a country where the national minimum wage is ₦70,000 a month, a single hardcover novel can cost nearly a fifth of a worker’s income.

The effect on readership has been predictable. Core audiences, such as students, have been priced out. In the vacuum, an informal market has flourished. On Telegram and other messaging platforms, pirated PDFs of Masobe titles are sold for ₦300 to ₦500, a fraction of the official price. Efforts to shut them down have proven largely ineffective. Yet, for Ominiaboh, piracy has also revealed something important: the demand for books has not disappeared but has shifted to where they can be afforded. The new Masobe app is his attempt to meet his audience where they are.

3. Middleground

The idea for the Masobe app had been gestating for nearly three years before it became a product. Initially, Masobe wanted a rental model, where users could pay to access a particular book for a limited period, but it eventually set that aside in favour of a subscription model. Ominiaboh is careful to frame the app not as a strategic pivot but as an additional distribution channel. “It’s like what we have with our books stocked at Roving Heights and other bookstores. The Masobe app is just another store.” However, this store is designed for a different customer; one who cannot afford to go to a Roving Heights store and who, without a cheaper alternative, might resort to illegal means to read books or simply not read at all.

The app launched with three subscription tiers. The entry-level tier costs approximately ₦1,999 and unlocks two books. The mid-tier, at around ₦3,999, gives access to four to five titles. The top tier, priced at roughly ₦5,999, opens the full catalogue, subject to a cap of 15 titles in a user’s library at any one time. The prices are not yet set in stone, as the publisher is still monitoring what the market can bear.

Author compensation is designed to mirror traditional sales. Each time a subscriber adds a book to their library, a fixed amount, between ₦500 and ₦1,000, depending on the title, is credited to the author’s account as a royalty-generating transaction. Masobe’s existing contracts with authors already included e-book and audiobook rights, so there was no need to renegotiate rights before the launch.

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4. Beating the ghost of OkadaBooks

Any discussion of digital reading in Nigeria must eventually reckon with OkadaBooks, the platform that came closest to cracking the market before shutting down in November 2023, citing rough economic conditions. At its peak, OkadaBooks had approximately 400,000 active readers and a catalogue of around 40,000 original books. Its closure has since hardened into a cautionary tale, cited as evidence that subscription models cannot work in Nigeria and Africa at large, that consumers, as the conventional wisdom goes, will not pay for digital content. Subscription streaming platforms have also struggled to survive on the continent, with Canal+-owned Showmax becoming the latest casualty in March this year, further reinforcing the narrative.

But Masobe is not trying to be the Netflix for African books. It is attempting something more pragmatic: an online bookstore for underserved readers priced out of physical books. Its internal benchmark reflects that restraint. Ominiaboh says the business can break even at around 15,000 subscribers, a fraction of Okada Books’ peak. Yet the ambition is still expansive. In a best-case scenario, Masobe aims to reach the 400,000-user ceiling. The gap between those two numbers—survival at 15,000, and scale at 400,000—is where the model will be tested.

For Masobe’s subscription app to be sustainable, three things have to hold. First is pricing discipline. The app works because it collapses the cost barrier that has pushed readers towards piracy. At roughly ₦1,000 to ₦6,000 per month, it reframes books from a high-ticket, one-off purchase into a recurring, lower-stakes expense. But that balance is delicate. Price too high, and it replicates the exclusion of print. Price too low, and it struggles to cover author payouts and platform costs.

Second is catalogue strength. Unlike streaming platforms that rely on sheer volume, Masobe’s advantage lies in curation. Literary prizes and critical acclaim have already validated its catalogue, but that alone will not be enough to sustain a subscription product. A closed catalogue limits choice, and choice is central to how users perceive value in subscription models. Also, to compete with piracy, where readers can access a wide range of titles across publishers, Masobe needs breadth as much as depth. That means bringing other publishing houses onto the platform, expanding beyond its own imprint to offer a more comprehensive digital bookshelf. The company is already in talks with local publishers to make this possible. If it can pair its curatorial strength with a broader catalogue to offer books that readers feel compelled to seek out, it can create a pull strong enough to convert even reluctant subscribers.

Third is distribution behaviour. The app’s success depends less on converting existing bookstore customers and more on capturing the shadow market currently served by piracy. This is where its model diverges from OkadaBooks. Rather than betting on discovering new readers at scale, Masobe is targeting existing readers who transact informally. If the app can offer convenience and reliability, it stands a better chance of shifting that behaviour.

Masobe is not the only platform exploring new distribution models for African literature. Storipod, a microblogging platform that serialises stories in the form of social media stories, is also rethinking how literature is consumed and monetised. Its model seeks to expand access to African literature by allowing readers to unlock books chapter by chapter. Once accessed, chapters remain in a user’s digital library. On Monday, Storipod announced a deal with Narrative Landscape Press to publish books by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on its platform, alongside works by Chude Jideonwo, Adorah Nworah, Pede Hollist, Suyi Davies Okungbowa, and Nikki May.

Taken together, these experiments point to a broader shift in how African literature is being packaged, priced, and distributed, less as a static product, and more as a flexible, mobile-first experience shaped by the economics of attention and affordability.

The Masobe app recorded 5,000 downloads in its first week, an early signal that it may be tapping into a real, if underserved, demand. The challenge now is retention: turning those downloads into paying, repeat users. Masobe is attempting both a product experiment and a bet on behaviour change. If it succeeds, it could begin to redraw the economics of publishing in Nigeria.

1. A balancing act

Growing up in Nigeria, culinary creator Victor Felix, better known as Chef Felz, learned early that cooking was not considered a man’s job. In many households, the kitchen belonged to women. For a boy who loved food and found meaning in its preparation, this was an early constraint. He became a chef anyway. But before that, he was a writer and performance poet preoccupied with questions of gender equity. His university thesis focused on feminism, and he adopted the label without hesitation. The kitchen and the page, in retrospect, were not so different. Both spaces were avenues for storytelling.

In late 2024, a friend sent Felix the link to apply for the Entertainment & Media Hubs Creator Economy Incubator by Co-creation Hub (CcHUB), a Lagos-based technology and innovation centre.

CcHUB was running a gender-equity storytelling bootcamp in the lead-up to the launch of its creative-industry hub. It aligned with everything Felix stood for, so he applied and got in. What followed was a three-month process, structured in phases. It began with a residential week focused on coursework, community, and gender discourse, followed by sessions with industry practitioners on storytelling, distribution, and the economics of content. In the final phase, participants pitched story ideas to compete for the final prize.

Felix’s story pitch was personal: a male chef navigating a profession shaped by gendered expectations. It doubled as an argument that ability should matter more than identity. He filmed in Ibadan while completing his compulsory national service, travelling from Lagos with a small crew. In January 2025, he emerged as the winner of the pitch competition.

The ₦5 million prize money came in handy. Felix used it to upgrade his production equipment and set up a new studio in Abuja, where he has since relocated. The results were immediate. Since he joined the boot camp, his audience has more than doubled, from roughly 20,000 to 76,000 followers.

2. A serendipitous start

The gender equity storytelling programme, which Victor Felix participated in, was delivered by CcHUB’s Creative Economy Practice. To understand how a technology hub ended up running a storytelling incubator, and why that is less of a detour than it sounds, it helps to understand one of CcHUB’s founding values: serendipity.

At CcHUB, serendipity is a design principle. The organisation believes that some of the most important outcomes—collaborations formed, ideas sparked, and careers redirected—cannot be planned or documented in advance. They happen when the right people are in the same room. Its physical spaces are built, in part, to increase the probability of those unplanned collisions. It is a philosophy that also explains how CcHUB’s creative economy practice came to exist.

Ojoma Ochai, now its managing director, was working at the British Council when she first encountered CcHUB. It was 2011, and a visiting UK Prime Minister’s delegation was being routed through Lagos. Someone suggested the itinerary include a stop at the newly opened Co-Creation Hub. Ochai, who had not heard of the place, drove to Yaba to see it for herself. Dr Bosun Tijani, co-founder of CcHUB and now Nigeria’s Minister of Information, Communication and Digital Economy, was not there that day; instead, she met his co-founder, Femi Longe. Ochai and Longe went on to co-design a programme called Culture Shift, which brought arts organisations and technology practitioners together to build solutions through hackathons. It was through that work that she eventually met Dr Tijani.

The relationship deepened over the following decade, running parallel to a growing intellectual preoccupation for Ochai. Since 2012, she has been deeply involved in UNESCO’s work on creative economy policy, eventually joining the expert panel for the UNESCO 2005 Convention on the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, the only UN convention specifically concerned with creative industries. She helped governments across the world develop creative economy strategies. Around 2018, she began commissioning research on how West African artists were using technology. Adoption was still nascent, but the direction was clear.

Ochai secured UNESCO funding for a larger study covering 94 countries, examining how the digital environment was reshaping creative industries globally. The central finding of this study was striking: it had become almost impossible to draw a clear line between the digital and creative economies. The broadband networks, the Big Tech platforms, and the data consumption that powered the digital world were all fundamentally driven by people consuming creative content. The two economies were not parallel. They were the same, viewed from different angles.

That conclusion changed everything for Ochai. “It was becoming impossible to distinguish between the digital economy and the creative economy,” Ochai said to Communique. “I started thinking, ‘If this is where the world is going, and Africa hasn’t even started, maybe I should quit my job and explore this.” She called up Dr Tijani and outlined her plan. She wanted to do for creative industries what CcHUB had done for tech. His response was immediate: “It sounds interesting. Can we do it together?”

Within weeks, Ochai developed a business plan, and CcHUB entered as an equity investor. After almost 15 years working at the British Council, Ojoma Ochai resigned to lead the Creative Economy Practice at CcHUB.

3. A long game

Since its founding, CcHUB’s creative economy practice has moved quickly and widely. Its work now spans research, infrastructure, and advocacy, a combination that is making it one of the most consequential organisations in the conversation on Africa’s creative economy.

In May 2022, CcHUB launched the CreaTech Accelerator, a programme designed to support companies operating at the intersection of creative industries and technology. The first cohort included a range of startups, from the fashion-tech platform FashTracker to the animation studio Orange VFX, and creator-commerce startups like Starz App and Twiva. Orange VFX won first place at the end of the accelerator, receiving $20,000 from the Creative Economy Practice. Some of the other companies have continued to scale. Twiva, for instance, has secured follow-on funding from the Sony Innovation Fund and the Jobtech Alliance.

But the accelerator also surfaced a deeper structural issue. Across cohorts, a consistent pattern emerged: there were not enough investment-ready ventures in the ecosystem. The pipeline was thin, and many promising founders lacked the financial literacy, governance structures, and clarity required to attract capital. In response, CcHUB restructured the programme. Investment readiness became a core component embedded from the very beginning. The programme now runs over 18 months, combining six months of intensive, structured support with a longer follow-on period designed to help ventures mature.

But accelerating individual companies only goes so far. To build a thriving creative economy, you also need to understand the ecosystems those companies operate in, which cities are hospitable to creative work, which are detrimental, and why. That question demanded a different kind of tool.

In April 2023, the Creative Economy Practice launched its flagship research product, the Creative Vibrancy Index. The index ranks cities across Africa based on the health and dynamism of their creative ecosystems, measuring indicators such as the density of creative businesses, access to infrastructure, and availability of funding. It currently covers 12 cities across four countries. The index is intended to serve as shared infrastructure for the ecosystem, helping governments, funders, and industry bodies make more informed decisions. A second edition is already in development, with plans to expand city coverage, update existing data, and introduce capacity-building components for local stakeholders.

There is Fashionomics, a programme focused on the fashion industry, which has run multiple cohorts and disbursed $90,000 to winners. And then there is the gender equity storytelling programme, which sits within a broader set of projects funded by the Gates Foundation, focused on improving gender representation in media across Nigeria and Kenya.

The most visible expression of CcHUB’s creative economy ambitions, however, may be its two physical hubs: one in Nairobi, which launched in December 2024, and the other in Lagos, which opened in February 2025. Both are free for community members to use. They offer editing suites, podcast recording rooms, filming areas, training rooms, and event spaces. Together, they are designed to serve 10,000 storytellers across Nigeria and Kenya, with a specific focus on using media to shift cultural norms around women’s economic empowerment.

Over the last five years, CcHUB’s creative economy practice has become a central part of the organisation’s operations, and a bet on where value is being created on the continent. By combining venture support, research, and physical infrastructure, it is attempting something few institutional investors on the continent have done: catalyse the growth of the creative industry.

The results are still early, but the ambition is clear. If it works, the payoff will extend beyond individual careers or companies, providing an example for institutional investors deploying capital in the industry. In that sense, CcHUB is helping define what Africa’s creative industry will become.

1. The dawn of a new era

On Friday, March 20, we hosted our most important event yet. Over a hundred people joined us at the Mike Adenuga Centre, Ikoyi, for the second edition of Communiqué IRL Lagos.

We kicked things off with a rundown of all we’ve been up to in the last year—expanding our media products, taking our events to Nairobi and Johannesburg, and formally launching our advisory and intelligence business that has seen us work with Expertise France, Sporty Group, the National Council of Arts and Culture, and 885 Capital, among others.

That presentation was followed by a special moment of recognition, where we surprised one of our most active community members, Anita Okafor, with a gift.

Then we had a panel discussion, which I participated in with Fisayo Fosudo, one of Africa’s most influential YouTubers. Gloria Edukere, our chief of staff and advisory business lead, moderated the conversation, which revolved around “The Creator’s Lifecycle.” It was full of gems and practical insights for creators looking to build businesses and careers that last longer than fleeting virality. Ask anyone who attended, and they’ll say the same thing.

Among all these amazing moments, however, we announced something that we had been working on for the last year. We’d hinted at it a few times in the past, but never fully articulated it until now. It completely changes our company’s trajectory and signals our entry into a new phase. We are confident it will have a massive impact on the future of Africa’s media and creative industries. It will change how creators and creative entrepreneurs build their businesses, how investors think about capital deployment, and how policymakers approach regulatory work.

2. Hello world, meet Communiqué OS

In the nearly six years that we’ve been publishing this newsletter and covering the media and creative industries, we have dealt with the “data question” far too many times to ignore. We agreed with the diagnosis that there isn’t enough data in Africa’s creative economy for founders, investors, and policymakers to work with. But we also knew that we needed a sustainable solution—one that wasn’t merely project-based, that didn’t depend exclusively on grants and foreign actors, and that was tailored to fixing real problems rather than succumbing to wishful thinking. To get to that point, we first needed to know what the landscape looked like. The creative economy database we launched in March 2025 did that.

Over several months before launch, we gathered information on 1,000+ organisations, investors, and events shaping the industry across Africa. We then categorised this by sector: film and TV, media, creator economy, music, fashion, gaming, creative arts, and cultural heritage. Our goal was to make it easier for anyone to find the right people, companies, and resources to unlock opportunities across the continent. But we also made it clear that the database was the first step in a long journey. It was, for all intents and purposes, an MVP.

Now, we are taking the next step: housing that data on a platform that is perpetually useful to the people we are building for. This is where Communiqué OS comes in.

Join the Communiqué OS waitlist

Speak to enough media founders, and you get the sense that many of us think we can replicate Bloomberg’s success in our market contexts. I have alluded to this multiple times. Yes, I know that Bloomberg is successful because it is first a data and intelligence company before it is a media platform. But I have also argued that this doesn’t mean it is impossible to take some elements of that success and assess their relevance in different scenarios.

In Communiqué’s context, this means we must develop an intelligence + media play that is both true to our reality and strategically viable, and this requires us to first understand what kind of information people need (not just want). Then we must figure out how to efficiently and affordably collect that information without compromising the quality. Finally, we must design a monetisation model that aligns with our audience’s spending habits.

So, what does this OS look like?

3. The anatomy of our intelligence layer

Think of Communiqué OS as an autonomous guide built on verified, structured profiles of the companies, investors, events, and organisations shaping the creative economy across Africa. Over a thousand of them, across 54 markets, organised by sector and geography. This is the foundation on which everything else sits.

The next layer is intelligence. Raw data, on its own, doesn’t tell you what to do. It only gives you an idea of what exists. The intelligence layer tells you what it means. In our case, that is a Health Index that scores markets across revenue density, capital inflows, export reach, and the policy environment; a capital flow tracker that follows money and traction; and a policy monitor that keeps watch on the frameworks shaping the industry in real time.

Above that sits the Creators Hub: a resource centre built specifically for Africa’s creative professionals. The tools that have always existed but never in the same place — accelerator listings, studio directories, legal contract templates built for the realities of this continent, a funding database that covers everything from the Afreximbank’s billion-dollar Africa Film Fund to smaller, sector-specific grants. The kind of information that, until now, required knowing the right person in the right room.

And holding all of it together is content and matchmaking: the connective tissue. The sector reports, playbooks, and interviews that help you understand where the industry is headed, paired with a routing engine that connects the right founders with the right investors.

None of these layers works in isolation. The data feeds the intelligence. The intelligence informs the resources. The content contextualises all of it. And the matchmaking engine brings it to life. The point is that an operating system is not a feature. It is the environment in which everything else runs.

4. Why do this?

We want to make the creative economy easier to navigate, build within, and invest in—a natural extension of the work we’ve been doing for the last six years. Communiqué OS brings together the insights, resources, and playbooks from our essays under one roof. It is for the founders, creators, investors, policymakers, researchers, and media professionals who want to build businesses, invest in companies and ideas, understand where things are headed, and how to prepare for the future.

For a long time, the problem has not just been access to information, but access to structured and unified information. The kind that helps make high-quality decisions and gives clarity.

Of course, none of this works without a sustainable business model. From the beginning, we knew this could not be just a grant-funded experiment (we won’t say no to the right grants, though) or a one-off research initiative. It has to be a product people are willing to pay for because it delivers clear, consistent value. Our approach to monetisation reflects that.

Communiqué OS will not be a pure subscription platform. Instead, users will purchase credits and expend them only when needed. We believe this approach better aligns with our market reality and puts the onus of trust and utility on us.

5. And how do we get there?

Building the platform is one part of the challenge; gathering the data is the other. For years, the dominant narrative has been that Africa’s creative economy lacks data. But we have found that the issue is not always the absence of data. It is the absence of systems capable of consistently capturing, structuring, and updating it.

Much of the most valuable information in this industry does not reside in the public domain. It lives in people’s experiences, the decisions they make, and the patterns they notice before other people. That kind of insight is often difficult to capture with traditional methods.

We’ve seen that reports help, but they are static. By the time we publish them, parts of the story have already changed. Instead, we need something more dynamic, something that evolves as quickly as the industry itself.

This is why we are introducing the Communiqué Intelligence Panel, a curated group of professionals and consumers across the creative economy who will contribute to a continuous stream of insight about what is really happening on the ground.

Instead of waiting months to compile a report, we can now ask focused questions in real time. Instead of relying solely on external datasets, we can capture lived experience directly from the people who shape the industry and consume its products. Instead of publishing isolated snapshots, we can begin to track patterns over time.

The process is intentionally simple. People register their interest, tell us a bit about who they are and what parts of the ecosystem they understand best, and if selected, become part of the private research community. This way, we ensure that we are not just building Communiqué OS for the ecosystem, but alongside it.

Register your interest

One year ago, we launched a primitive database. One year later, that database has grown into something much bigger and more audacious. Who knows what it’ll be another year from today?

For now, however, we invite you to take the next step with us. Join the Communiqué OS waitlist and register your interest to be a part of our Intelligence Panel.

1. Nollywood’s night in Toronto

The National Event Venue in Toronto is typically used for weddings, concerts and other community celebrations. But on January 17, it played host to a more unusual event: the Canadian premiere of Behind The Scenes, the latest cinema release from award-winning Nollywood producer Funke Akindele. That evening, the venue’s 700-seat auditorium transformed into a temporary Nigerian cinema. The crowd that gathered was a familiar cross-section of Toronto’s Nigerian diaspora, drawn by the chance to watch one of Nollywood’s biggest stars on the big screen, thousands of kilometres away from home.

Before Behind The Scenes arrived in Toronto, it had already fulfilled what has become the unwritten rule for every Funke Akindele cinema release: that it dethrones the previous Funke Akindele film to become the new number one on Nollywood’s all-time box office chart. This time, however, Behind The Scenes went further than the usual script, becoming the first film to cross the coveted ₦2 billion mark at the Nigerian box office. With the domestic run secured, the film began to travel, first to the UK, then to the US, and finally to Canada, where it grossed over $140,000 in a week.

The Canadian cinema run was made possible by a little-known distribution company called Snag Productions. Founded by two Nigerian immigrants based in Canada, the company is attempting to build a more deliberate pathway for African films into the North American cinema market. Their ambition is not simply to organise occasional screenings for diaspora audiences, but to create a distribution pipeline that allows Nollywood and other African and Black films to circulate more regularly in Canadian cinemas.

2. The international distribution bottleneck

Nigerian films have historically struggled to crack the international cinema market. When Nollywood films travel abroad, their theatrical runs are usually limited and geographically predictable. The UK has become the most reliable overseas destination, largely because of its large Nigerian diaspora and established African film audiences. But outside the UK, the path is less certain. In North America, especially, Nigerian films have rarely secured consistent theatrical distribution. Most screenings happen as one-off diaspora events organised by community groups, rather than as part of a structured distribution strategy. The result is that even Nollywood’s biggest box office hits often struggle to find sustained audiences beyond Nigeria and the UK.

The difficulty of exporting Nollywood films to international cinemas is not simply a matter of ambition, but also of the structural realities of the markets these films seek to enter. Demography, for instance, is a major constraint. In Canada, the potential audience for Nigerian films is still relatively small. According to estimates from the 2021 national census, about 80,000 Canadian immigrants were born in Nigeria. When you expand the bracket to include people of West African heritage, it rises to around 150,000. Even assuming rapid growth since then, the figure likely remains below 400,000 people in a country of more than 30 million. In practical terms, this means the core diaspora audience that typically drives demand for Nollywood abroad represents less than one per cent of the Canadian population. By comparison, the Indian population in Canada is about 1.6 million, and the larger South Asian community stands at 2.6 million, or roughly seven per cent of the population. This helps explain why Indian films such as Dhurandhar have been able to sustain longer theatrical runs, grossing $7 million in Canada.

Another constraint is the structure of the cinema market itself. Canada has about 3,000 cinema screens across roughly 700 locations. But many of these venues operate relatively small multiplexes with limited screens. Screening slots for films are heavily contested. Hollywood releases dominate the schedule, followed by British films, Canadian independent productions, Asian films, and the globally established Bollywood industry. Even within the broader category of Black cinema, films from the United States and Canada tend to take precedence. By the time African films enter the equation, they are competing for a very small portion of an already crowded cinema schedule. This congestion means that even when a Nollywood film secures a theatrical release, sustaining it for several weeks can be difficult. Cinema operators constantly rotate films based on ticket sales, and a movie that cannot demonstrate consistent demand quickly loses its screening slots.

Finally, Nollywood’s international audience remains narrow. Most demand still comes from Nigerians in the diaspora, with limited uptake from Caribbean audiences or Black viewers born and raised in North America. Until Nollywood expands beyond that core demographic, its international theatrical footprint will remain small.

3. Cracking Canada’s cinema market

Snag Productions was created to address this problem in Canada. The company was founded by Damola Layonu and his wife, Chiagoziem Obi, both of whom previously worked at Filmhouse Group in Nigeria. It was there that Layonu first built his experience in film distribution before the couple emigrated to Canada.

Once they arrived, the absence of African content in Canadian cinemas became difficult to ignore. Despite the size and visibility of African communities in cities such as Toronto, Nollywood films were largely absent from the country’s cinema screens. “We were asking ourselves, why can’t we have Nollywood films running and performing well in Canadian cinemas? People say black people don’t go to cinemas, is that a fact? We wanted to find out,” Layonu said to Communiqué.

That question eventually became the foundation for Snag Productions. The company was incorporated in 2022 to build a distribution pathway for African films into the Canadian cinema market. However, it did not hold a screening until two years later, after securing a distribution licence with FilmOne, Layonu’s former employer.

Its first release was Farmer’s Bride, followed by a steady stream of Nollywood titles that helped test the market’s viability. Rather than attempting long theatrical runs immediately, Snag’s strategy has been deliberately cautious. Films are typically released over a weekend first. If ticket sales exceed expectations, the screening window is then extended into a full week. The idea is to demonstrate, through actual ticket sales, that there is a viable audience for Nollywood films in Canadian cinemas.

The company has also begun to think more strategically about the release calendar. Certain kinds of films already dominate at specific times of the year. The December-to-January holiday window, for instance, has become closely associated with blockbuster releases from producers such as Funke Akindele and Toyin Abraham. Valentine’s season has also emerged as a reliable window for romantic films. Actor and producer Timini Egbuson has begun to corner that period with releases such as Reel Love in 2025 and Love Notes in 2026. Snag Productions aims to secure distribution deals with filmmakers during these periods.

Beyond programming strategy, Snag has also begun building partnerships within the Canadian exhibition ecosystem. The company has struck a distribution agreement with Landmark Cinemas, the second-largest cinema chain in Canada, allowing Nollywood titles to screen across multiple locations. In cities where Landmark does not operate, such as Toronto, Snag has relied on Fusion Intelligence’s Convoy distribution platform to stream films to non-cinema locations. Convoy was used during the Canadian run of Behind The Scenes.

Finally, the company is also thinking about the longer-term challenge of content appeal. While diaspora audiences remain the core market for Nollywood abroad, Snag is exploring ways to broaden that reach. As part of that effort, it has partnered with Weaned Child Productions, a studio founded by novelist Umar Turaki, to develop and distribute original content designed to travel more easily with Canadian audiences.

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.

By Hollywood standards, these figures are modest. But for Nollywood in North America, they represent proof that a consistent audience exists and can be mobilised when films are properly distributed.

Timing is also favourable. Nigerian migration to Canada has accelerated over the past decade, with Nollywood already functioning as an important cultural touchpoint for diaspora communities. As more Nigerians choose Canada and other North American destinations as their preferred migration routes, the audience base that supports these screenings is likely to expand.

For Snag Productions, the long-term ambition is not simply to organise occasional screenings for homesick audiences. It is to normalise the presence of African films within the cinema ecosystem, moving them from sporadic diaspora events into something closer to a regular feature of the North American cinema calendar.

Register here

1. An orchestra for Afrobeats

On the evening of December 26, 2025, guests began arriving at the National Theatre, stepping out in tuxedos and floor-length gowns, their silhouettes sharp against the glow of the theatre’s restored façade. The mood was deliberate. This was not your typical Detty December concert. It was a black-tie event.

In a country where major concerts are often delayed for hours and “Nigerian time” has become both a joke and an excuse, the precision of the night felt intentional. By the scheduled hour, the lights began to dim. The band was ready. The production cues rolled seamlessly, and then award-winning musician and founder of YBNL, one of Nigeria’s foremost music labels, Olamide, walked onstage. YBNL is famous for incubating talent, including Pheelz, Young John and Lil Kesh. A decade earlier, he had helped introduce a young Adekunle Gold to the national consciousness through his record label. This time, though, he only had to introduce Adekunle Gold to the audience of 5,000 seated before him, and then the show began.

What followed was a three-hour orchestral masterpiece, proof that Afrobeats, often associated with high-energy festivals, could be interpreted with the same discipline and theatricality as a classical production. In the days that followed, many described the concert as one of the best produced in Nigeria in this era of Afrobeats.

But the night was bigger than the music. The scale of it, the technical precision, the acoustics, all pointed back to the venue itself: the National Theatre. For decades, the country’s biggest musical moments happened in temporary spaces: converted halls, open grounds, hotel ballrooms, pop-up arenas, while the National Theatre sat unused and neglected. Now, thanks to a $100 million intervention by the government and the country’s Bankers’ Committee, there was once again a permanent stage for the cultural activities, and this was just the first part of the plan.

2. A $100m comeback plan

The National Theatre was commissioned in the mid-1970s as Nigeria prepared to host FESTAC ’77, the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture. Designed in the shape of a military hat, it was meant to signal confidence. Nigeria had oil money, continental influence, and cultural ambition. The theatre, with its 5,000-seat main bowl, exhibition halls and rehearsal spaces, was built to match that moment.

For a while, it did. It staged major performances, state events and international festivals. It was where culture met power. But as oil revenues fluctuated and public maintenance culture weakened, the building began to deteriorate. By the 1990s and early 2000s, broken seats, leaking roofs and outdated equipment had become part of the story. The monument remained imposing from the outside, but had slowly fallen apart inside.

There were attempts to reverse the decline. In 2001, the Federal Government announced plans to concession and rehabilitate the complex, but the effort stalled amid bureaucratic delays and funding constraints. In 2007, another renovation was proposed, in partnership with private entities. This was met with stiff opposition from members of the creative industry. “The implication for the arts is that we will no longer have a home we can call our own. No country sells its cultural heritage if we make the mistake of concessioning it to businessmen. Then we are not going to have a venue for our arts and cultural heritage to be celebrated.” Ahmed Yerima, then the theatre’s general manager, said at the time.

So the theatre lingered in an in-between state: too important to demolish, too expensive to fully restore, and too symbolic to ignore. By the late 2010s, it had become less a functioning cultural engine and more a reminder of good days long gone. That is, until 2020.

In 2018, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), working with the Bankers’ Committee, a coalition of chief executives of Nigeria’s commercial banks that works alongside the CBN to coordinate major industry-wide interventions, began to take a more structured interest in Nigeria’s creative economy.

That same year, the CBN launched the Creative Industry Financing Initiative, offering loans to entrepreneurs in music, film, fashion and information technology. But policymakers soon realised that financing alone would not solve the industry’s problems. Talent had grown. Global demand had grown. Infrastructure had not.

In 2020, the CBN proposed a bigger plan to build dedicated creative hubs across those four verticals on the large expanse of land surrounding the National Theatre. The Federal Government agreed, with one important condition: that they first renovate the National Theatre. “The former Minister for Information, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, said you cannot build new hubs around a dilapidated building. First, revive the National Theatre building and then new hubs can come up so they are complementary,” Professor Sunday Ododo, the former General Manager of the National Theatre, told Communiqué. The bankers agreed, and renovation work began.

Initial estimates put the rehabilitation cost at ₦2.8 billion. But as structural issues became clearer and the scope expanded, the figure rose significantly. By completion, the intervention had ballooned to roughly $100 million.

The renovation was extensive. The main bowl was fully refurbished, with new seats, modern stage technology and upgraded acoustics and lighting systems. Mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems were replaced. The roof was repaired. Air-conditioning systems were modernised. Digital production capabilities were installed. Safety systems were upgraded to meet international standards. What had once felt like a relic was rebuilt into a contemporary performance venue.

But the restoration is only the first phase of the project. The next phase will see the development of creative hubs across film, music, fashion and technology within the theatre complex.

3. When the applause fades

Phase two is where the project becomes sustainable. Modern arenas of the National Theatre’s size are not built as isolated monuments. Around the world, they are designed as anchors for larger districts. The arena pulls people in, but the surrounding ecosystem of hotels, restaurants, retail, offices, rehearsal spaces and studios keeps the area active every day. That daily activity generates revenue, improves security, justifies infrastructure investment and, most importantly, creates a community with a stake in the venue’s success.

The old National Theatre did not have this advantage; it stood alone. When events slowed, the complex had no alternative economic engine. There were no complementary businesses feeding off its traffic. Maintenance depended largely on government budgets. When those budgets tightened, repairs were postponed. Small faults became larger ones. Deterioration was inevitable.

The proposed creative hubs are meant to solve that structural weakness. Instead of a building that wakes up only for concerts, the complex would host film production facilities, music studios, fashion incubation centres, and technology spaces. That means people working there daily. It means training programmes, small businesses and creative start-ups.

If Phase One restored the theatre, Phase Two is designed to build the ecosystem around it, the kind that keeps the lights on even when there are no events. This model has found some success elsewhere in Africa. In Kigali, the Zaria Court development, providing hospitality and entertainment facilities, was opened in 2025 beside the BK Arena.

The reopening concert proved that the National Theatre can once again host ambition. But the deeper test lies ahead. If the creative hubs materialise as planned, it could become a production base, a training ground, and a commercial engine for industries that already command global attention. Nigerian music fills arenas abroad. Nollywood travels across continents. Fashion and digital creators shape culture far beyond the country’s borders. What they have often lacked is a structured infrastructure at home. The National Theatre’s second act, then, will answer the question of whether Nigeria can convert cultural momentum into durable economic value.

On December 26 2025, the orchestra played, and the lights worked. That was Phase One. Phase Two will determine whether the engine continues to run long after the applause fades.

1. Déjà vu

You’ve seen the ads for platforms like ReelShort or Dramabox. They start mid-chaos. A woman in an office dress storms into a glass-walled boardroom. Her billionaire boss slides a document across the table. “You’ll sign this…or I’ll ruin your life.” Or a young martial arts student in a crowded teahouse discovers an ancient scroll meant for someone else. Before he can read it, a group of bandits bursts in, in search of that same scroll. A fight breaks out. The episode ends with him fleeing into the night, the scroll clutched tightly in his hand.

What you’ve just seen in those ads is the essence of microdrama. Unlike traditional television or film, microdramas are short, episodic stories designed for mobile consumption. Each episode usually runs between 30 seconds and three minutes, and the storytelling is built around high-stakes conflict, emotional cliffhangers, and a rapid pace that keeps viewers coming back for the next instalment.

Microdramas often lean into melodrama: intense relationships, betrayal, family secrets, class tension, or revenge. Production costs are kept low, but the stories are crafted to maximise emotional impact and audience engagement. The content is serialised, bingeable in small doses, and engineered to hook audiences in seconds.

The microdrama industry has grown in leaps and bounds since its inception in China. In 2024, revenues in China alone surpassed $7 billion, exceeding the Chinese box office’s earnings for that year. The format has not stayed confined to the Chinese mainland; it has expanded rapidly to Southeast Asia and the United States, where it generated $814 million in revenue in 2024. The global microdrama market is projected to reach $30 billion by 2030, fueled by mobile-first consumption habits, algorithm-driven distribution platforms, and the low-cost, high-volume nature of production.

But Africa has yet to get in on the game. The continent has a natural affinity for the format. Many of the systems and values that underpin the explosive growth of microdrama, fast production cycles, dialogue-driven narratives, emotionally charged storytelling, and serialised output are the same strengths that built traditional African film industries like Nollywood. But what will be the continent’s place in the global market? This is the question some Nollywood executives are trying to answer.

2. From China with love

Serialised storytelling, the type that microdramas are now popularising, has existed for centuries, from newspaper novels in the 19th century to radio dramas and soap operas. But the internet changed two things at once: speed and feedback. Stories could now be published in fragments and judged instantly by audiences.

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, online fiction platforms such as Wattpad, Jinjiang Literature City, and Qidian made this model mainstream. Writers released stories chapter by chapter, often daily. They learned, quickly, that shorter chapters, dramatic turns, and unresolved endings kept readers coming back. If a story gained traction, it was extended. If it didn’t, it was dropped.

China took this system further. By the mid-2010s, the country had built a vast web-novel ecosystem, complete with editors, ranking systems, and monetisation tools. Popular online stories were routinely adapted into television dramas, films, animations, and games. Storytelling became industrial: high-volume, audience-responsive, and optimised for scale.

The next shift came with short-form video. Platforms like Douyin and Kuaishou trained users to consume content in seconds. Producers began experimenting with ultra-short and vertically shot episodes designed specifically for phones. These experiments accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic, when audiences spent more time on mobile devices and production budgets tightened.

By the early 2020s, microdrama had solidified into a distinct format. Dedicated apps emerged. Studios specialised in fast-turnaround production. Business models formed around subscriptions, pay-per-episode access, and advertising. In 2021, the microdrama industry generated $500 million in revenue.

Once the model worked at home, it travelled. Chinese companies realised that these stories crossed borders easily. They relied on universal emotions, simple setups, and mobile-friendly viewing. Platforms expanded into Southeast Asia and North America, often localising actors and settings while keeping the same narrative structure.

Microdrama is now one of the fastest-growing segments of global entertainment. It sits somewhere between film, television, and social media. “After four years of rapid global growth, the microdrama industry is now entering its third phase of evolution.” Ronan Wong, COO of microdrama distribution platform AR Asia, told Variety. The first phase began in China, and the second phase saw the format expand successfully to North America. The third phase will see countries around the world develop their own microdrama systems, producing content that reflects their local cultures. In India, for instance, microdramas are estimated to be the fastest-growing segment in the country’s $2.4 billion interactive media sector. This is where Africa comes in.

3. The Storyformat playbook

Two years ago, two Nigerian film executives quietly began working on a way to plug the continent into a fast-moving global industry before it calcified. Elijah Affi, cofounder of TakeOut Media and producer of Tokunboh, Nollywood’s second most-watched film on Netflix, and Ifeoma Areh, convener of the Digital Creator Academy, came to the same conclusion: Nigeria already had the instincts for microdrama. What it lacked was structure. “We already know how to do low-budget projects. We already know how to tell very crazy stories. We already have the secret sauce,” Affi said to Communiqué.

Their response is Storyformat Studios, a platform designed to localise microdrama production, beginning with Nigeria and then expanding across the continent. In May, the pair will launch the Digital Creator Academy for Microdrama, training 300 established filmmakers across the continent to adapt their skills to the demands of vertical, short-form storytelling.

Available data suggests demand already exists for microdrama on the continent. According to Sensor Tower, Nigeria is among the top five global download markets for microdrama apps. In the third quarter of 2024, ReelShort recorded more than 300,000 weekly active users in the country, while DramaBox saw strong growth in Ghana, reaching 33,900 weekly active users during the same period.

However, monetisation is still a problem. Weekly revenues in Nigeria peaked at $3,800. South Africa remains the most profitable market for microdrama, with ReelShort’s weekly revenues ranging from $7,000 to $15,000 in 2024.

A major reason is a lack of market fit in the business. The prevailing in-app purchase model used by microdrama platforms struggles in markets accustomed to free, ad-supported content. Also, the content being pushed on the continent—werewolves, European-style fantasy tropes—does not reflect local realities. To address these structural challenges, Storyformat Studios is launching a pan-African microdrama alliance, a coalition of independent creators and studios designed to reduce gatekeeping, set standards, and negotiate collectively with global platforms.

The academy feeds the alliance. The alliance feeds production. Production feeds platforms. Together, they form an ecosystem.

For decades, Nollywood and the larger African film industry have arrived late to global entertainment cycles. By the time new formats mature, the rules are already set and the power consolidated elsewhere. Microdrama offers a rare exception. It is still forming, with its creative language, business models, and global hierarchies far from settled.

“This is the first time that Africa will be able to join an industry that is literally in its infancy. We have the opportunity to be at par globally in terms of storytelling, in terms of technical skill, and in terms of creativity,” Ifeoma Areh said to Communiqué.

Affi and Areh see familiarity as their competitive advantage. Fast production cycles, heightened emotion, dialogue-driven plots, and audience-first storytelling have long defined industries like Nollywood. These are the same values that power microdramas’ success in China and beyond. What has changed is the container: vertical screens instead of cinemas, minutes instead of hours, algorithms instead of schedulers.

The opportunity now is structural. If, as Affi and Areh believe, African film industries invest early in training, creator coordination, and local platforms, they can shape this format rather than adapt to it. Microdrama allows the continent to enter not as a latecomer, but as a co-author of a new global storytelling economy.

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1. The evolution of MBA Africa into a creative business academy signals a maturing of Africa’s creative industries — from raw talent to structured ecosystems that can scale and sustain themselves.

2. It highlights how education and training are becoming central to the creative economy, helping young Africans move from passion-driven work to enterprise-driven impact.

3. More broadly, it points to a new phase in Africa’s cultural growth — one where creatives aren’t just making art, but also building the infrastructure that will define the continent’s next global exports.

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After seven years as a radio on-air personality, Wale Ozolua — now Manager, Content Operations and Artist Services at Audiomack — had developed an ear for music. For his next act, he wanted to understand the business.

He joined OneRPM, a digital distribution company that helps artists manage releases and reach audiences across various streaming platforms. On the radio, music was about the moment; the vibe and the emotions the sound evoked. At OneRPM, it was about the machinery behind the moment: rights, royalties, and reach.

Ozolua had instincts. Years in radio had sharpened his eye for talent and audience dynamics. But instinct wasn’t enough. He could see the gaps, the missing structure, the absence of a framework to translate his passion into professional mastery. He went in search of clarity and found the Music Business Academy for Africa.

Every industry needs a bridge between passion and professionalism. Filmmakers find it in film schools. Designers find it in fashion institutes and mentorship labs. Developers often find it in accelerators and coding boot camps. Each serves the same purpose: turning creative impulse into sustainable craft. For the last five years, the Music Business Academy for Africa (MBA Africa) has been that bridge, training a new generation of executives to understand the mechanics of the continent’s booming music industry.

Last week, in front of an audience of alumni and other academy stakeholders, the bridge was widened. MBA Africa officially transitioned into the Creative Business Academy for Africa (CBA Africa), expanding its mission beyond music to embrace the broader creative economy.

2. An act of faith

Starting a music business training programme in Africa can be an act of faith — or foolishness. Godwin Tom fell on the faith side of the spectrum. He had worked with some of the biggest names in Afrobeats, including Wizkid, Davido, and Waje, and had witnessed firsthand the genre’s global growth in the 2010s. But he also saw the problems. There were few systems, no formal training, and very little understanding of the business. He set out to fix this.

In 2017, Tom launched the Music Business Series with Godwin Tom (#MBSwithGT), a weekly X (formerly Twitter) series where he invited friends and colleagues from law, marketing, and management to share insights about the industry. The conversations drew people from across the continent, revealing that the lack of structured training for music executives was not just a Nigerian problem.

So he took the conversations on the road. Travelling from Lagos to Ibadan, Abuja, Accra, Nairobi, and Johannesburg, Tom hosted free sessions on the business of music. Everywhere he went, the message was the same: talented young Africans wanted to work in the industry but didn’t know how. To bridge that gap, he launched an internship programme. The first cohort had 32 participants. At the end of the programme, Tom hired two of them as interns and placed the rest in jobs across the industry. The programme continued like this until 2020, when the pandemic hit.

Stuck at home, Tom decided to build out a full-fledged music business school.

3. The architecture of a music business school

When Godwin Tom launched the Music Business Academy for Africa, it initially offered three modules: Management, Music and the Law, and Music Business Fundamentals. By 2021, it had doubled to six modules, with new courses like Music History, Marketing, and Events Management. Each addition filled a gap that Godwin Tom and his team noticed among students and professionals.

To give the programme more credibility, Tom invited Professor Carlos Chirinos-Espin from New York University, an expert in global music business education, to help expand and refine the structure. With Chirinos-Espin’s input, the curriculum expanded to nine courses, including “The Industries of the Music Business,” a class that helped students understand the wide range of careers available beyond performance, from publishing and licensing to touring, brand partnerships, and data analytics.

The academy’s growth has always been guided by one principle: stay vocational and stay relevant. Every year, it added new modules in response to fundamental industry gaps. Recently, MBA Africa introduced courses on “Mental Health for Creatives” and “HR for the Creative Industry” — areas that are often overlooked but are deeply needed. Students learnt how to establish personal boundaries, manage burnout, and develop systems that safeguard their emotional and psychological well-being.

Inside the programme, learning doesn’t stop at theory. Every student works in a team that simulates the structure of a real music company. Within these groups, everyone is assigned to roles, including A&R, PR, management, marketing, and leadership, which rotate throughout the year. The academy also throws unexpected “curveballs” to test adaptability. Sometimes, all team leaders are suddenly reassigned, forcing new leaders to emerge. The goal is to teach that leadership isn’t about titles but about dependability and initiative.

The ambition to build a world-class music business school for Africa has not come cheap. It comes with world-class expenses: faculty, production, artist camps, live concerts, studio sessions, and salaries for the 14+ staff who keep the programme running. Over the past five years, it has cost an estimated $1.5 million to organise (about $300,000 each year). To sustain it, MBA Africa has relied partly on sponsorships. YouTube and The Orchard serve as headline sponsors, each contributing a third of the total funds needed. The final third comes from student fees and Godwin Tom’s personal investment.

The programme has also launched the MBA Women’s Fund, created to help more women — a demographic that has historically been underrepresented in the industry — enrol in the programme. “For some women, the challenge isn’t interest; it’s permission, family pressure or lack of financial support”, Tom said to Communique. The fund removes at least one of those obstacles. Partners like Audiomack and Sterling Bank have contributed to the Women’s Fund, sponsoring tuition for dozens of women each year. Since 2020, the programme has trained over 1500 students.

4. Building beyond music

Now, MBA Africa is reaching beyond music because the skills it teaches are just as relevant across the wider creative industry. The academy has launched two new courses, “Film in Music” and “Fashion in Music,” which explore how these industries intersect and feed off each other. “Music doesn’t exist in a vacuum,” Tom said to Communiqué. “It connects to film, fashion, tech, and culture. We want our students to see those links and use them.”

It’s a preliminary step towards a much larger goal: to eventually establish independent academies for different sectors, such as film, fashion, and gaming, all operating under the Creative Business Academy for Africa (CBA Africa).

In shaping this next chapter, the academy is drawing inspiration from global successes, such as Harvard Business School’s Business of Entertainment, Media, and Sports course will be key to CBA Africa’s growth. Launched in 2008 by Professor Anita Elberse, the programme applies rigorous business thinking to creative industries, drawing stars like Ciara, Dwyane Wade, and LL Cool J. For CBA Africa, it’s a powerful example of what’s possible — a model for transforming Africa’s creative passion into structured, scalable business excellence.

From its beginnings as a small, music-focused training programme to its evolution into the Creative Business Academy for Africa, MBA Africa’s story mirrors the growth of the continent’s creative economy: ambitious, experimental, and determined to professionalise passion. Its next chapter is about scaling the model that worked for the music industry to the larger creative industry. Whether in music, film, fashion, or gaming, CBA Africa aims to train the next generation of executives who will build lasting creative enterprises. Like Harvard’s renowned entertainment business course, it aims to demonstrate that creativity and commerce can coexist.

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• It signals untapped demand in African publishing. Narrative Landscape’s record-breaking sales show that when the right story, author, and infrastructure align, Nigerians are willing to buy books at scale challenging assumptions about a weak consumer market.

• It offers a blueprint for creative entrepreneurship. Starting with low-risk, revenue-generating services before reinvesting in traditional publishing illustrates how African founders can bootstrap their way into more ambitious ventures.

• It highlights the value of owning distribution. By building its own logistics pipeline, Narrative Landscape proved that publishers and by extension, other creative businesses can bypass broken systems and deliver directly to audiences, securing both trust and scale.

1.16,000 copies and counting

The Otedola family is no stranger to record-breaking feats. Temi Otedola’s debut film, Citation, ranked among Netflix’s top ten globally within weeks of release. DJ Cuppy earned a spot on Forbes Africa’s 30 Under 30. But in August 2025, it was the family’s patriarch setting the pace, and this time, not for a billion-dollar business deal. Three weeks after its release, Femi Otedola’s autobiography, Making It Big, had sold 16,000 copies in Nigeria and another 4,000 in the UK, a milestone that few non-educational books have ever touched in the country’s history.

In a market where selling 10,000 copies over a book’s lifetime can confer bestseller status, Otedola’s numbers looked closer to a music-streaming debut than a publishing launch. The force behind that rollout was Lagos-based trade publisher, Narrative Landscape Press. It wasn’t the first time in 2025 the publisher had tested the limits of Nigeria’s book market. Just months earlier, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s fourth novel, Dream Count, saw its first Nigerian print run of 25,000 copies sell out within days of its release.

Those weren’t isolated wins. Narrative Landscape has built one of the most enviable catalogues in African publishing, with a roster that includes Oyinkan Braithwaite, Chude Jideonwo, Yvonne Orji, Lupita Nyong’o, Marlon James, Wole Soyinka, and Nikki May. Together, these authors provide the publisher a rare mix of global star power, literary prestige, and commercial appeal.

That Narrative Landscape Press sold books in such volume was striking in itself. Nigerians rarely buy books at scale, held back by economic pressures, the lure of free or pirated copies, and a fragile publishing ecosystem plagued by high costs and poor distribution. Which is why these successes matter; a signal that when the product, the author, and the publishing machinery align, readers are willing to spend. And for the last few years, Narrative Landscape has been at the centre of that alignment.

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2. Bookstrapped beginnings

Narrative Landscape Press did not begin with a splashy debut novel or a star-studded launch. Its origins were far more pragmatic. After years in the publishing industry, co-founders Eghosa Imasuen, author and former COO of Farafina, and Anwuli Ojogwu, former editor at Farafina and co-founder of the Society for Book and Magazine Editors of Nigeria, knew they wanted something different. “There are still not many trade publishing companies in Nigeria; there’s room for others to emerge, because there are writers to sign up. We loved publishing and wanted to create another publishing house,” Ojogwu said to Communiqué. The idea was less about a grand vision than about contributing to African literature and building a professional publishing outfit in a market that had space for more players.

However, starting a publishing house in Nigeria is capital-intensive, and the founders did not have significant capital. In 2016, they began with a more pragmatic approach: publishing services. Sometimes called vanity publishing, it meant helping authors and institutions produce their books to professional standards, including editorial work, design, print production, and distribution, but with the clients footing the bill. This differed from traditional trade publishing, where the publisher assumes the financial risk of editing, producing, and marketing a book, with the expectation of recouping its investment through sales.

Early clients included Parrésia Publishers and the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library, both of whom paid for Narrative Landscape’s production expertise. The revenue from these projects kept the company afloat and helped the team build the capital base needed to move into traditional publishing. By 2018, they were ready to take the leap.

When Narrative Landscape decided to step into trade publishing in 2018, Nigeria’s literary scene was in the middle of a renaissance. A new generation of writers was breaking through internationally: Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen had been named a finalist for the Booker Prize; Elnathan John’s Born on a Tuesday would go on to win the Betty Trask Award; and Ayobami Adebayo’s Stay With Me was shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction.

On the home front, literary festivals were expanding the ecosystem. Building on the success of the Ake Arts and Book Festival, launched in 2013, Lola Shoneyin had created the Kaduna Book and Arts Festival in northern Nigeria and founded Ouida Books, another ambitious publishing house. The energy around Nigerian literature was palpable, and Narrative Landscape wanted to be part of shaping that moment.

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3. Trade publishing secrets

To launch the trade publishing side of the business, the co-founders turned to their longtime friend, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who had just ended her relationship with her former publisher, Farafina. The new house acquired the Nigerian rights to all of Adichie’s works and reissued them with striking Ankara-inspired covers, the result of a partnership with Dutch textile maker Vlisco.

Alongside Adichie, they also secured the Nigerian rights to Oyinkan Braithwaite’s debut novel, My Sister, the Serial Killer. The book went on to become a New York Times bestseller, selling over a million copies and being translated into more than 30 languages. These acquisitions reflected a dual strategy: signing both emerging voices and established names.

But when it came to choosing titles, Narrative Landscape’s guiding principle was authenticity. “We’re particular about ensuring that African stories are represented in the voices that should tell them. What matters is the craft and the way it reflects our culture and resilience. We want readers, whether in Lagos or abroad, to encounter something that feels true to who we are,” Ojogwu said to Communiqué.

That commitment to authenticity was matched by something equally important: trust. In Nigeria, publishing is as much about community as it is about business. Unlike in the West, where relationships are often mediated by agents, writers here tend to build personal relationships with their publishers. Narrative Landscape leaned into this dynamic, going beyond straightforward negotiations to cultivate relationships where writers felt their work would be safe. For high-profile authors like Lupita Nyong’o, Marlon James, and the late Binyavanga Wainaina, that sense of trust, rooted in shared values and personal connection, was the deciding factor.

4. Distribution nightmares and non-fiction dreams

Trust and authenticity gave Narrative Landscape its foundation, but scaling the business meant confronting one of the biggest challenges in Nigerian publishing: distribution. For publishers, the surest way to achieve scale is to get a book onto a school curriculum. That’s how A.H. Mohammed’s The Last Days at Forcados High School sold over 2.4 million copies, and Sarah Ladipo Manyika’s Independence moved over 1.5 million copies. But for authors who are not as fortunate, the reality is a fragmented web of distributors who often delay payments or default entirely.

To work around this, Narrative Landscape built its own direct-to-consumer distribution system, striking a partnership with Konga to leverage its logistics network. Taking control of distribution has become a core part of its business model. When Chimamanda Adichie’s Dream Count launched earlier this year, it was this system that enabled the publisher to meet demand faster than established bookstores.

Narrative Landscape first solidified its bona fides with fiction, but increasingly its focus has shifted toward non-fiction. This pivot reflects a broader trend: for the past two years, according to the Open Country Mag bestseller list, the top-selling books in Nigeria have been non-fiction titles. “Nigerians are becoming more interested in non-fiction personal stories—not just of global figures like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, or Steve Jobs, but of their own leaders. When these stories feel authentic, readers connect with them deeply, which makes the genre a viable investment,” Ojogwu said to Communiqué.

Narrative Landscape is positioning itself to capitalise on that momentum. In 2024, co-founder Eghosa Imasuen published Challengers, a retelling of the founding story of the VFD Group, and later this year the publisher will release Chude Jideonwo’s fourth book, How Depression Saved My Life. Both point to a new chapter for Narrative Landscape Press, one rooted in non-fiction storytelling that meets readers where their interests are growing.

In 2016, when Eghosa Imasuen and Anwuli Ojogwu set out to build Narrative Landscape, they were clear about its mission: to publish high-quality literature and to make money. Almost a decade later, the company appears to be doing exactly that.

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Why this matters

1. Even a failed pilot proved Nollywood audiences are hungry for lower-cost, piracy-safe screenings.

2. Use location specific data to guide expansion as success depends on existing consumer habits

3. Innovation fails without seamless delivery; this pilot is a masterclass in fixing the balance between security and user experience.

1. Best laid plans

In Communiqué 80, we explored Fusion Intelligence’s bold plan for a community cinema model that could deliver Nollywood films beyond traditional cinema locations. At the time, we noted that “Fusion Intelligence makes a compelling pitch to both filmmakers and exhibitors: show your film in more places safely, and earn revenue from an entirely new class of venues.”

On August 1, the Lagos-based technology solutions provider put that plan to the test. Partnering with Café One, one of Nigeria’s largest coffeehouse chains, it piloted screenings of filmmaker Nora Awolowo’s Red Circle across four locations — Kaduna, Owerri, Uyo, and Enugu — outside Lagos, Nigeria’s most profitable box office market.

Awolowo, one of Nollywood’s most exciting young directors, had already scored a theatrical hit with Red Circle. The film grossed over ₦100 million during its cinema run earlier in June and earned strong reviews for its storyline and visual style. By selecting a proven box office success for the pilot, Fusion wanted to demonstrate that its community cinema model could deliver the same high-demand content that audiences were paying premium prices to see in traditional cinemas, but at a lower cost and in more accessible spaces.

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2. Where things fell apart

Ahead of the screening, Fusion Intelligence had tested Convoy, its distribution platform, with films in the public domain like The Sound of Music. However, they did not test Convoy at the screening locations. The internal tests went smoothly. But there was a catch: The Sound of Music file was just 1.5 gigabytes, while Red Circle was over 7 gigabytes. That difference proved decisive.

On the morning of the screenings, the Red Circle file was uploaded to Convoy to further reduce the chances of the film leaking. But the first sign of trouble came when it took hours for Red Circle to download at the screening locations. In Kaduna, the process dragged on for more than four hours; in Owerri, Enugu, and Uyo, it took over two hours. The delays meant screenings started late.

Then came the bigger problem.

Fusion Intelligence had over-indexed on security with Convoy. The platform allowed producers to upload their films, have them encrypted, and securely stream them to authorised locations with unique decryption keys. On paper, this solved Nollywood’s greatest fear: piracy. But in practice, Convoy’s security system created a broken viewing experience. As Red Circle played, Convoy automatically began re-encrypting played parts in real time to prevent duplication.

The Red Circle file’s large size became a problem. Convoy re-encrypted the file faster than people could watch the movie. Screenings stopped repeatedly, forcing projection teams to re-enter decryption keys multiple times during a single showing.

As a result, the screenings on the first day failed. Fusion Intelligence quickly adjusted, slowing down the encryption speed on the platform. To rebuild goodwill, they offered free screenings of Red Circle throughout August.

3. Lessons and small wins

The pilot wasn’t a total flop. On opening day, 100 tickets were sold across the four locations, generating ₦300,000. This amount may seem modest, but let’s put it into perspective. Red Circle’s opening day in traditional cinemas grossed ₦6.9 million across 76 locations nationwide, with 30 locations in Lagos. Fusion Intelligence generated roughly 4% of that revenue across four community cinema locations, with less than half the cost of regular cinema tickets. When you begin to scale that number up, it begins to make a difference. For instance, if there are community cinemas in each of the 46 locations outside Lagos, they will generate around ₦3.5 million, or 50% of Red Circle’s opening-day gross.

Owerri recorded the highest sales, while Uyo sold the least. The contrast was telling: Owerri already hosts two established cinemas, while Uyo has none (its most prominent cinema, Silverbird, shut down in 2024). The results suggest that community cinema may not necessarily thrive in cities without cinemas, as long assumed, but rather in places where cinema-going culture is already established. In such markets, community cinemas could serve as a lower-cost alternative for audiences priced out of premium cinema experiences.

Marketing also played a role. “We focused our marketing on the first day of the screenings,” Fusion Intelligence CEO Kolade Adewoye told Communiqué. Many viewers assumed the screenings were a one-off event and only bought tickets for the opening day. Following the technical mishaps, all subsequent screenings were free, further limiting revenue.

Still, the experiment validated key parts of Fusion’s thesis. Concessions, such as snacks and drinks sold during screenings, brought in almost the same revenue as tickets, proving that community cinemas could open new income streams for host venues. And perhaps most importantly, Convoy kept the film secure. Despite all the hiccups, Red Circle never leaked online, a significant achievement in an industry long battered by piracy.

Fusion Intelligence’s Red Circle pilot shows both the promise and pitfalls of building a new exhibition model for Nollywood. Piracy protection may matter to producers and investors, but audiences ultimately judge by experience. If the viewing isn’t smooth, the model fails.

Fusion Intelligence now faces the challenge of fine-tuning Convoy to strike the right balance between security and usability. The outcome won’t just shape its own fortunes, but also those of the entire industry.

Fusion Intelligence has released a full breakdown of the Red Circle Pilot. You can read it here.

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1. Community can be a powerful foundation for a scalable business:

WeTalkSound started as a WhatsApp group for music lovers, but the trust, loyalty, and network it built in those early days became the foundation for a full-fledged 360° music company. Entrepreneurs can build an engaged community to create a ready-made audience for their product.

2. Vertical integration increases value and influence: WeTalkSound’s evolution into a full-service music company providing PR, video production, events, distribution, and label services to independent artists helps diversify the company’s revenue streams. Creative entrepreneurs can learn from this by building services connecting multiple parts of their industry’s value chain.

3. Independence is a strategic advantage in emerging creative markets: WeTalkSound has built an open, artist-agnostic platform. This makes it attractive to independent musicians who want control over their careers but still need professional infrastructure. This reflects a broader shift where creators want ownership and control but still need professional services. Entrepreneurs should identify where creators in their industry struggle with independence and build service platforms to fill those gaps.

1. The WhatsApp group to music empire pipeline

When I join the We Talk Sports group chat, its name has been briefly changed to “Mission X” to celebrate the Super Falcons clinching their 10th African Women’s Cup of Nations title. For a moment, the air is thick with national pride. But within hours, the conversation returns to regular programming. With the football season yet to begin, the conversation revolves around the European clubs on summer tours, transfer market rumours, and tactical breakdowns of pre-season friendlies.

It feels less like a WhatsApp group and more like walking into a lively bar: matches are dissected in real-time, banter flies faster than goals in a Champions League match, and somehow, amidst the chaos, friendships are forming. This, in its original form, is what Dolapo Amusat conceived of when he started a group of interest-based “We Talk” communities.

We Talk Sports is one of the last two of those communities. The other, WeTalkSound, has grown beyond just being a community for music lovers.

In 2018, WeTalkSound (WTS) began an annual tradition of releasing the LOFN album series, a project focused on love and attraction. By 2021, the fourth edition reached number one on Apple Music’s Alternative chart in Nigeria, a milestone signalling WeTalkSound’s growing ascendancy in the country’s wider music industry.

WeTalkSound eventually put a pin in the LOFN tradition, moving to more ambitious projects. In 2024, it released Sounds of Nollywood, a documentary series spotlighting the often-overlooked sound designers and composers behind some of Nollywood's biggest films. That same year, a collaboration with Trace saw the company develop shows showcasing African music and entertainment culture.

WeTalkSound’s portfolio of collaborations now includes work with Empire, Aristokrat Records, Universal, and OneRPM; a client list that reads like a who’s who of the African and global music business. In the process, WeTalkSound has outgrown its origins as a community of music lovers, fully evolving into a full-service music company that can produce, market, and distribute music, create compelling cultural content, and execute brand partnerships. But it all began many years earlier with a young boy in Ibadan with a deep love for music.

2. Early beginnings in Ibadan

Dolapo Amusat’s penchant for music began in secondary school in Ibadan, when all his classmates had a music phase. But while they all grew out of it, his phase endured. His first real attempt at creating a music community came before university, with a Facebook group called Rap at Its Best. “It was basically a place to argue about rap all day,” he recalls. Members traded lines from new releases, analysed metaphors, and occasionally descended into heated debates.

By the time he got to the University of Ibadan, Amusat had developed a reputation among friends as the music guy. But while he recorded a few tracks and even released music, much of his energy on campus went into other creative pursuits.

He became more active in the university’s literary scene than in its music circles, joining the campus press outfit Indie Press. He also started The Stellar Ensemble, a WordPress blog where he and his friends shared poetry, essays, and cultural commentary.

In 2015, Amusat co-created UI Writes a digital poetry anthology from University of Ibadan students. Published as a free PDF, the collection was downloaded thousands of times and featured in The Nigerian Tribune and The Guardian. “That was the first thing that made me think, okay, we can start something from scratch, with no money, and it can be real,” Amusat told Communiqué.

Shortly after UI Writes, during his final year, Amusat conceived WeTalkSound. The premise was simple: he had friends who loved music, but they didn’t know each other. Why not create a space where they could connect, share discoveries, and collaborate? The idea drew inspiration from his years on online forums, especially the Nigerian discussion site Nairaland, and from international music communities like Rap Genius (now Genius). “I was very heavy into forums,” he says. “I loved that you could have people from everywhere come together just to talk about music.” Alongside Wetalksound, he also created other communities, including WeTalkSports, WeTalkPolitics, and WeTalkMovies.

After university, Amusat went corporate, joining KPMG, Bolt, and eventually Google. But while he was climbing the corporate ladder, WeTalkSound was building its own momentum. What began with Amusat’s University of Ibadan circle quickly spilt into other campuses. UNIBEN, UNILAG, and OAU students joined in, drawn by the group’s energy and shared obsession with music. Soon, the group hit the WhatsApp member limit and had to migrate to Telegram.

By 2018, the community was ready to do more than talk about music. It began to make it. The LOFN series was born, sourcing tracks from artists within the group and curating them into a Valentine’s season release. The albums became a showcase for emerging voices, spotlighting artists like Vaderthewildcard, Soulblacksheep, and Bio. As these artists grew bigger, they carried WeTalkSound with them.

When any member of the WeTalkSound community dropped a music project, the community, which now has over 1000 members, moved like an army, reposting links and hyping releases across social media. The music industry began to pay attention, but there was still little structure around it. “We knew how to make noise online. It was more noise than any methodical strategy.” In 2020, Amusat began to create a structure around the community using what he had learned from Google and Bolt.

3. The WeTalkSound blueprint

Building a business began with Amusat deciding that being a part of conversations in the music industry wasn't enough; the community needed a media platform to shape conversations. “Media exists for different reasons, and one of them is to push agendas.” If WeTalkSound was going to be influential in Nigeria’s music ecosystem, it had to be able to create its own narratives. So, they built out an in-house publication and content team to create stories, interviews, and cultural commentary on the Nigerian music industry.

From there, the focus shifted to providing PR and marketing services for artists. WTS was already a trusted name among up-and-coming musicians, so handling publicity, campaign strategy, and audience engagement felt like a natural extension. But music marketing is heavily dependent on visuals. So they built out a video production arm, starting with artist-focused documentaries.

Once they had media, marketing, and visuals on lock, Amusat looked to the next frontier: events. WeTalkSound had always had small community events, but they decided to do it on a larger scale. Insert Nights was launched, a monthly live event series that became a gathering point for artists, fans, and industry insiders. These nights served as both showcases and testing grounds for talent and networking hubs for the music industry.

The final pieces of the puzzle came with music distribution and label services. WTS had spent years helping several artists grow, but Amusat knew that actual influence in the music industry came from owning IP — songs, masters, and content that could generate revenue directly. By offering distribution, WeTalkSound could ensure artists’ music reached streaming platforms worldwide. They could help guide artists’ in their creative process, and navigate the murky waters of contracts and rights management by providing label support.

Today, WeTalkSound operates as a 360-degree music company capable of in-house navigating the complex process of taking an artist from idea to global stage.

In building out WeTalkSound, Amusat often points to Roc Nation as a blueprint. Roc Nation has its hand in nearly every part of the global music value chain, from developing artists to organising concerts, collecting royalties, and selling merchandise. In 2019, after years of declining viewership, the NFL tapped Roc Nation to curate the Super Bowl halftime show, a partnership that yielded record-breaking performances from artists like Rihanna, Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent, and Dr. Dre.

WeTalkSound has begun to explore similar partnerships in its own way, for instance, collaborating with the French Embassy to produce cultural programming for World Music Day. Another reference point is AWAL (Artists Without a Label), which began as a community-driven label services platform for independent artists. By 2022, AWAL’s influence and infrastructure were so significant that Sony Group acquired it for $430 million.

Like Roc Nation and AWAL, WeTalkSound is betting on breadth, versatility, and independence. But it also has a unique advantage in the Nigerian market. The typical record label structure here often revolves around a superstar artist who signs younger acts, using their own fame as the launchpad. WeTalkSound is not tied to any one artist or a legacy institutional label. Instead, it operates as an open platform, equally accessible to any artist looking to retain independence while still accessing world-class services.

As more Nigerian musicians choose to go independent, WeTalkSound is positioning itself as the infrastructure that makes that choice viable. A full service music company capable of offering everything from creative direction and marketing to legal, distribution, and event production.

Key Points

Own a niche: Trying to appeal to everyone is expensive and unsustainable. Kava is betting on Nollywood because it’s a clear niche with a growing global fanbase. Creative entrepreneurs and investors should focus on one specific audience and serve them deeply. That focus builds loyalty and long-term value.

Plan for the entire lifecycle of a film: With the rise of niche streaming platforms. There’s an added layer in the distribution cycle for films. Creative investors should look for opportunities to license or monetise work after its peak attention phase.

Invest in community: Beyond streaming, Kava’s success may depend on its ability to create a community for Nollywood lovers. Likewise, creative investors and entrepreneurs launching new products should prioritise community to turn users into advocates.

1. Kava and chill?

Last month, at a star-studded event in Lagos, Filmhouse Group unveiled its latest venture: Kava, a new streaming platform for Nollywood, launched in partnership with production powerhouse Inkblot Films.

When Kava goes live in late August, it will debut with over 30 premium Nollywood titles, including exclusive post-theatrical releases like the comedy-drama Alakada: Bad and Boujee, Owambe Thieves, and What About Us, the debut film from rising studio Narrative Entertainment. New titles will be added weekly, and original programming is already being developed.

Kava joins a growing wave of producer-led streaming platforms emerging in the wake of prominent global streamers pulling back from the African market. But what exactly is the play here?

Why are these new streamers betting on a model where even Netflix has struggled to survive? And perhaps most importantly: what is Filmhouse doing differently this time, after two earlier attempts at building a Nollywood-focused streaming service?

2. Third time’s the charm?

Filmhouse Group’s streaming ambitions are not new. The company’s first foray into digital distribution came in 2018 with MyFilmhouse.ng, a platform that promised to bring Hollywood and Nollywood films directly to Nigerian consumers. But at the time, Nigeria’s market was still largely dependent on physical DVDs, pirated content, and traditional TV. MyFilmhouse struggled to gain traction and quietly faded out.

In 2021, Filmhouse tried again with Filmhouse Plus. Billed as both a streaming platform and a digital community for film lovers, Filmhouse Plus launched with curated content, behind-the-scenes footage, filmmaker interviews, and integrated digital ticketing for cinema releases. It was an ambitious attempt at creating a home for Nollywood’s emerging digital audience. But the platform soon ran into some challenges.

The company had expended a lot of resources in building and maintaining the tech stack for streaming, but even then, the app was still riddled with bugs. A previous Communiqué essay detailed persistent UX issues that plagued the platform. And even if its tech problems had been resolved, a bigger challenge loomed: Netflix and Amazon Prime Video had entered the Nigerian market, sparking a bidding war for premium Nollywood content. Filmhouse couldn’t compete for content at that level, so its streaming dreams fizzled out once again.

Now, the stars seem to have aligned to favour Filmhouse. Amazon Prime Video has fully exited the Nigerian market, and Netflix has scaled back significantly, slowing down its local productions and narrowing its slate. For the first time in years, the race to own Nollywood’s digital future is wide open, and with Kava, Filmhouse may be the most prepared to seize the moment. But this time, with a different strategy.

There are two ways to build a global streaming business. The first—the wide way—is to offer a massive content library that caters to a wide range of audiences with varying tastes. Platforms like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu have entered this way.

Then there’s the narrow way: building a platform that serves a particular audience, with deep, tailored content that speaks directly to them. Platforms like Shudder (horror), Crunchyroll (anime), and Revry (LGBTQ+ content) have proven this model works. Kava seems to have found the narrow way.

Filmhouse is positioning Kava as a niche global home for Nollywood and African content. This platform seeks to serve the growing demand for Nollywood content worldwide.

“When we’re able to deliver content at scale to audiences that are not just us, they will understand and fall in love with the stories that we have. They just don’t know it yet, but they will fall in love with us,” Kava co-CEO Chinaza Onuzo said to TechCabal.

3. A crunchy success story

To understand niche streaming, it helps to understand its most successful example: Crunchyroll.

Crunchyroll was founded in 2006 as a scrappy startup built by a group of UC Berkeley graduates who began by uploading pirated anime content for fans worldwide. But by 2009, the platform had gone legit, licensing content directly from Japanese studios and building a paid subscription model for anime lovers outside Asia. Over time, Crunchyroll cultivated a hyper-loyal audience by focusing only on anime. It invested in community-building features like fan forums, simulcasts that released new episodes the same day as Japan, and even a merchandising arm. In 2017, it hit 1 million paying subscribers, and three years later, Sony acquired it for $1.2 billion.

Other platforms have followed similar paths: Shudder has become the go-to platform for horror enthusiasts; CuriosityStream offers a buffet of science and documentary programming; and BroadwayHD caters to theatre fans by streaming live-recorded Broadway and West End productions.

4. How will a niche Nollywood streaming platform succeed?

To build a successful niche streaming platform, there must first be global cultural demand for the niche content. Crunchyroll’s rise coincided with the growing global appetite for anime. The same principle must apply to Nollywood: if global demand for Nigerian and African storytelling continues to rise, then a dedicated platform like Kava has a strong chance of scaling internationally.

We can measure that demand by examining how Nollywood content performs on global streaming platforms today. Black Book, arguably the most successful Nollywood film on Netflix, hit the number one spot in 12 countries and made the Top 10 in over 60. That’s no small feat, but compare that to anime’s current global pull: K-Pop: Demon Hunters, the most-watched anime on Netflix, hit #1 in 33 countries and made the Top 10 in 93. Anime is ahead in global reach, but Nollywood is clearly gaining ground. There’s already enough momentum for a platform like Kava to build a strong foundation around.

But even with cultural demand, success won’t be immediate. Crunchyroll didn’t explode overnight. It took 11 years to hit 1 million paying subscribers, 14 years to reach 5 million, and only in the last few years, fueled by anime’s international boom, did it accelerate to 15 million subscribers. Niche platforms grow slowly, but they can scale with consistency and a loyal base.

The second pillar of success for a niche streamer is aggregation: owning the widest, deepest, and most valuable library in the niche. Offering only new films is not enough; Kava and other niche streamers must become the home of Nollywood, from the latest hits to cult classics.

For Kava, this is where its partnership with Inkblot matters. As one of Nigeria’s most commercially successful production houses, Inkblot brings an immediate boost in content quality and volume. Its catalogue, which includes titles like The Set Up, The Wedding Party 2, and Up North, gives Kava a strong opening hand. But one studio isn’t enough.

Kava must strike licensing deals with other major production houses and independent filmmakers to truly dominate, securing streaming rights across the industry. For many of these producers, Kava will need to insert itself at the end of the content lifecycle: after the cinema run and global licensing windows with Netflix or Prime expire. That new pipeline might look like this:
Cinema release → Global streamer → Niche home on Kava.

This is already happening. Several Nollywood films streaming on Netflix are set to leave the platform this month as their licenses expire. Many are expected to find new homes on niche platforms like Kava.

But beyond the content, a key ingredient for the success of a niche Nollywood streaming platform is community. It’s not enough to stream great content. For Kava or any Nollywood-focused platform to truly thrive, it must become the digital town square for Nollywood fans worldwide. That means embedding community tools that allow viewers to connect, debate, review, recommend, and engage with the content and each other.

This strategy has worked well for other niche platforms. Crunchyroll grew because it became the hub of anime fandom. It built forums, hosted conventions, supported fan art, and enabled early access to merchandise. Shudder, the horror streaming platform, has cultivated a dedicated user base through curated collections, live-streamed watch parties, and strong editorial content.

For a Nollywood streamer like Kava, this could mean building spaces for fans to discuss films, follow favourite directors, participate in virtual premieres or Q&As, write reviews, and even co-watch titles with friends. The more fans feel connected to each other and to the creators, the more likely they are to stick around, advocate for the platform, and invest emotionally in its success.

Nollywood already has a vibrant, vocal fanbase. The next step is to give them a home. If Kava gets the tech, the content, and the experience right, it could become Nollywood’s global home.

1. The media needs better capital, not just more of it. Traditional VC and nonprofit models often fail media businesses — MDIF offers a proven middle ground, blending equity, debt, and grants with long-term support to build sustainable, impactful companies.

2. NAMIP is proof of concept. As part of MDIF, the Nigerian Media Innovation Program is helping startups like Communiqué — and others like HumAngle and Premium Times — grow viable businesses in an ecosystem where structure, mentorship, and capital are scarce.

3. We need more MDIFs. Media is essential infrastructure, especially in emerging markets. The success of MDIF shows there’s both impact and return in backing independent media — now is the time to scale that model globally.

1. Food for thought

In August 2024, I began actively exploring what it would be like to run Communiqué full-time. The newsletter was growing steadily. Its audience was expanding. I’d struck a few partnerships. So, it was okay to consider going all in. After all, there was “proof of concept,” right?

I talked to friends and family about this. I needed to be sure of what I was getting into. I also ran the idea by mentors and advisors. Everyone saw the potential. But only a handful could help me answer this question: What would a viable business look like?

Advertising and subscription revenue from the newsletter were unlikely to be sufficient, at least not in this economic climate. There had to be more. Throwing a layer of consulting on top of that made things more appealing, but building a clientele takes far more time and consumes more energy than most people think.

As I mulled over the question of sustainability, I had a meeting with Deji Adekunle, program director of the Nigerian Media Innovation Program (NAMIP), that same August. Adekunle and the NAMIP team, a part of the larger Media Development Investment Fund (MDIF), have been instrumental in helping a handful of Nigerian independent media companies grow into viable businesses. I was hoping Communiqué could become a part of the group.

For this to happen, however, I first needed to prove that this side project could become a business worthy of external support. So, I used what I had left in my savings to establish a more structured approach, hired essential staff, and actively began seeking clients.

Our first client was Gatefield, with whom we implemented the Visual Storytelling Bootcamp. Then we onboarded Moniepoint as the headline sponsor for our newsletter. We also turned on the paywall and got our first set of paid subscribers within a few weeks.

Armed with this track record, we then applied for Communiqué to become a member of NAMIP. Fortunately, we got into the program, and what has followed is a season of essential lessons, incredible support, and a personal realization that the media industry needs more initiatives like this.

You see, NAMIP exists within the MDIF ecosystem, and the MDIF has been responsible for the growth of tens of media companies worldwide. However, it has remained largely quiet and in the background throughout its existence.

To me, however, more people need to know about this organization that helped launch Communiqué properly and set it on the path it’s on today.

2. Sound the bugle

I first learned about NAMIP during my time as the Africa Editor at Rest of World, while scouting for media development agencies and programs on the continent. The idea was impressive: an incubator for independent Nigerian media organizations, designed to help them figure out better business models, audience engagement strategies, and product management systems. The ecosystem was sorely lacking this type of initiative, so I dug deeper.

Since its inauguration in 2022, NAMIP has helped shape media organizations such as BusinessDay, Culture Custodian, Premium Times, and HumAngle. I discovered that NAMIP was part of a larger organization that had successfully implemented similar programs in South Africa, parts of Asia, and Europe.

Founded in 1995 by Serbian journalist Saša Vučinić and former Washington Post correspondent Stuart Auerbach, MDIF (then known as Media Development Loan Fund) initially existed to support independent media in Eastern and Southeastern Europe during the transition from communism to democracy. Soon enough, the organization realized that the type of support it offered was in demand globally. So, it expanded its outlook to countries such as Indonesia, Guatemala, and South Africa.

Since its inception, MDIF has deployed over $320 million in financing to more than 150 media companies worldwide. More than $270 million of this is in loans and equity financing, while over $55 million is in grants and similar financing models. Its modus operandi is exactly how media investment should work. In many ways, it typifies how creative economy investment firms should operate, especially in Africa.

The organization doesn’t just inject capital. It works with companies to develop their capacity through training programs and regular accountability sessions. This way, the companies can identify sustainable paths for growth and establish proper business structures. Some of these companies receive loans or equity investments. Others receive grants, often through regional media development programs, such as NAMIP.

Every so often, experts and thought leaders argue that traditional financing models are ineffective for the media and creative industries. That much is true. However, more often than not, what happens is a swing towards the extreme, where people obsess over development funding and grants. These are not designed for self-sufficiency, and the evidence speaks for itself. What the ecosystem lacks is balance, and this is what MDIF provides.

“We provide both debt and equity because sometimes media companies need a loan, for example, when they have established revenues and just need capital they can pay back, and other times prefer equity to finance a major investment without the need for regular repayments,” Peter Whitehead, MDIF’s director of communications, told Communiqué.

In addition to its financial and operational support, MDIF also offers media advisory services, providing technical support for editorial and audience development, technology and digital transformation, and business development services, among others. Ideally, some of the media companies that the MDIF invests in grow big enough to become clients for its advisory arm. Brilliant.

This multi-pronged approach accounts for ecosystem diversity in ways that many other funds and development initiatives don’t, especially when dealing with companies from emerging markets, where media organizations face a frustrating paradox: they’re critical to society, yet structurally underfunded.

MDIF’s model steps in where commercial capital often won’t, offering patient financing and capacity-building that helps media businesses survive and grow.

3. All of the lights

We often discuss media as if it were just another content industry. But in reality, it’s deeper than that. It is the nervous system of any democratic society. When you weaken that system, everything else will suffer as a result.

Yet around the world, media businesses are being left behind. Many are too mission-driven for traditional venture capital, while some are considered too commercially oriented for nonprofit funding. They operate in a no-man’s-land — too risky, often misunderstood, but too essential to fail. And so, the waters around them are murky.

That’s why MDIF’s model is so valuable. It proves that there’s a third way, a middle ground between grants and aggressive capital. A model that sees media not only as a public good, but as a viable business. An economic engine, so to speak. A model that backs founders like me with the resources and runway to figure things out.

Imagine if we had ten more organizations like the MDIF, operating in different regions and formats, funding everything from investigative newsrooms to youth-focused content studios and digital media startups. Imagine if more creative economy funds adopted this model. This isn’t naivete. The MDIF, for instance, has returned over $127 million to investors and received more than $75 million in interests, dividends, and capital gains. So, there is a solid business case here.

Communiqué didn’t become a business overnight. It took numerous conversations, experiments, sleepless nights, and strategic pivots. But more than anything, it took someone, an organization, believing that it was worth backing.

NAMIP, through MDIF, did that. They helped us refine our thinking, push our boundaries, and grow into something more structured and sustainable. And if it weren’t for that support, we wouldn’t be where we are.

That’s why I believe more people need to know about MDIF. More funders, more founders, more policymakers. Because if we’re going to build a world where media companies can serve the public exceptionally well, then we need more initiatives like MDIF.

1. While global interest is rising, many creative businesses in Africa lack the formal structures investors require. A strategic approach that addresses gaps in infrastructure, financing, and capacity can open up the industry’s value and move it from a grassroots hustle to a scalable economic force.

2. A tiered investment strategy can be the backbone of a scalable creative economy. The proposed fund will allocate capital across five tiers: micro-funding for creators, VC for platforms, growth capital for export-ready brands, infrastructure for production, and ecosystem support for talent and regulation.

3. Ecosystem building will maximize returns and reduce risk. Beyond direct investments, 10% of the fund will go to talent development, legal literacy, IP protection, and policy reform. This de-risks the market for future investors and ensures the value created—talent, content, and IP—remains on the continent and grows within strong institutional frameworks.

1. The billion-dollar question

What would you do with a billion dollars?

If you’re an investor, this might be familiar territory: real estate, fintech, logistics, maybe healthcare. But increasingly, Africa’s creative and cultural industries are becoming a more viable asset class.

On the surface, the continent’s creative sector looks fragmented, underfunded, and largely informal. Yet scratch beneath that, and you find one of the fastest-growing, highest-impact sectors in the region. Everywhere you go, people are constantly consuming cultural products, from the songs they enjoy to the movies they watch, from the fashion designers they love to the local dishes they daydream about. Culture is everywhere and in everything.

But for so long, this sector was not considered a significant economic lever. Yes, it has existed for hundreds of years, but merely as a vehicle of identity and nothing more.

However, it is now attracting significant interest from investors. In fact, there already is a billion-dollar fund: Afreximbank's $1 billion African film financing facility launched to support the continent’s film and audiovisual industries. The film fund is a part of the bank’s commitment to the continent’s creative industry, which is expected to grow to $2 billion by 2027. Alongside this, others like HEVA and the Next Narrative Africa Fund also exist.

But this article poses a deeper, more urgent question: What should capital deployment for Africa’s creative industry look like?

What are the risks? What kinds of returns are possible? What systems need to exist to make that money transformative? And who has done something like this before?

To begin answering these questions, let’s examine other billion-dollar bets on culture and creative potential.

In an earlier Communiqué essay, we examined how South Korea exported its culture through a deliberate, state-backed strategy. In the late 1990s, the Korean government began investing heavily in pop culture, film, music, gaming, and drama through a combination of public and private funds, export credits, and soft infrastructure. Today, K-pop and K-drama are global exports, supported by a multibillion-dollar industry and worldwide distribution networks.

But a more recent example is Saudi Arabia’s $64 billion bet on its creative industries, launched under the Vision 2030 economic diversification strategy. While not without criticism, it demonstrates the sheer magnitude of capital and intentionality needed to build an industry where none previously existed.

These examples are not plug-and-play. But they prove the same thesis: when culture meets capital, futures can change.

So, what does this look like in an African context?

2. The road not taken

In March, Semafor highlighted the significant surge in investor interest in the creative economy. “Africa’s creative economy may be small by global standards, but it is thriving, prompting renewed efforts to draw investment,” the report read.

Within the story, however, creative economy investor and analyst Marie Lora-Mungai rightly pointed out the shortage of investable companies. “Investors are struggling to find deals in which to deploy their available funding. Too many creative sector companies are still informal or semi-formal,” she said.

While music, film, and sports have gained more recognition and moved toward formalization in parts of Africa’s creative economy, the majority of the sector remains largely informal. Industries like fashion, visual arts, and even tourism in some regions are still overlooked, under-supported, and often excluded from formal economic frameworks.

Furthermore, African creative businesses are small, informal ventures that lack the corporate structures investors typically require. They often operate as sole proprietorships or family-run outfits with limited or no financial records.

Despite these facts, some investors see what is possible and look to hedge their bets on the market’s ability to figure things out.

We do not want to leave things to chance, so we’ve spent time thinking about what a fool-proof investment strategy looks like for this continent.

Say we had a billion dollars, how would we deploy it? What would we do differently?

3. The yellow brick road

The first step in deploying a $1 billion fund in Africa’s creative industry is to map the landscape and understand where value is being created, but more importantly, how it’s being lost. An initial version of this would include a live database that accurately depicts the state of affairs.

Africa is not one market. Its creative industries are distributed across the continent: Nollywood in Nigeria, gaming studios in South Africa, fashion houses in Senegal, and hip-hop collectives in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. These are not isolated phenomena. They are nodes in a continental creative network.

Every region has talent. Every region has audiences. However, what they lack is the connective tissue: capital, platforms, production facilities, IP frameworks, and distribution channels that enable them to transcend local scenes and enter global markets. This is where strategic investment can be catalytic.

Next, the fund will need a channel to build and shape narratives. This channel will also serve as a way to signal to the market, attract and manage deal flow, and promote portfolio companies.

Finally, the fund needs a clear and transparent investment strategy. One that is clearly defined for the ecosystem to understand and respond to.

What, then, is that strategy? A multi-tiered approach.

A. Micro-funding (10% of the fund; $98 million): It would be counterproductive to ignore the early-stage and semi-formal businesses that make up a significant portion of the market. A portion of the fund will be dedicated to early-stage creators, collectives, and experimental projects that produce short films, EPs, web comics, fashion prototypes, and digital content. These small ticket sizes ($5,000–100,000) support small projects and will reach thousands of creators across the continent, serving as R&D for cultural storytelling. This tier drives grassroots innovation and ensures broad participation. This is the most common form of funding available, and investors like MBO Capital have successfully deployed this type of capital, particularly in the film industry.

B. VC-style equity funding (25% of the fund; $245 million): This allocation will be directed to startups like Selar, which builds tools and platforms serving creators, streaming platforms, IP licensing portals, digital marketplaces, and payments infrastructure. With ticket sizes ranging from $250,000 to $5 million, this layer supports scalable, tech-enabled solutions that can bring formalization, monetization, and distribution to creative value chains. Think of this tier as building the roads and railways of Africa’s creative economy.

C. Growth equity (25% of the fund; $245 million): This allocation will support mid-stage companies with proven traction, such as film studios, fashion brands, record labels, and animation firms, that are ready for global expansion. Investments between $5 million and $15 million will enable them to build catalogs, acquire competitors, and expand beyond their home markets. This tier generates the fund’s most visible commercial returns and positions Africa to own high-value IP at scale. Kupanda Capital's $5 million investment in Mavin Global is an example of this type of growth investment. That deal has yielded more than 10 times the return, with Universal Music paying north of $200 million to acquire a majority stake in the Nigerian music label last year.

D. Infrastructure (25% of the fund; $245 million): Africa’s creative economy suffers from weak infrastructure. This allocation will support the development of sound stages, recording studios, post-production facilities, broadband upgrades, digital archives, and IP registries. It would also partner with development institutions and governments to fund physical creative hubs, such as co-working spaces, theatres, and cultural districts, to anchor local ecosystems.

E. Ecosystem Support (10% of the fund; $98 million): Funding companies, projects, and infrastructure alone isn’t enough. There is a need to create the frameworks and human capital to successfully receive this funding. This is where ecosystem support comes in; this portion will support talent and business development, IP protection, and regulatory advocacy. That includes:

• Creative academies and training labs to upskill the next generation of writers, designers, animators, and producers.

• Residency programs and diaspora fellowships to connect African creatives globally.

• Legal clinics and IP literacy campaigns to ensure creators understand and defend their rights.

• Policy engagement to advance copyright, trade, and taxation reforms that make creativity bankable.

This is where the fund becomes an ecosystem builder, not just helping drive value production, but also value retention. In this tiered model, each layer reinforces the others. Micro-funding feeds VC; VC enables growth; growth demands infrastructure; and all of it depends on a supportive ecosystem. Trace Academia, a partnership between Afreximbank and French Music station Trace, provides over 130 online courses to African creative entrepreneurs, exemplifying this type of funding.

The goal is not to fund one big hit, but to lay the tracks for a generation of African creative products to be made, owned, and exported on African terms.

Key Points

1. Plan for long-term storytelling: Successful cinematic universes require careful planning and continuity. African creators should design interconnected stories and characters from the start, focusing on ensembles or recurring themes that reflect shared cultural values, rather than relying on a singular main character.

2. Secure patient, multi-project funding: Investors should move beyond one-off film financing and support long-term franchise development. Co-productions and multi-film deals can help build sustainable universes, rather than expecting quick returns from standalone projects.

3. Build for a pan-African (and global) audience: To maximize reach, filmmakers should incorporate diverse African cultures, themes, and talent to ensure broad appeal. Grassroots marketing and regional engagement can help build loyal fan bases, while global partnerships can expand visibility.

Characters featured in this artwork are the intellectual property of Comic Republic.

1. Homemade heroes with global dreams

In August 2024, a YouTube video attracted attention for all the right reasons. A group of young Sierra Leonean teenagers, armed with an iPhone X and CapCut editing software, released a homemade superhero film under the banner of their self-created studio: the African Cinematic Universe. Their hour-long film, stitched together with rudimentary visual effects and unrelenting enthusiasm, has since racked up over 200,000 views. It might have remained a charming internet curiosity, were it not for one particular viewer: Idris Elba.

Elba, whose father hails from Sierra Leone, publicly praised the boys and pledged to support their filmmaking ambitions as part of a broader commitment to increase his investment in Africa’s creative industries. But the teenagers’ refreshingly earnest effort is far from the only attempt at cinematic world-building on the continent.

In 2023, Nigerian digital comic book publisher Comic Republic inked a $4 million deal with Universal Studios to develop a cinematic universe based on its roster of homegrown African superheroes. The deal marked the first time a global studio had bet on African IP that wasn’t a one-off production, but rather as the foundation for a cinematic universe.

But before that, Marvel’s Black Panther had proven the global appetite for African stories told with ambition and scale. Released in 2018, the film grossed over $1.3 billion, igniting pride across the continent and helping establish Wakanda as a cultural totem for the global Black community. But nearly seven years later, despite centuries of storytelling traditions, a vibrant film culture, and growing international attention, the continent remains absent from one of modern cinema’s most lucrative and influential formats: the cinematic universe.

2. In the beginning was Universal

The idea of a shared cinematic universe is not new. Long before Iron Man or Black Panther, there were Frankenstein and Dracula. In 1931, Universal Pictures launched what would become the first modern cinematic universe, starting with Dracula and Frankenstein, and later expanding to include The Invisible Man and The Wolf Man. These characters appeared in both standalone films and crossover titles, such as Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943) and House of Frankenstein (1944).

But the Monster universe was not successful. Story continuity was treated as optional, character development was inconsistent, and editorial choices often severed narrative threads rather than weaving them together. Universal had the right idea, but lacked the necessary infrastructure and discipline to sustain it.

The modern cinematic universe, by contrast, is a high-stakes exercise in precision and planning. And no studio has executed this better than Marvel.

3. Marvel’s long game

By the mid-2000s, Marvel had grown tired of licensing its characters to other studios. Despite the success of Spider-Man at Sony and the X-Men at Fox, Marvel was earning a fraction of the box office returns and had little creative control. In 2005, Marvel Entertainment raised $525 million through a credit facility with Merrill Lynch, betting it could produce its films.

Kevin Feige, then a junior executive who would later become its president, understood that while Spider-Man and Wolverine were locked up at rival studios, the core Avengers—Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Hulk—were still available. More importantly, they existed in a shared comic universe that readers had followed for decades. Feige’s bet was simple: that audiences would care not just about characters, but about continuity. That the thrill of watching separate storylines converge would be just as powerful as the individual storylines themselves.

Marvel Studios launched Iron Man in 2008, a standalone film that grossed over $580 million. Later that year, The Incredible Hulk was released to rave reviews and grossed $265 million at the box office. But the larger payoff was still years away. In 2009, Disney acquired Marvel for $4 billion. At the time, the total box office revenue from Marvel’s IP (both films produced in-house and those licensed) was $4.5 billion. Since then, Marvel’s Cinematic Universe (MCU) has gone on to earn over $25 billion from 21 interconnected films, making it the highest-grossing film franchise in history.

Marvel’s success sparked a rush of copycats. Some succeeded. Godzilla, created by Japan’s Toho Studios in the 1950s, made a comeback in Legendary Studios’ MonsterVerse, anchored by Godzilla (2014), Kong: Skull Island (2017), and Godzilla vs. Kong (2019), which collectively grossed over $2.5 billion.

But most attempts have failed. Warner Bros. attempted to establish a King Arthur universe with The Legend of the Sword (2017), but audiences barely noticed. Sony’s Robin Hood (2018) was meant to launch spin-offs for each of the Merry Men, but flopped before it could even start. Universal’s infamous “Dark Universe,” heralded by The Mummy (2017) starring Tom Cruise, lost the studio $150 million.

Still, the promise of a cinematic universe in which stories, characters, and fan bases could compound in value remains tantalizing.

As one screenwriter put it in a conversation with media scholar Henry Jenkins, quoted in The Conversation, “When I first started, you would pitch a story because without a good story, you didn’t really have a film. Later, once sequels started to take off, you pitched a character because a good character could support multiple stories. And now, you pitch a world because a world can support multiple characters and multiple stories across multiple media.”

Despite Africa’s rich well of mythology, folklore, and lived experience, its filmmakers have yet to launch an actual cinematic universe. The reasons are not creative, but structural and cultural.

4. Why Africa has no cinematic universe yet

First of all, the business model behind cinematic universes—a long game of multi-project financing, coordinated timelines, and audience development—is largely incompatible with how investment works in contemporary African filmmaking.

Funding in Africa’s film industries is primarily short-term and project-based. A production secures capital to make one film, not to develop an interconnected trilogy or expand into a spin-off series. Investors want quick returns and lower risks. Few are willing to wait the five to ten years it might take to nurture an entire universe of stories.

Also, the very concept of a superhero, which most cinematic universes are built around, doesn’t always resonate in the same way. While Western narratives have long championed the lone hero, someone who rises above their peers, usually burdened with unique powers and a singular destiny, African societies tend to prioritize the collective. Identity is often rooted in ancestral lineage, communal legacy, and interdependence rather than individualism.

“Unlike Hollywood, which has stayed on the blockbuster superhero sci-fi format, we mostly produce melodramas. We don’t even have the technology to properly produce sci-fi,” Dr. Shaibu Husseini, the Director General of the Nigerian Film and Video Censors Board (NFVCB), told Communiqué.

But a cinematic universe does not have to be based on superheroes. It only has to include films that share the same fictional world, characters, and storylines.

African filmmakers can achieve this by:

I. Planning for continuity

Plan interconnected characters and worlds from the start. Create recurring protagonists that reflect African communal values, think ensemble heroes instead of lone crusaders. Local franchises prove the model works: Charles Okpaleke’s Play Network Africa attempted it with three Nollywood remakes—Living in Bondage: Breaking Free, Rattlesnake: The Ahanna Story, and Nneka the Pretty Serpent—with all three appearing in the top 100 highest-grossing Nigerian films.

Ayo Makun’s “Akpos” comedies (30 Days in Atlanta and its sequel A Trip to Jamaica) drew massive audiences by following the same hero on new adventures in totally different films. Likewise, Marvel’s MCU built audience loyalty by weaving standalone films into a cohesive timeline. This approach turns isolated hits into a self-sustaining franchise, encouraging viewers to follow each new chapter.

II. Financing for the long game

African filmmakers can overcome budget constraints by pooling resources through co-productions. Producers can also leverage rising investor interest to finance multiple films, rather than the singular project that is the norm. In May, BRS Studios announced a slate of three movies to be released this year, all of which were financed by MBO Capital. While the films do not form a cinematic universe, other filmmakers can adopt a similar model to secure investment deals and create their cinematic universes.

III. Creating for a pan-African audience

Think continent-wide from day one. Producers should assemble creative and production teams from multiple regions across the continent to ensure broad cultural appeal. They should address themes and settings that span African experiences (such as urban life, diaspora, and folklore), so that audiences everywhere feel represented. They can buttress this with grassroots marketing and regional premieres to generate buzz. Then, iterate based on audience feedback: monitor which characters or settings resonate, then expand those threads in sequels or series.

Across the continent, there are already stories with the depth and scope to anchor full-fledged cinematic universes. Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone trilogy, inspired by Yoruba mythology, has been optioned by Paramount. And Comic Republic, with a vast roster of African superheroes and mythic figures, is actively developing its universe under a global studio partnership. These examples show that the seeds have already been planted. What’s needed now is the will to nurture them.

African filmmakers can craft cinematic universes that rival those of Hollywood. The next Wakanda doesn’t have to be imagined by outsiders. It can be built right here.

1. Intellectual Property (IP) ownership is the core asset: Comic Republic’s refusal to sell its IP, despite tempting offers, underscores a critical lesson: the most valuable asset in the creative economy is the IP itself. Investors should prioritize backing creators and companies that retain control over their IP, as this allows for diversified income (e.g., from merch, games, licensing) and long-term value beyond one-off deals.

2. Distribution and monetization must evolve with audience behavior. Comic Republic’s pivot from print to free digital downloads, addition of a subscription model, and now launch of an animation studio show the importance of adapting. Investors should look for businesses that are agile and data-driven in their approach to audience engagement and revenue generation, especially in sectors where piracy, low purchasing power, or platform dominance are concerns.

3. Value capture requires full-stack participation, not just rights retention: While licensing deals can provide capital, true value capture often requires participation across the value chain—from development to production to distribution. Comic Republic’s launch of CR Motion+ is a strategic move toward vertical integration, allowing it to shape and profit more directly from its stories.

1. The paywall rises

In May, Lagos-based digital comic company Comic Republic quietly rolled out subscriptions on its platform. Under the new system, readers can access the first three editions of any comic for free, but beyond that point, they hit a paywall. To continue reading, fans have to subscribe.

With the introduction of the paywall, Comic Republic was moving away from its longstanding tradition of offering its titles entirely for free. This model would not only open up a new revenue stream for the company but also channel more income directly to the creators behind its growing roster of African superheroes.

Reaching an audience of 2.3 million monthly, of which 90% is based outside Nigeria, Comic Republic will consider the subscription experiment successful if it can convert 10% of that audience into paying subscribers.

The subscription play is part of a broader reimagining of the business, which now includes CR Motion+, an animation arm set up to bring its characters to life beyond static images.

Since its founding in 2013, the company has carved a unique space for itself in the comic book ecosystem, offering digitally distributed, African-themed stories that challenge both the dominance of Western superhero tropes and the notion that African content can’t scale globally.

Much like Marvel, which built a universe of superheroes adored worldwide, Comic Republic, with titles like Guardian Prime, Avonome, and Eru, has built a loyal following at home and abroad. Drawing attention from Hollywood studios, international publishers, and fans hungry for representation. Now, a little more than a decade after its founding, the company is expanding to focus on much more than comics alone.

2. Origin stories

Long before Jide Martin built a business around African superheroes and drew interest from Hollywood studios, he was just a boy who loved to draw. He got into trouble several times with his mother for mutilating his school textbooks to draw cartoon characters.

The entrepreneurial instinct came while Martin was still a law student at Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria. While in school, he started a fashion brand. Later on, he founded an event management company (he eventually exited both businesses to focus on Comic Republic). But no matter what venture he ran during the day, he would return to drawing comics at night. “After work, I’d just draw till like 2 a.m.,” Martin told Communiqué.

With a group of three friends working from his dining table; Michael Balogun, a colourist, Tobe Ezeogu, a graphic designer and Wale Awelenje the group's writer, Martin initially started Comic Republic in 2010. But they did not release anything until 2013.

That year, Man of Steel was scheduled to hit cinemas, and Martin saw an opening. “Our flagship character, Guardian Prime, is a Superman archetype. So we thought, the best time to launch was when people were going to watch the Superman movie.”

Jide Martin struck a deal with Silverbird Cinemas to feature Comic Republic’s first series in its cinema brochures—those glossy leaflets listing upcoming blockbusters and popcorn deals. For 200,000 naira, Comic Republic debuted Guardian Prime, a Nigerian superhero dressed in a forest green and snow-white suit, reminiscent of the country's national flag colors. Silverbird’s brochures played a pivotal role in launching Comic Republic, but they also posed a significant limitation, as only cinema-goers had access.

Around the same period, digital distribution of comics gained traction globally. In 2012, Strika Entertainment, the creator of the popular Supa Strikas comic books, launched a digital version to complement its print and TV offerings. Furthermore, Webtoon, originally known as Naver Webtoons in its native South Korea, where it first launched in 2004, began to gain widespread popularity following its global launch in 2014.

Martin saw an opportunity to pioneer a similar digital-first model in Nigeria. By the end of 2013, Comic Republic ended its distribution deal with Silverbird Cinemas and pivoted to digital. Initially, the company shared its comics via Facebook before launching its digital platform, where fans could download PDF copies of new issues every two weeks. By 2016, Comic Republic was averaging 28,000 downloads per issue.

That same year, Martin decided to tell the Comic Republic story to a wider audience. He contracted Agence France-Presse, the international wire service, to have Comic Republic profiled. Several international outlets picked up the AFP story, bringing Comic Republic to the attention of major brands. One of them was Aviva, a Nigerian stationery company that approached Comic Republic for a licensing deal to feature its characters on school notebooks.

The partnership paid off. Aviva’s notebook distribution soared from 14 million units to 43 million over the next three years. In 2017, Aviva invested in Comic Republic, acquiring a 10% stake at a ₦120 million ($360,000) valuation. The deal also included Tseyi Hammond, an avid comic fan and CEO of investment banking major FBN Quest, as a co-investor.

3. From Lagos to Hollywood

Comic Republic made a killing from advertising inside its comic books. Alongside that, it also built out a B2B business helping brands like Samsung, Sahara Group, and Meta produce comic content.

But Martin knew Comic Republic’s real value wasn’t in ads or agency work. It was in the intellectual property, the sprawling universe of African superheroes and mythologies they had spent nearly a decade building. By the late 2010s, with over a dozen recurring characters and thousands of pages of lore, Comic Republic began looking for a partner who could help take its IP global.

The success of Marvel’s Black Panther in 2018 changed the game. The film’s billion-dollar run and cultural impact proved there was an audience for Black and culturally rich superheroes.

As a result, Comic Republic was in high demand. Hollywood studios, production houses, and investors came calling. But many proposals came with a catch: complete buyouts that would strip the company of control over its characters. Martin refused. “I have constantly insisted that we must own the right to the IP.”

In 2021, Comic Republic licensed one of its titles, Ireti, to Emagine Content and JackieBoy Entertainment for a proposed feature film adaptation. But the project never got off the ground, and after a year, Comic Republic revoked the license. After that, the company signed a representation deal with Creative Artists Agency (CAA).

With the help of CAA, Comic Republic negotiated a deal with Universal Studios to develop both a live-action film and a television series inspired by its Vanguard universe, a pantheon of Comic Republic characters that includes Guardian Prime, Ireti, Eru, and Amadioha. The plan is ambitious: to build an interconnected universe of African superheroes, similar to Marvel's cinematic universe.

The contract’s total earnings will amount to $4 million for Comic Republic. But the most important part of the deal is that it's only a licensing agreement, and Comic Republic retains its IP.

“The licensing deal is only for audio, visual, TV, and film. What that means is that we can take the same characters and make games. We can continue to make our comic books. We can merchandise shirts and things like that, as long as they're not in the likeness of the movie actors.” Also, the license exists for only a period, after which it has to be renewed. It's been two years since the Universal deal was signed, and work on the movie is still ongoing.

4. Comic Republic’s animation moment

The Universal deal was a milestone for Comic Republic, but it also forced the company to reflect deeply on its long-term vision. While the licensing deal preserved its IP ownership, it also exposed a hard truth: the real financial windfall in Hollywood doesn’t always go to the creators. Mad Massive Entertainment, the production house tasked with producing the live-action adaptation of Comic Republic’s universe, reportedly earned nearly twice what Comic Republic received from the deal.

For Martin and his team, it was a wake-up call. If they were going to fully realise their IP’s potential, they couldn’t only own the rights to the content, they had to be actively involved in its development. In 2024, Comic Republic took its boldest step yet by launching CR Motion+, a full-fledged animation studio to develop its slate of original content, including feature-length films and animated series based on its characters.

This move coincided with a global surge of interest in African animation. In 2020, Disney announced a groundbreaking partnership with UK-based but Nigerian-owned Kugali Media to create Iwaju, a sci-fi series set in a futuristic Lagos. The show premiered in 2024 to critical acclaim and earned three Emmy nominations. Also, in 2021, Disney teamed up with South African studio Triggerfish to release Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire, a collection of Afrofuturist sci-fi shorts, which further cemented Africa’s rising status in the animation world. Comic Republic is betting that it can ride this wave.

With CR Motion+, the company is laying the groundwork for telling African superhero stories on its own terms, without intermediaries. Comic Republic has come full circle, first starting on the pages of a cinema brochure, now a film based on its characters is in development, poised for a cinematic blockbuster release. Yet the journey is still unfolding.

Keypoints

1. Creative ventures must be structured like real businesses. MBO Capital’s approach to film investment reveals a broader truth for all creative economy players: financial discipline, strong team structures, and clear roles are essential. Vague or inflated budgets, overly centralized control (e.g., one person writing, directing, and producing), and lack of professionalism are red flags to serious investors. Creative entrepreneurs must present their work with the same rigor and transparency as startups in any other industry.

2. Distribution is the new dealbreaker. For investors, content without a distribution strategy is a non-starter. Nollywood’s experience highlights that even great storytelling must be matched with clear paths to market, especially international ones. With the pullback of streamers like Amazon Prime and Netflix from Nigeria, studios that build relationships with global distributors or find alternative international routes (e.g., through regional aggregators) are now best positioned to attract capital.

3. Financial institutions are ready but selective. The emergence of structured funds like MBO Capital’s upcoming film fund and Volition Capital’s VEMA Fund II shows growing investor appetite for creative sector assets, but only when risk is mitigated. Revenue-participation models, proven track records, and tangible licensing deals reduce uncertainty. Creative entrepreneurs must learn to speak the language of investors—unit economics, risk management, ROI—if they want to unlock scalable capital.

1. Nollywood meets finance

In early April, a curious mix of Nigerian film industry stars and investment professionals gathered in a financial services firm's offices in Lagos for an important conversation: how to make films that make money. Hosted by MBO Capital, a Lagos-based private equity firm, the one-day conference brought together creatives and financiers to unpack the film business in Nigeria.

Unlike the typical glamour-heavy gatherings of Nigeria’s film elite, this event was equal parts business school and industry therapy session. Two standout panels set the tone for the rest of the conference. One, titled "Positioning Nollywood for Profit," brought together voices like BB Sasore of Nemsia Films, Enyi Omeruah of EK 782 Films, and Wangi Mba-Uzoukwu, former Head of African Originals at Amazon Prime, to dissect how to tell commercially viable stories. The second panel, "Looking Behind the Scenes: The Art of Telling the Best Stories," explored the creative process of filmmaking, with contributors like Arie Esiri (Eyimofe), Seyi Siwoku, cinematographer Ola Cardoso (Breath of Life, The Journey of an African Colony), and screenwriter Nicole Asinugo (Living in Bondage 2).

Over the last three years, MBO Capital has quietly built a track record as one of the most active financiers in Nigeria’s film industry. But this event wasn’t about showboating. Instead, it was about knowledge sharing. After several years of investing in Nollywood, the firm has learned what it takes to back a successful production and what red flags to watch out for. Now, it was ready to share these lessons publicly for the first time.

2. A serendipitous start

MBO Capital’s foray into film financing began in 2017, almost by accident. At the time, the firm’s investments focused primarily on sectors like real estate and manufacturing, industries with clear fundamentals and well-understood business models. But then an opportunity arose to invest in a slate of films by Inkblot Productions, a fast-rising film studio out of Lagos. Fresh off the success of The Wedding Party, then Nigeria's highest-grossing movie, the company was looking for working capital to fund its growing slate of productions. For MBO, this was a chance to test the waters.

So, it structured a deal with a revenue-participation agreement, and while the firm declines to share exact returns, it claims it was a financially rewarding partnership. The three films it funded—The Wedding Party 2, Moms at War, and New Money—are on the list of Nigeria's highest-grossing films. But the firm did not invest in more titles until the streaming boom of the early 2020s.

In August 2022, Amazon Prime Video officially launched in Nigeria, sparking a bidding war with incumbent platforms like Netflix and Showmax. Eager to secure high-quality local content, Prime Video signed first-look deals with leading Nigerian studios including Anthill Studios, Nemsia Films, and Inkblot Productions. However, these created a problem: the filmmakers had contracts to produce films with specific returns on completion of production, but no funds to make the films. This was where MBO Capital came in.

“To us, the presence of that streaming contract significantly de-risked the transaction because one of the things that you worry about if you invest in a film is, how much is this going to make? Is it going to [the] cinema? How much are you going to license it for? Is the streamer going to be interested?” Folajimi Alli-Balogun, MBO Capital’s assistant vice president and head of the film desk, told Communiqué. “But here we were being provided with the contract from the beginning that says I’ll license it for this amount. So there’s no risk in that sense. All you were facing was execution risk. And if Amazon is convinced by this producer's ability to execute this project, that was fine for us.”

In 2022, MBO Capital invested in producing Jade Osiberu’s Brotherhood and Gangs of Lagos. Brotherhood grossed 328 million naira at the box office, making it the second-highest-grossing Nigerian film of that year before its release on Amazon Prime Video, while Gangs of Lagos premiered exclusively on the platform. MBO Capital also invested in productions from other studios like Native Filmworks and Nemsia Studios. But the romance between Nollywood and streaming platforms was short-lived.

In February 2024, Amazon Prime laid off its African staff and halted funding for original content in the region. Netflix followed a similar route later in the year, significantly scaling down operations in Nigeria. As a result, MBO Capital’s strategy had to change. Instead of just investing in anyone with a streaming contract from Amazon Prime or Netflix, it now supports studios with a proven track record and a solid international distribution plan.

“What the best people are doing now is collaborating with international filmmakers. So maybe you make a Nigerian film with some South Africans that can pass for a Nigerian film, but you sell it to Netflix through a South African aggregator. And so by doing that, you remove yourself from whatever restrictions Netflix has placed on Nigeria,” Alli-Balogun told Communiqué.

Despite the reduced activity of international streamers in the Nigerian market, MBO Capital invested 2.3 billion naira last year and plans to double that number this year.

3. The MBO Capital strategy

After investing in over 17 Nollywood films, MBO Capital has refined its strategy for picking films and studios to invest in. The most important quality is an existing track record of delivering box office hits. For instance, Jade Osiberu had built a reputation with films like Isoken, Ayinla, and Sugar Rush before MBO Capital invested in Brotherhood and Gangs Of Lagos, and Nemsia had made films like Banana Island Ghost and God Calling before MBO Capital invested in Breath of Life.

A. Watch out for the budget: the devil is in the details

Also, from MBO Capital’s experience, the first red flag—or green light—is in the film budget. Some stakeholders say that the influx of cash into the film industry via streaming deals came with several acts of financial impropriety by some filmmakers, and was one of the reasons the major streamers scaled back investments. Now, MBO Capital demands financial discipline from the filmmakers it supports. “The level of detail in a budget tells you everything about the seriousness of the producer,” Alli-Balogun explains. He recounts seeing one budget so thorough it accounted for tissue paper and plastic cups used on set. That budget became a benchmark. “Now, when we get vague or half-baked budgets, we just send them that one and say, ‘This is the level of detail we expect.’”

B. Avoid controversy

Beyond the numbers, MBO Capital also vets for content that avoids controversy to steer clear of projects that might offend audience sensitivities. This lesson became more important after the Descendants of Isale Eko Union, the community where Jade Osiberu's Gangs of Lagos draws its inspiration from, dragged the producers of the film to court, demanding 10 billion naira in compensation for the wrongful depiction of the community as a den of criminals. The case was only resolved in March this year, with the Lagos High Court ordering Amazon Prime and the film producers to apologize to the community.

C. Hammer on the team structure

Team structure is another key consideration. MBO Capital avoids projects where one person wears too many hats: writing, directing, and producing. “That’s usually a red flag,” says Alli-Balogun. “We want productions that are run like proper businesses, with clearly defined roles, casting directors, line producers, directors of photography, people playing to their strengths.”

D. For distribution

Perhaps the most important factor these days is distribution. For a production to receive MBO Capital’s backing, it has to have a clear international distribution plan. The firm typically makes investments around the $500,000 range, through a combination of debt and equity. And Nigeria's domestic film market alone cannot yield the significant returns MBO Capital desires.

MBO Capital is not alone in seeing the Nigerian film industry as an investment-worthy asset class. More financial institutions are beginning to recognise Nollywood’s commercial potential and are structuring vehicles to back it.

Following the success of its VEMA Fund I, which financed Editi Effiong’s The Black Book, Volition Capital launched VEMA Fund II, aiming to raise $20 million to support film production and distribution across Africa. Similarly, investment firm Chapel Hill Denham announced a $1.2 million initiative last year to provide early-stage financing, business development support, and attract third-party capital to Nigeria’s entertainment and media sectors.

MBO Capital, for its part, is preparing to formalise its own role in the industry by launching a dedicated film fund. While details are still under wraps, the firm says the move will allow it to scale up its investments, bring in institutional partners, and take bigger bets on Nigerian cinema with global ambitions.

After years of being overlooked by the formal capital markets, Nollywood is finally getting the structured financial attention it has long needed. And as firms like MBO Capital continue to refine the playbook for film investment in Africa, the industry may be entering a new era—one defined by capital, not just creativity.

1. Game, set, match

The air was thick with anticipation and excitement in the final moments of the Carry1st Africa Cup. Noxious Gaming, one of South Africa’s rising esports teams, was on the brink of victory in Africa’s first-ever Call of Duty: Mobile tournament. Their opponents, Delta Esports, a fierce team from Kenya, had pushed them to their limits, but Noxious held their ground, with unmatched teamwork and precision. When the final kill was secured, the room erupted. South Africa had claimed the crown, and with the title came more evidence to support the country's claim as Africa's undisputed gaming powerhouse.

The tournament, hosted by South African gaming publisher Carry1st, reflected the explosive growth of Africa’s gaming and esports industry, which has become one of the fastest-growing sectors on the continent. Between 2015 and 2021, the number of gamers in Africa more than doubled, soaring from 77 million to 186 million, and South Africa accounted for 24 million of them. By 2024, the industry grew six times faster than the global average. In 2022, it earned $860 million, with projections suggesting revenues would reach $1 billion by 2024. But Africa exceeded those expectations by far, hitting a staggering $1.8 billion in 2024.

South Africa, alongside Nigeria and Egypt, had been one of the key countries driving this growth. Egypt's proximity to the Gulf region, with its deep pockets and investment flows, had helped fuel its growth. Nigeria's significant population and economic activity ensured that it would always be a key player in the continent's gaming industry. But South Africa had emerged as the continent’s true pioneer—relying not on population size or geographic advantage, but on its advanced infrastructure, a tech-savvy population, and a vibrant developer ecosystem.

2. Growing pains

The South African gaming industry began to develop in the 1980s. In its early years, the high cost of gaming consoles like the Sega Genesis and PCs limited the industry to a niche pastime of the more well-to-do population. Boys like Elon Musk got introduced to tech by developing games after school. By the 2000s, the end of apartheid and increasing internet access had helped diversify the industry. PC gaming surged in popularity, and communities of gamers began to develop, first in neighborhood LAN parties where gamers gathered for multiplayer sessions, and later on the internet. These gaming communities mostly played foreign games like Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter, but some South African game studios had already begun to emerge.

Celestial Games, the country’s first game development studio, published Toxic Bunny in 1996. The game was a modest success in South Africa, selling 7,000 units locally, but it performed significantly better internationally, selling 150,000 units. The studio published other titles like Tainted, a science fiction role-playing game, but it was not as successful, and in 2001, the studio closed its doors due to financial constraints. However, the foundation had already been laid, and other studios were founded to replace it. Luma Arcade, Free Lives, I-Imagine Interactive, and 24 Bit Games were some of the studios that emerged after Celestial Games. Of these, the most successful was Free Lives.

In 2015, Free Lives released Broforce, which soon became an international sensation and a massive commercial success, earning the studio $3 million just one year after launch. Other Free Lives titles include Genital Jousting, Gorn, and Terranil. With its windfall, Free Lives invested heavily in developing the South African gaming ecosystem, organizing events like Playtopia, a three-day gaming festival in Johannesburg.

“It is very developer-focused. It’s primarily for the creators to gather and learn from each other. With the help of Devolver (Free Lives’ game publisher) – who also funds the event alongside us – we were able to fly in African devs from Nigeria, Egypt, Tunisia, and Kenya, with no strings attached. Just come and meet people, attend talks, and play games,” Dominique Galowski, Free Lives Managing Director, said to the international publication Games Industry Biz. “Both African games and international games are shown so that there is a bar that is set. Because the young ones are coming, the next generation of developers, and we want them to see that this is what the standard can be, and shoot for this; you could be the game that does well.”

3. Standards of measurement

The South African gaming ecosystem grew steadily throughout the 2000s, and soon there were efforts to standardize the industry. In 2012, the University of Witwatersrand started the country’s first game design degree. The first generation of the country’s game development talent had been self-taught hobbyists; now, there was a reliable talent pipeline to feed the industry. There was a dire need for this pipeline, as many industry veterans had begun to move abroad and take jobs with foreign companies, leaving a skills development gap that the university filled.

The results were soon evident. In 2018, Semblance, a world-building game created by Braamfontein-based studio Nyamakop, became the first game developed by an African studio to be released on Nintendo. The game had begun as the final-year project of the studio's co-founders while they were studying for their game design degree at the University of Witwatersrand. Additionally, initiatives by Mind Sports South Africa, the local body behind competitive gaming in South Africa, to ensure that esports tournaments were played in elementary schools helped draw in a younger generation to the industry.

In 2023, 24 Bit Games was acquired by US-based Annapurna Interactive. The exit was a testament to how far the South African gaming industry had come, evolving from a niche pastime into a formidable global contender. What began in the 1980s as a hobby for a privileged few had blossomed into a vibrant ecosystem of developers, publishers, and esports teams. Early pioneers like Celestial Games and Free Lives laid the groundwork, proving that South African studios could create games that resonate globally. Esports teams like Goliath Gaming and Bravado Gaming have carved out a niche in the international arena, and the ecosystem is thriving.

Previously, South African game developers like Nyamakop had to travel from one gaming conference to another in search of publishers. Now, international publishers flock to South African gaming events like Playtopia and rAGE Expo, the latter of which drew over 30,000 visitors in December 2024. These gatherings have become hubs of innovation and collaboration, showcasing not only South Africa’s talent but also its growing influence in the global landscape.

The rise of game publishers like Carry1st has further solidified the continent’s position, providing a platform for local developers in South Africa and the continent to reach global audiences. Despite the challenges native to Africa, the South African gaming industry has come of age and become a continental leader. The next step is to become a bigger global contender.

1. In the arena

2024 was marked with high-profile defeats for Nigerian combat sports athletes. Anthony Joshua suffered a devastating loss to British fighter Daniel Dubois, breaking his four-match winning streak, and UFC middleweight champion Israel Adesanya fell short in his last title defense.

These setbacks cast a shadow over Nigeria’s presence in global combat sports, with fans and analysts questioning the future of the country’s fighters on the world stage.

As all this went on, the African Warriors Fighting Championship (AWFC) was carving a new niche for itself with Dambe, an ancient form of wrestling predominantly practiced in Northern Nigeria.

In January 2024, the AWFC hosted a Dambe match between Shagon Yellow and Luke Leyland. It was the first match between a Nigerian and a foreign Dambe fighter. While the British Luke Leyland suffered a resounding defeat at the hands of Shagon Yellow, the match signaled the promise of the AWFC to turn Dambe from a local recreational pastime into a global combat sport on par with WWE and the UFC.

A few months after the Leyland fight, popular crypto betting company Stake, with a history of sponsoring high-profile sports brands like the Alfa Romeo Formula 1 team and English Premier League club Everton FC, came on board as the official sponsor of the AWFC. Later in the year, Silverbacks Holdings, a private equity firm focused on emerging media and sports properties, including the NBA's Basketball Africa League, invested in AWFC.

With these strategic investments, the AWFC is now poised to expand its operations, host larger-scale events, and bring African combat sports to an even wider audience. It had taken years of hard work to get to this point, and six years after the first AWFC match held in Enugu, Southeastern Nigeria, the work was still just beginning.

2. An African challenger

In November 2024, after securing his second term as U.S. president, Donald Trump made one of his highest-profile public appearances at an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event held at Madison Square Garden in New York. It was proof of the growing ascendancy of mixed martial arts sports in popular culture, a rise that began with the acquisition of UFC in 2001.

In 2001, a consortium of investors acquired the struggling UFC from its founders for $2 million. The new management came in and implemented changes, choosing to forego traditional cable TV, where the UFC was considered too gory, for fledgling streaming services and other online distribution channels and developing a reality TV show around the sport. Those decisions paid off in 2016 when the UFC was acquired by global talent and media agency Endeavor for $4 billion, a 2,000% increase on the original $2 million that was paid for it 15 years prior. Two years later, ONE Championship, the UFC's primary competitor in Asia, received a $100 million investment, valuing it at $1 billion, only seven years after its founding.

In London, Maxwell Kalu, a communications executive, was paying attention to the trend, but he had also realized that Africa was underrepresented in this market, with no martial arts league of international standing. He returned home with the mission to bring the UFC to Africa, starting with his home country of Nigeria. On getting back to Nigeria during a two-month fact-finding mission, he found Dambe, and his mission changed. Instead of bringing the UFC to Africa, he was going to take Dambe to the world.

In 2018, Maxwell launched AWFC with a mission to professionalize and promote traditional African combat sports. Modeled after the UFC and ONE Championship in Asia, AWFC operates as a promoter, scouting the best talent from Dambe camps across northern Nigeria. The league hosts high-profile events, produces premium content, and distributes it globally, all while improving health and safety standards and increasing financial rewards for fighters.

AWFC’s events are structured around the traditional house system of Dambe, with fighters from one house competing only against those from rival houses. This unique format preserves the sport’s cultural roots while adding a layer of competitive intrigue. Since its inception, AWFC has amassed over 700 million views on its content, with the U.S. and Brazil emerging as key markets, a similar trend with other mixed martial arts leagues across the world.

3. Expanding AWFC’s global footprint

In its first seven years of existence, AWFC has successfully proven its thesis that African combat sports can be transformed into professional properties. Now, it has to become a global product. In doing this, its leadership must adopt a multifaceted approach.

I. Broadcasting and streaming deals

The first cornerstone of AWFC’s growth strategy lies in securing lucrative broadcasting and streaming partnerships to bring its events to a wider audience. Traditionally, combat sports tend to fare better on streaming platforms than on traditional ones because the content is not considered family-friendly.

AWFC can partner with established streaming services such as ESPN+, DAZN, or even regional players like Showmax and StarTimes to bring Dambe to international markets. Already, AWFC has partnered with Afroland TV, a streaming service focused on the global Black and Caribbean community, to broadcast fights in the U.S., but it has not signed any deals in Africa or Europe.

The organization should consider partnerships with platforms like YouTube and TikTok, whose short-form content capabilities are ideal for engaging younger demographics. By packaging its content into bite-sized highlights, behind-the-scenes footage, and fighter profiles, the AWFC can cultivate a loyal fanbase while monetizing through targeted advertising and subscription models. There's an opportunity for AWFC to develop its streaming service, as the UFC has done with Fight Pass. Following the Silverback investment, AWFC hinted at plans to do just that.

II. Development of intellectual property

Beyond streaming and broadcast deals to cover the fights, the AWFC has an opportunity to create value by developing a robust portfolio of intellectual property around Dambe. The UFC's growth was supercharged by its reality TV show The Ultimate Fighter during the 2000s and 2010s, but Fight Island, a series of fights held on a sequestered private island in 2020 and 2021, helped drive growth during the pandemic. Similarly, Formula 1 has seen a new lease on life and growth since the release of Drive To Survive, a Netflix documentary about the racing sport. The AWFC can invest in building a narrative-driven ecosystem around its fighters, events, and traditions.

III. Consolidating African martial arts

Dambe is currently the only sport the AWFC promotes, but there are other traditional combat sports across the continent, like Ngolo in Angola and Laamb in Senegal. ONE Championship has used this strategy successfully in Asia, combining different Asian forms of martial arts, including submission grappling and Burmese boxing, with its traditional offerings. Also, in 2023, Endeavor merged the UFC with WWE, creating a combat sports super company worth $21 billion and bringing both sports under the same organization. The AWFC can play a similar role in Africa, positioning itself as the exclusive promoter of African combat sports globally.

As the African Warriors Fighting Championship (AWFC) continues to grow, it will inevitably face growing pains. One of the most pressing challenges will be fighter compensation. As seen in the UFC, where the fighters demanded more than the 15% revenue share, AWFC athletes will eventually demand a larger share of company revenues, leading to potential labor disputes and negotiations over revenue-sharing models. Ensuring fair compensation while maintaining financial sustainability will be a delicate balancing act for AWFC.

Beyond financial disputes, regulatory challenges will emerge as Dambe expands beyond its traditional strongholds. The league may have to navigate varying combat sports laws across different countries, balancing cultural authenticity with the health and safety standards required for mainstream acceptance. Additionally, securing long-term broadcasting deals and expanding global viewership will require significant investment in marketing, technology, and audience engagement strategies. There is also the challenge of talent development. While Dambe has a deep-rooted history in Nigeria, AWFC will need to establish structured training academies and recruitment pipelines to ensure a steady influx of elite fighters. This is especially important if it seeks to grow beyond Nigeria and incorporate other African combat sports like Ngolo and Laambe.

Despite these hurdles, the AWFC has already proven that it has the resilience to redefine African combat sports. If the league can weather these challenges, it could cement itself as a dominant force, placing Africa firmly on the map in a way that has never been done before.