Communiqué 76: What would you do with a billion dollars?

A blueprint for deploying $1 billion into Africa’s creative industry.

Key points

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.

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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?