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.
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.