Communiqué 112: CcHUB’s creative economy act
Over the last five years, the Lagos-headquartered tech hub has become a central node in Africa’s creative ecosystem.
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.