Communiqué 122: A dispatch from London

Notes from Communiqué IRL London: Diaspora data, the operator gap, and why mobility is the creative economy’s most urgent policy problem.

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1. Let’s start a fire

In September 2025, Yossie Olaleye emailed me to ask if we could organise a Communiqué IRL event in London. She’d seen what we did in Nairobi the month before and thought it might be a good idea to extend the series to London. At the time, we’d been exploring that option internally, but we never made any headway. For us, Yossie’s email was providential. The next day, we hopped on a call and began making concrete plans. We already had a topic and a potential speaker list, but there was no venue or sponsor.

We updated our concept note, began reaching out to potential partners, and suddenly, what seemed abstract a few months prior became more apparent. We got a venue at King’s College London with the help of Professor Roberta Comunain, settled on a date in 2026, and received support from LAGO Collective to fine-tune the arrangements.

On June 19, 2026 — ten months after Yossie reached out — we hosted the first edition of Communiqué IRL outside Africa, with a room full of people interested in the things we’ve been writing about for the last six years. That felt like validation that we are heading in the right direction.

Scenes from Communiqué IRL London

2. The fire rises

I haven’t fully processed the impact and happenings of that event. But for now, I want to discuss three main points I took away from that night’s conversations.

The first concerns the actual size of the African diaspora market and the lack of comprehensive data on its purchasing power. The second covers the opportunity for diaspora members to plug the operator gap that continues to plague Africa’s creative economy. The third is the need for better-quality policy conversations between African governments and countries with strong diaspora heatmaps.

Let’s dig in.

3. Measuring the wrong things

When people talk about the diaspora as a market for African creative businesses, their standard reference point is often remittance data. They say things like this: In 2024, over $104 billion flowed into Africa in remittances — roughly twice the volume of overseas development assistance. Nigeria received $19.8 billion. Ghana received $4.6 billion in officially recorded remittances, exceeding what the country earned from cocoa exports alone.

These numbers are real, but they are not useful in this conversation.

Remittances are support mechanisms — money sent “back home” to stock the fridge, fund school fees, cover medical bills, etc. Around 75% goes toward exactly these purposes, according to the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). They are not discretionary income, and they tell us nothing about whether a Nigerian in London will pay for a film, a festival ticket, or a media subscription. The person sending a significant portion of her salary home to Accra is often the last in the room with budget for cultural consumption.

We referenced the diaspora’s economic significance in “Culture in a Box” to argue that African cultural exports deserve more serious institutional attention. But the data infrastructure to quantify what the diaspora will spend on cultural goods — as distinct from what it sends home — barely exists. For instance, how do we know what share of diaspora discretionary income goes toward cultural categories, such as music, film, fashion, food, literature, live events? Which of these goods commands the most loyalty? How does that spending behaviour shift across first-, second-, and third-generation communities? Does a second-generation Ghanaian in London relate to Afrobeats the same way as someone who moved three years ago? These are questions that have not been codified, because a large remittance figure is readily available and looks good on a pitch deck.

Communiqué will commit to building better diaspora intelligence over the coming years. But we cannot do it alone — we need partners, institutional collaborators, and other organisations willing to share data and fill in our blind spots.

The first step, however, is being clear about what the current data doesn’t tell us.

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4. The operator gap

In Communiqué 121, we noted that capital is becoming more available to Africa’s creative economy, but the sector continues to lack serious operators — people who understand finance, business strategy, and the intricacies of venture building.

The tech sector has already run this experiment. Over the past decade, African professionals who had spent years at technology companies abroad returned with operational capacity that local ecosystems lacked. The results were not perfect, but they were clear. The creative economy needs its own version of this. People who have built careers inside global creative operations — record labels, streaming platforms, film studios, rights management companies — and who could bring that expertise to bear on building in Africa are exactly the profile the sector needs.

There is also a structural problem that returning professionals alone cannot fix. The ecosystem has spent years trying to turn creatives into operators. Those are more unicorns than templates. A gifted musician is not automatically equipped to run a finance function or manage a multi-year licensing deal. What we need are systems designed for people who already have operational skills — accelerators and fellowships that help operators understand why the creative economy is the right place to deploy what they already know, not programmes that teach creatives to write business plans. The creatives themselves also have to be honest enough and willing to work with such people to expand their business.

5. The London Bridge

My time in London makes it clear that the city has incredible potential to be the de facto primary Western hub for Africa’s creative economy. The African diaspora presence is exceptionally dense — full of Nigerian, Ghanaian, Kenyan, Zimbabwean, and South African communities with deep roots and active professional lives. The geographical proximity to the continent could also be an advantage. And the geopolitical relationships between the UK and African nations, complicated as they are historically, provide a foundation for institutional dialogue that need not start from scratch.

But there is the problem.

LAGO Collective has been tracking the financial cost of European visa regimes on African applicants. In 2024, rejected Schengen applications cost African countries €60 million in non-refundable fees. In the UK, rejected visitor visa applications generated £50.7 million in revenue, a 13.5% increase from 2023. The UK extracted approximately £10 million from rejected applications from Nigeria and Ghana alone, at rejection rates above 40% for both countries. LAGO’s founder, Marta Foresti, calls these fees “reverse remittances,” which are “money flowing from poor to rich countries.” Of the 13 countries that faced Schengen rejection rates above 40% in 2024, nine were African. The poorer the country, the higher the rejection rate.

UK visa fees rose from £100 to £115 in July 2024, then to £127 in April 2025. The result is that the very cohort who would make London a creative economy hub worth having — artists, executives, journalists, entrepreneurs — are being turned away or priced out. A country positioning itself as a global creative capital while systematically blocking the African practitioners who would populate that ecosystem is taxing aspiration, not facilitating trade.

African creative economy ministries have to put visas and mobility on the table as trade and diplomatic issues. They cannot dance around these issues. Cultural cooperation agreements that do not address people’s freedom of movement are incomplete. MOUs that do not name visa rejection rates are merely designed to make governments feel productive while solving nothing. We must deal with the mobility problem.

6. Parting words

Hosting our first event outside Africa — an event that talked specifically about building cross-cultural and economic bridges — was proof that the Communiqué community extends beyond the continent, and that the conversations we have been having for six years resonate with people who are physically far from Lagos or Nairobi but close to what is happening there in every other way.

The London event surfaced three problems the creative economy needs to solve. We need real data on what the African diaspora actually spends on cultural goods. We need an operational layer that matches the talent need and scale of the incoming capital. And we need governments to treat cross-border mobility as the trade issue it is.

These problems will not resolve themselves, and we will keep making the case until the right people treat them with the seriousness they deserve.

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