1. Afrobeats heads to Toronto
On the evening of August 28, Nigeria’s music, entertainment and media communities gathered at the Canadian Deputy High Commission in Lagos for The Headies: Road to Toronto, an event announcing the next international chapter of Nigeria’s most prominent music awards. After being held in Atlanta twice in 2022 and 2023, the biggest night in Nigerian music was moving again—this time to Toronto.
Toronto, however, is not an entirely new frontier for Nigeria’s creative industries. Increasingly, the city is becoming an overseas base from which Nigerian music, film, and other forms of entertainment can reach audiences across Canada and the wider North American market.
In Communiqué 107, we reported on Snag Productions, a Canadian film distribution company helping African films find a home in North American cinemas. Its strategy is to take films that had already found audiences in Nigeria and other African markets and help them reach African audiences abroad through theatrical releases in Canada and the United States. “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,” we wrote.
So far, individual artists, promoters, and companies such as Snag Productions have driven much of this crossover. They have identified an audience and built their own routes into the Canadian market, often without a formal structure connecting the creative industries of both countries. But the Canadian government wants to change that. It is now taking an active interest in Nigeria’s creative economy and exploring partnerships across music, film, animation, and other parts of the sector. Through these relationships, Canada wants to move from being simply a destination for Nigerian creativity to becoming an active business and investment partner, using the creative economy to build stronger ties between both countries.
You’re reading Communiqué because someone in the Inner Circle paid for it. Pay it forward.
2. Connective tissue
Following the success of the Headies’ two editions in Atlanta, Carlos Rojas-Arbulú, Canada’s deputy high commissioner in Lagos, sat down with Headies founder Ayo Animashaun in late 2024 to discuss how they could bring the awards to Canada. The conversation began over coffee with a “what if?” — What if the Headies could build on its experience in Atlanta and establish another international base in Toronto?
The awards are one expression of a broader position the Canadian mission has taken on Nigeria’s creative sector. “The strategy that we have at the High Commission in Abuja, and here at the Deputy High Commission, is that we intentionally decided to focus on the creative industries because we understand that the creative sector is a vector for economic development,” Rojas-Arbulú told Communiqué. “We accept the notion that many of these film directors or musicians or companies behind those are in many instances themselves business people who are looking for opportunities to grow their business and also to collaborate and extend partnerships to other sectors of society.” This means engaging Nigerian creatives not only as artists but also as founders, employers, and investors. A musician travelling to Canada for a performance may also have interests in technology, hospitality, agriculture or energy. A filmmaker attending a festival may be searching for distributors, investors, or production partners. Canada’s emerging strategy is to use these moments to connect them with Canadian companies and institutions.
Music is only the latest part of that effort. Film has been one of the Canadian government’s most consistent points of engagement with Nigeria’s creative economy. Over the last five or six years, the mission has organised four delegations of Nigerian filmmakers to the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), which has become Nollywood’s most reliable window into North America. Nigeria’s presence in the programme grew from a single film in 2022 to five in 2025, before settling at three in 2026. Those selections have included some of the most celebrated Nigerian films of the period: Biyi Bandele’s Elesin Oba: The King’s Horseman, Afolabi Olalekan’s Freedom Way, Akinola Davies Jr.’s My Father’s Shadow, the Esiri brothers’ Clarissa, and EbonyLife’s adaptation of Lola Shoneyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives, selected for this year’s festival ahead of its Nigerian release in December. Toronto also hosts the Toronto International Nollywood Film Festival, where commercial Nollywood titles screen for the diaspora.
These appearances do different jobs for the films involved. Some arrive in Toronto for their world premieres, while others use the festival to secure North American attention, meet buyers, or build momentum ahead of their commercial releases. TIFF’s new industry market could make that commercial role even more important by creating a formal space for acquisitions, sales and investment.
Canada has also applied the same thinking to food. The Deputy High Commission has twice hosted Toronto-based food creator Raquel Fox, the founder of Island Girl Foods, in Nigeria. Island Girl Foods began exploring conversations with Nigerian partners to help distribute its Canadian products and expand production to Nigeria, including the possibility of operating from one of Lagos’s free zones.
Canada has also set its sights on animation. It already has a globally recognised animation industry, with production clusters in Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia, benefiting from a deep pool of artists, specialist training programmes, and production companies like Nelvana, Mercury Filmworks, and Jam Filled Entertainment, which have experience delivering work for global entertainment businesses. The Canadian government wants to matchmake these studios with Nigerian animation studios. “We’re trying to see how we can better connect the dots with technology and creativity. For instance, with animation, we have great companies out of Montreal, Vancouver and Victoria. And I think that’s probably the next round. We have to get to the place where we have clearly outlined what our pool of companies is and how we better match them with those Nigerian companies that are looking for partners, investors, and a certain level of expertise,” Rojas-Arbulú said.
$10 covers a reader. $100 covers a story. $1,000 covers a month. Communiqué is built on direct support from people who believe Africa’s creative economy deserves serious coverage.
3. Reverse cultural diplomacy
When governments use the creative industries as a diplomatic tool, the most familiar model is outward-facing. A country exports its music, films, fashion and other cultural products to build influence abroad. South Korea’s use of K-pop, television and film to strengthen its global image is perhaps the most commonly cited example.
But cultural diplomacy can also work in the opposite direction. Instead of just exporting its own culture, a country can position itself as a platform for another country’s creative industry. It can open its stages, festivals, institutions, funding programmes, and business networks to foreign creators. The visiting creatives gain access to new audiences and markets, while the host country builds goodwill and develops commercial relationships with an influential industry it did not create.
France’s engagement with Africa’s creative industries offers one of the clearest examples of how this can evolve. In July 2018, during a visit to the New Afrika Shrine in Lagos, French President Emmanuel Macron announced plans for an African cultural season in France. Macron promised that the programme would introduce French audiences to contemporary African fashion, film, music and art, with African professionals shaping how the continent was presented.
The result was the Africa2020 Season. Originally scheduled for 2020 but delayed by the pandemic, the programme eventually ran from December 2020 until September 2021 under Senegalese curator N’Goné Fall. It was designed to invite French audiences to understand the world from an African perspective. The season extended beyond conventional exhibitions and performances. Its programme covered art, science, technology, entrepreneurship and education, with projects developed jointly by African professionals and French institutions. According to the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs, Africa2020 included more than 1,500 events across 81 French cities and attracted over four million spectators. Building on the success of Africa2020, the French government launched Création Africa, a programme to move the relationship closer to investment and market access.
Institut Français runs Création Africa on behalf of the Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs, funded through the Fonds Équipe France Création, and delivered with the AFD, Expertise France, Bpifrance, and the French cultural network on the continent. Where Africa2020 was a season, Création Africa is a pipeline: it covered 16 priority countries at launch in 2023 and 33 by 2024, including Nigeria, and it finances work across fashion, audiovisual, music, gaming, esports, comics and contemporary art. Unlike a cultural festival organised primarily for an audience, Création Africa was designed to bring African creative businesses into the same rooms as French investors, institutions, and potential commercial partners. The first forum took place in Paris and drew more than 600 participants. They included 323 African guests from 35 countries and representatives from 80 French companies.
The second forum moved from Paris to Lagos in October 2025. Organised in collaboration with the Lagos State Government and Nigeria’s Ministry of Art, Culture, Tourism and the Creative Economy, it brought together more than 1,000 participants from over 40 African countries and Europe. Across three days, the forum hosted roundtables, masterclasses, concerts, and pitching sessions, including a showcase of the Lagos x Paris Fashion and Design Accelerator. The Fashion and Design Accelerator provided Nigerian brands with several months of training and support as they prepared to enter international markets.
Canada is still at the beginning of this journey. Unlike France, it does not yet have a Création Africa-style programme that combines cultural exchange with funding, training, and structured access to investors and markets. What it has is growing demand for Nigerian culture, a large diaspora, established film connections and a government that now sees creative industries as part of its economic relationship with Nigeria.
The Headies will therefore be an important test. Its Toronto edition can prove that a Nigerian cultural event can create opportunities beyond ticket sales, performances, and publicity. But the deeper measure of success will be the partnerships, investments and market access that survive after the ceremony ends.
The 'reversal cultural diplomacy framing is sharp, Canada moving from audience to investment partner. But the real test, as you note, is what survives after the ceremony: whether partnerships and market access get documented and repeated, rather than staying dependent on individual hustle like Snag Productions has shown so far.