Offscript with Ojoma Ochai

CcHUB’s managing director on her journey to steering Africa’s top innovation hub, merging tech with the creative economy.

“It was the most fun job ever. Sometimes I’d pinch myself and ask, ‘What’s the catch?’”

Over a Zoom call, Ojoma Ochai, Managing Director of Co-Creation Hub (CcHUB), tells me about her first role as an arts assistant at the British Council. The job, she explained, saw her help in some of the earliest crossovers of Nigerian talent to UK audiences. By day, she booked them for concerts, festivals, and other cultural showcases abroad. By night, she attended concerts, festivals, and theatre productions to build relationships between the British Council and the local creative scene.

The path to that role was not linear. It began with Ochai’s father, a broadcaster at the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria with a deep love for the arts, who introduced her and her siblings to the theatre from an early age. At home, he pressed literature of every kind—books, newspapers, and, most importantly, African novels—into her young hands.

“When I look back at the work I do now and my worldview, I've done a lot of work around narratives of Africa, and that's because of reading African literature and Nigerian literature as a child. I was never confused about my identity or the validity of the African experience. It was never a case that we were somehow worse off or not enough, because the books I read were as good, if not better, than anything else we were reading at the time.”

Her parents had hoped she would pursue a career in law or the arts, but she had a rebellious streak and did the opposite, leaning towards the sciences. “In secondary school, I was unusual in that you either went to science class, arts class, or commercial class, but I did a combination of science and arts,” she recalls. “I did Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Literature, and Government because in my head, maybe at some point I’d decide to be obedient and do what my parents were telling me.”

Ultimately, Ochai went with the sciences, studying Network Engineering at the National Institute of Information Technology, Abuja. Her first job out of school was with the telecoms firm Multinet at the beginning of Nigeria's transition to mobile internet in the early 2000s. She followed that with a role at an edtech company, Computers for Kids. Yet the work left her restless. The seeds of appreciation for the arts her father had planted in childhood were pushing to find expression.

In the early 2000s, Nigeria’s creative scene was having a renaissance. Nollywood, fuelled by the runaway success of the classic film Living in Bondage, was booming. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie had just released Purple Hibiscus, which would go on to win the Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book, inspiring a new generation of writers, and Terra Kulture had opened its doors, becoming a focal point for theatre, literature, and art in Lagos.

From her base in Abuja, Ochai watched this wave gather momentum and wanted in. So she resigned from her job, packed her bags, and moved to Lagos. Not too long after, she spotted a vacancy for the arts assistant role at the British Council. She got the job.

Over the next 15 years, Ochai would rise steadily through the British Council, eventually becoming Regional Director for Arts and Creative Economy Programmes in Sub-Saharan Africa. During that period, the knowledge economy, industries built on ideas, information, and intellectual property, moved higher up the British Council’s agenda. And with it came a sharper focus on the creative economy.

The way the British Council saw it, the creative industries weren’t just about culture; they were a strategic driver of economic growth, employment, and soft power.

At that time, Ochai worked on programmes such as the Creative Entrepreneurs Programme, Talent Is Not Enough, a training initiative for artists, the Nigerian Creative Industries Expo, and a creative economy mapping project in partnership with Nigeria’s Ministry of Culture. She also helped launch the Lagos Theatre Festival, which would become a fixture on the city’s cultural calendar.

Many of these initiatives had one thing in common: a focus on exploring the commercial viability of creativity. “Our premise was: you may be talented, but if you can’t make money from it, it can’t be sustainable.”

Her father was pleased. The prodigal daughter he thought he had lost to tech was back where he hoped. Things had come full circle.

But Ojoma was still going to utilise her tech muscle. While serving as the British Council’s Director of Arts for West Africa, she commissioned a study on how artists in the region used technology. The findings revealed that digital distribution was still nascent, yet many creatives were experimenting with it.

Sensing a bigger story, she wrote to UNESCO, requesting funding for a more ambitious project: a study of 94 countries examining how the digital economy was shaping the creative industries.

“One key finding was that it’s impossible to distinguish where the digital economy ends and the creative economy begins.” The reason, she explains, is the sheer overlap: the backbone of the digital economy, broadband infrastructure, large platforms, and data consumption, was enabling people to stream content and engage with creative products.

She concluded that the two economies were converging, and Africa had yet to enter the game meaningfully. “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 turned to a long-time friend, Bosun Tijani, then CEO of CcHUB. “I said to him, ‘This thing you’re doing, technology application for prosperity. I want to do technology application for creatives.’”

It was a proposal that fit neatly into CcHUB’s expanding ambitions, and so Ochai knew her time at the British Council was up. In 2021, she resigned to launch the Creative Economy Practice in partnership with CcHUB. Two years later, Tijani resigned to become Minister of Information, Communications and Digital Economy. Ochai succeeded him as managing director of CcHUB, overseeing the technology and creative industry portfolios.

The transition to running all of CcHUB, overseeing technology and creative economy practices, has not been as jarring as Ochai expected. Her years in the tech sector provided a solid foundation. “The learning curve is more about shifting from non-profit to hardcore investment thinking, which is more prevalent in tech than creative industries,” she says.

That doesn’t mean the creative economy has taken a back seat. In February, CcHUB launched its second Nigerian hub, dedicated entirely to the creative economy. However, across both sides of the business, the through-line is a belief in Africa’s raw human potential.

“We have a lot of people who aren't skilled, and the biggest opportunity I see is if they can be upskilled and enabled, there's so much that can happen. I'm not just talking about entrepreneurship. I'm talking about workforce innovation, the whole range. I genuinely think the opportunity in Africa is just beginning because we have these people who're so young, and there's so much they can do.”