African creatives can create a brighter economic future for the continent

When people speak of Africa’s potential one of the first reference points is usually the young and growing population. But this fact in and of itself will not guarantee a brighter tomorrow. What will this young and burgeoning population do? Which industries are best set to unleash their true potential? Creatives across the continent are putting up their hands, pointing the way.

On the music front, Africa is stepping centre stage. There were more African nominees at the 2022 Grammys than ever before, while Nigerian Afro-Pop artists Wizkid and Burna Boy have the whole world listening, topping global charts and performing to sell-out venues across the UK, EU, Canada and the US. In 2022 Burna Boy was the first Nigerian artist to headline at Madison Square Garden.

Both won Grammys in 2021 and their Spotify monthly listeners average almost 15-million and 110-million respectively, according to Forbes Africa. This shows the growing marketability and potential of African music on the world stage.

African fashion is also being propelled by a new generation of innovative designers, tapping into the global diaspora and seizing the disruptive power of digital platforms. Coco Emilia, a Cameroonian fashion entrepreneur, has embraced the reach and influence of social media, leveraging her 2.6-million Instagram followers to build multiple fashion and beauty businesses. Fashion weeks in Dakar, Kampala and Addis Ababa are also playing an increasingly competitive role on the fashion scene.

Nigeria’s film industry (Nollywood) also continues to dazzle. It is one of the fastest-growing creative industries in the world, and the largest private employer in Africa.

These burgeoning creative successes are helping ensure Africa’s creative industries are recognised (on paper anyway) as a resource, ripe for development. But whether these green shoots in music, fashion and film will be enough to catalyse sustainable growth in Africa’s creative industries that boost broader economic development on the continent will depend largely on how policymakers and education providers in particular respond to this opportunity.

Femi Odugbemi, a storyteller, visionary and member of the Academy of Motion Pictures, believes Africa is entering its “golden moment” and is ripe for a transition from just creators of art to a sustainable creative economy with the lion’s share of power on the continent. The world is ready to explore the African story, he says, but various players need to work together to empower the sector.

Currently, there is a leaking pipe between creatives and their audiences in both intra-African and international markets. Weak, outdated and unenforceable legal protections for creative content produced and distributed on digital platforms in Africa mean that creativity and influence are lost as intellectual property slips through the cracks.

This view is supported in McKinsey and World Economic Forum research, which found that gaps in policy leadership can lead to piracy and counterfeiting, threatening nascent creative industries. The growth of Nollywood, for example, is being jeopardised by escalating copyright piracy, which means filmmakers receive only a fraction of the total revenue generated by their movies. As a result, the industry struggles to monetise services and suffers from chronic underinvestment, especially relative to its market size and extended viewership.

Beyond the law

More relevant and tighter copyright laws and intellectual policy frameworks can safeguard individual contributions to the creative economy and bolster the reach and influence of a nation’s cultural output. But if national laws continue to be unreliable in getting the protection the industry needs, creative industry leader Obi Asika says nonfungible tokens (NFTs) are providing an alternative route.

Based on blockchain technology, NFTs use a distributed ledger to guarantee inviolable ownership and prove authenticity. Asika is bullish about the future of NFTs in Africa’s creative economy. He says there are more than 2,000 creators in the NFT space in Nigeria, where 9-million people have crypto wallets.

Beyond NFTs, which are still in early adoption territory, Asika thinks Africa can take control by building its own platforms and providing the surrounding technological infrastructure to support local creativity. Though a business case still needs to be built, such a transition could also support a wider ecosystem of talent development and employment on the continent, for coders too.

African creatives are itching to take advantage of such infrastructure. Craig McGaley, who has been in the music business since 1992, says he has seen rapid growth on the continent of independent practitioners who create content at home from well-equipped studios and distribute through various channels directly to audiences. This means composers now own the master copy and are in a more powerful position for monetising their work.

There are several points like this along the value chain of music, film and artistic production where royalties could be collected, but right now most young creatives lack a formal understanding of the ecosystem and so have a limited understanding of how to generate value beyond the spark of creativity.

That’s the part of the story that African universities — business schools in particular — have a key role to play in changing. Most creative undergraduate degrees are still craft-focused and exclude business modules, which means creatives are left to figure out the business side on their own. This is a hole that must be plugged.

By providing a supportive regulatory base, building enabling infrastructure and educating young creatives on the value of their work and how to market it, Africa could capitalise on its golden moment and craft a new story, sung in its own voice, that delivers economic growth and wide value beyond just that of a proud African identity.

• Van Zyl is a drummer and music specialist who heads up the Alumni Association at Henley Business School Africa where Narula is director of the Dunning Africa Centre.