Digital platforms in Africa should scale up to take advantage of the continent’s surging demand for creative content. This was the view of Chinelo Anohu, senior director at the Africa Investment Forum, who also added that the forum, which is an African Development Bank flagship entity, is providing advisory services and investment support to creative players.
Anohu was speaking at a virtual “fireside chat” on recently with Afreximbank president, Benedict Oramah, and Dean Garfield, Netflix’s vice president of public policy. The Africa Soft Power Project organized the event, titled “The New Face of African Collaboration,” which was moderated by Omar Ben Yedder, group publisher and managing director of IC Publications.
The Africa Investment Forum, championed by the African Development Bank and its founding and institutional partners, works to accelerate the closure of the continent’s investment gaps. The Forum currently has a growing portfolio of 118 deals valued at $114 billion.
The African Development Bank Group is Africa’s premier development finance institution. It comprises three distinct entities: the African Development Bank (AfDB), the African Development Fund (ADF) and the Nigeria Trust Fund (NTF). On the ground in 41 African countries with an external office in Japan, the Bank contributes to the economic development and the social progress of its 54 regional member states.
The largest single foreign direct investment into Africa, the Mozambique Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) Area 1 Project, to which the African Development Bank is contributing $400 million in financing, was structured at the Africa Investment Forum 2019 marketplace event.
The latest dialogue it held was against the backdrop of the recent coming into force of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA), even as 2021 is also the African Union’s year of arts, culture and heritage, further underscoring the importance of innovation and creativity at the moment.
Discussions focused on the role of infrastructure and connectivity in advancing Africa’s creative industries, including film, textiles and design.
Oramah said that Afreximbank set up a $500 million fund in January 2020 to support Africa’s creative industries, considering that the continent faces a challenge to effectively monetize its creative output, and that once it does so, innovation would follow.
According to Anohu, the Africa Investment Forum is working to promote content deals, as well as digital infrastructure projects to advance creative industries, including support to smaller players.
“At AIF 2019, we had a very interesting entrepreneur scheme which saw those that were not as big get the kind of funding they needed to get beyond getting a feasibility study done,” she said, adding further that “support for intellectual property rights and equipping investors with the data they need to tackle negative perceptions about investing in Africa are key priorities for Africa Investment Forum.”
Garfield agreed with Anohu that AfCFTA would help address a number of the challenges militating against boosting Africa’s creative output, including uneven intellectual property protections, fragmented payment systems and inadequate human capacity in creative industries.
“Data is one of the African Development Bank’s strong points. They have a fantastic research division, and what we’re trying to do is mainstream that data culled from 55 countries and distill it in such a manner that the investors can easily access the information they need,” he confirmed.
Netflix’s Garfield sounded an optimistic note about the company’s future trajectory is in Africa, citing the continent’s youthful population and its rich storytelling tradition.
