The Continent Is Not Waiting. Africa’s Creators Are Already Building The Economy.

by Daniel Kojo Soboh, CEO and Founder of EMY Africa

On youth, the creator economy, and why Africa’s most urgent development opportunity isn’t in a ministry, it’s in a smartphone.

Every year, Africa adds between eight and eleven million young people to its labour market. Every year, the formal economy fails to absorb most of them.

This is the sentence that has opened a thousand development reports, launched a thousand policy consultations, and, by most honest assessments, produced insufficient change. The framing itself is part of the problem. It positions Africa’s youth as a weight to be carried rather than an engine to be fuelled. And it looks almost entirely in the wrong direction for solutions.

Because while the traditional economy has been slow to respond, something else has been happening at remarkable speed. Africa’s young people have not been waiting. They have been building.

They have built a creator economy (musicians, filmmakers, designers, educators, digital entrepreneurs, and cultural producers) valued at $5.1 billion in 2025 and projected to reach $29.84 billion by 2032, growing at a compound annual rate of 28.7 per cent. To put that in context: that is faster than almost any other sector on the continent. It is export-oriented, intellectual-property-led, youth-driven, and it requires a smartphone rather than a mining concession to enter.

More than half of Africa’s creators, 51.3 per cent, are between 18 and 24 years old. A further 45.6 per cent are aged 25 to 34. These are not side hustlers. They are professionals, building audience-first businesses, negotiating brand partnerships, producing content for international distribution, and solving the monetisation challenges that formal institutions assumed could not be solved here. The African Development Bank has argued the point directly in its assessments of youth employment: Africa’s young people do not just need jobs. They need the skills and tools to create them. The creator economy is providing both.

A Different Kind of Export

The data is striking, but the story goes deeper than numbers. What Africa’s creative generation has achieved is something that extractive industries, for all their scale, have never managed: it has made African identity desirable globally on its own terms.

Nollywood, producing thousands of films annually, has become the engine of the continent’s storytelling. Distributed through Netflix and Amazon Prime, it is doing for African narrative what Korean cinema did for South Korea’s global reputation, normalising African voices, aesthetics, and values for international audiences without apology or translation. Nigeria’s wider creative sector, driven by Nollywood and Afrobeats, reached $14.8 billion in value in 2025, contributing 2.3 per cent to GDP and employing over four million people. In 2023 alone, those two sectors contributed approximately $1.4 billion to Nigeria’s GDP.

Afrobeats is a parallel story of structural consequence. What began as a regional West African sound has grown into a global phenomenon that streams more in the United States and the United Kingdom than in Nigeria itself. It has drawn collaborations from Beyoncé, Drake, and Ed Sheeran. It has produced the first African-artist-led track to surpass one billion Spotify streams. The Grammy Awards now have a dedicated Best African Music Performance category. These are not cultural curiosities. They are indicators of an industry generating real commercial value and genuine global influence.

And this is not only a Nigerian story. Kenya’s 20-30 per cent film rebate schemes have attracted Netflix and Amazon productions. Morocco’s studios hosted Hollywood blockbusters long before the African cultural moment reached its current pitch. Ghana, South Africa, Rwanda, and Senegal are each developing creative ecosystems with their own character and commercial momentum. The continent’s creative generation is pan-African in its reach, even when it is hyperlocal in its content.

Why This Moment Is Structurally Different

Previous creative booms in Africa have been limited by infrastructure. Payment systems that exclude creators from being paid across borders. Distribution platforms that treated African content as a niche. A near-total absence of the legal and financial structures that allow creative careers to compound rather than peak and collapse.

Those barriers have not disappeared. But they are falling. Mobile money integration has transformed what it means to monetise creative work in a market without a robust banking infrastructure. Platform economics rewards consistency, niche authority, and audience loyalty, qualities that young African creators have demonstrated in abundance. And a growing global appetite for authentic African content has created a feedback loop: the more the world sees, the more it demands.

What is now required is the ecosystem to sustain it. This is not a government project alone. It is a challenge for investors who have not yet understood that a musician is also an entrepreneur. For media institutions that need to document and amplify achievements, not only crises. For corporates that need to back creative enterprises with the same seriousness applied to extractive industries. The Brookings Institution projects that by 2050, Africa will be home to one-third of the world’s youth population, with eight to eleven million entering the labour market every year. Without creative and digital economies absorbing that energy, the pressure on formal employment becomes unsustainable.

The Work of Keeping the Record

There is a quieter but equally important dimension to this conversation. Excellence, to endure, must be documented. It must be named, recognised, and accorded the institutional weight that makes it legible to the next generation and to the wider world.

This is not a trivial task on a continent whose image has been shaped, for decades, by a media architecture largely built outside it. The corrective is not propaganda. It is the deliberate, consistent act of recording achievement at the highest standard, holding a mirror to the continent that shows what is actually there.

Platforms that have taken this work seriously matter more than they are sometimes credited for. EMY Africa, which marks its tenth anniversary in 2025, has spent a decade doing precisely this: building a continent-wide ledger of excellence through its awards, magazine, symposiums, and international showcases. Its Youth Changemaker Award nominees this year came from Ghana, Rwanda, the DRC, Angola, Uganda, Zambia, Cameroon, Nigeria, Morocco, and South Africa — ten countries, ten young people redefining what leadership looks like in this generation. Its partnerships with UNESCO, the Diaspora Affairs Office of the Ghanaian Presidency, and EY Ghana reflect the seriousness with which this documentation project is now being taken.

When a platform of that kind survives a decade and expands rather than contracts, adding a magazine, an expo, symposiums at the London School of Economics and New York University, a soiree circuit across Johannesburg, Lagos, and London, it is evidence that there is both appetite and infrastructure for the longer project of building African excellence into a permanent institutional fact rather than a seasonal story.

The Question That Remains

Africa’s creator economy is not waiting for permission. The youth building it are not waiting for a policy paper to validate what they already know: that their talent is real, that their market is global, and that the barriers in front of them are structural rather than intrinsic.

The question is whether Africa’s governments, investors, corporates, and media institutions will move with the same urgency. The creator economy will grow regardless. The only variable is whether the continent’s institutions grow with it, or spend another decade writing reports about potential, while the young people they describe build the future without them.

Biography of Daniel Kojo Soboh, Founder and Executive Director of EMY Africa and Carbon AV:

Daniel Kojo Soboh is an African cultural entrepreneur, creative economy advocate, and Founder and Executive Director of EMY Africa and Carbon AV. Working at the intersection of culture, business, and impact, he has built platforms that champion African excellence, connect creatives with investors and policymakers, and position culture as a driver of economic growth. Through initiatives including the EMY Africa Awards and activations across London, Lagos, and New York, Soboh has become a leading voice shaping conversations on Africa’s creative industries, youth empowerment, and global influence.