At a Creative Economy Stage panel at Moonshot by TechCabal, the conversation was direct: African creators have the talent, but the system built around them has not caught up. Film executives, live entertainment producers, payments leaders, and television producers sat down to talk about what it actually takes to build an economy where creativity translates into real money.
Kene Okwuosa, group CEO of Filmhouse Group, put it plainly. "There isn't a challenge in creativity, and there isn't a challenge in talent. There's an abundance of stories that just haven't even begun to be told," he said. "But are creators capturing the value that their talent and their creativity should capture? The truth is that we still have quite a way to go." Africa's creator economy is currently worth about $3 billion and could exceed $17 billion by 2030, according to the Africa Creator Economy Report. But a growing market does not automatically mean growing paychecks for the people making the work.
Distribution is one of the sharpest pain points. With relatively few streaming platforms and buyers competing for African content, creators have limited leverage when it comes to selling their work. More channels, more competition, more options: that is what would shift the balance. Filmhouse has been trying to close that gap by operating across the full film value chain, from production to what Okwuosa described as the largest cinema chain in the market, to supplying content to 26 or 27 airlines and platforms including Netflix and Amazon. In 2025, the company also launched Kava, a subscription streaming service built in partnership with Inkblot Studios.
The momentum is showing up in the numbers. West African cinemas generated a record 15.6 billion naira, roughly $11.6 million, in revenue in 2025. For the first time, Nollywood films outsold Hollywood titles at the box office, according to FilmOne's annual scorecard. Meanwhile, Darey Art Alade, co-founder and chief creative officer of live entertainment company Livespot360, came to the conversation with a different gap on his mind: the technical capacity to stage large-scale productions at all. The infrastructure question, it turns out, runs deeper than anyone streaming deal can fix.
Originally published by TechCabal.