Bolanle Austen-Peters has welcomed the growing institutional recognition of Africa’s creative economy by development finance institutions such as the International Finance Corporation (IFC and Afrexim bank), while calling for African banks and broader capital markets to follow suit and finance film, theatre, music, fashion, entertainment and digital content with the discipline applied to any other major industry that generates comparable jobs, tourism, hospitality and production value.
Speaking at the Africa Soft Power Summit 2026 in Nairobi during the panel “Creators as Economic Power: How Influencers, Artists and Storytellers Are Shaping Africa’s Global Position,” Austen-Peters said the creative economy must be financed with the same seriousness given to traditional industries.
“I just came back from Cannes. The entire 800 million euros that is generated annually in Cannes is from the film industry that they all support. Every single sector, from restaurants to fashion, are all embedded within the filmmaking space,” said Austen-Peters, Founder and Artistic Director of BAP Productions.
For Austen-Peters, the lesson is clear: where creative industries are properly understood, they are financed as economic infrastructure, not treated as cultural side activity. She said African creative businesses support jobs across production, tourism, hospitality, fashion, media, logistics, technical services and youth employment, and should therefore not be dismissed as too risky or informal for serious capital.
Austen-Peters argued that the financing gap is not only a creator problem, but also an institutional knowledge problem. Mature creative markets, she said, are built when financiers understand the sector’s revenue models, employment potential and spillover value, and then develop the tools to de-risk production, distribution, venues, platforms and IP-backed businesses.
She also challenged financial institutions to reassess how creative businesses are classified in their risk frameworks. For Austen-Peters, the continued treatment of the sector as unusually high-risk should be tested against industry evidence: audience demand, job creation, export potential, repeatable production models, tourism linkages and the wider economy that forms around successful creative industries.
Her point was that the sector does not need sympathy from financiers. It needs proper understanding, appropriate risk models and capital structures that reflect how creative businesses actually generate value.
The panel brought together Austen-Peters; Oladapo “D’banj” Oyebanjo, entertainer, music executive and CEO of The C.R.E.A.M Platform, a direct-to-consumer super fan platform for creatives; Brian Mogeni, Co-Founder and CEO of Wowzi; Ken Osei, Principal Investment Officer at the International Finance Corporation; and Njoki Muhoho, Founder and Executive Producer of Zebra Productions, as moderator.
The discussion centred on one of the strongest themes of ASP 2026: African creators are already shaping global culture, but the financing systems, intellectual property frameworks, infrastructure and institutional support required to help them scale are still catching up.
D’banj brought the issue down to the creator’s balance sheet. Speaking from his experience as an entertainer and business operator, he said the financing system still struggles to recognise the asset base of creative businesses. For many creators, he argued, value sits in intellectual property, audience trust, catalogue strength, platforms and cultural reach, rather than in conventional collateral.
“Our biggest collateral is our IP,” he said.
He cited The C.R.E.A.M Platform as evidence that African creative businesses can attract institutional capital when their intellectual property, platform model, audience base and revenue logic are properly structured.
For D’banj, Afreximbank’s equity investment in the platform showed what becomes possible when a finance institution understands the business case behind African creativity. The point, he said, was not simply that capital had come in, but that the investment recognised a creative platform as a scalable business with ownership value.
For him, African content should be understood as a natural resource that can create multiple forms of value when properly processed, owned and monetised.
“Content is natural. It is just like crude oil. If you process it, it becomes film, comedy,” he said.
The institutional capital perspective came from Ken Osei, Principal Investment Officer at the International Finance Corporation, who said the financing conversation around Africa’s creative economy is beginning to move from talent recognition to infrastructure investment.
He pointed to IFC’s recent announcement in Kigali around investment interest in sports and entertainment arenas across the continent as an example of how development finance institutions are beginning to view creative and entertainment infrastructure through a commercial lens.
For Osei, the issue is not simply that African artists need more stages. It is that without the right venues, production infrastructure and commercial platforms on the continent, African creativity will continue to generate value elsewhere. He said the growing influence of figures such as Masai Ujiri has helped shift investor understanding of sports and entertainment from cultural activity to investable infrastructure.
For Osei, the creative economy must be approached as a serious commercial sector, not as cultural goodwill.
“It’s entertainment, but it’s business. And we have to think about it the way we would any business,” he said.
“It’s not charity, it’s business.”
Osei said the sector will require stronger collaboration between private investors, public-sector actors, development finance institutions and practitioners if its full economic potential is to be realised.
“It’s high time policymakers start engaging with the creative economy as an industry. That’s the only way we will really stimulate it,” he said.
He added that the creative economy has the potential to become one of the continent’s largest sources of employment.
“It could very well become Africa’s biggest employer,” he said.
The panel’s strongest message was that Africa’s creative economy has outgrown the language of potential. African music, film, fashion, theatre, sport, content and storytelling already move global audiences. The next task is to build the commercial architecture that allows creators and creative businesses to own the value they generate.
That architecture includes IP protection, licensing systems, catalogue valuation, creator data, performance infrastructure, formal business records, stronger management structures, financing models and better collaboration between creators, banks, investors, development finance institutions and policymakers.
Brian Mogeni, Co-Founder and CEO of Wowzi, pointed to the role of platforms in helping creators move from influence to income. He said Wowzi was built to empower creators to earn and grow, not only by connecting them to brands, but by building infrastructure that allows them to monetise audiences, drive commerce and participate more directly in business value.
“We have to build from Africa to the world. Our mission at Wowzi is to empower creators to earn and grow,” Mogeni said.
He noted that creators have become a new media channel, but the real opportunity lies in connecting creativity to commerce in a way that reaches the bottom line.
“Until that line between creativity and commerce, where it hits the bottom of the P&L, is fully connected, that is when we can actually scale this,” he said.
Taken together, the conversation challenged both sides of the market. For financiers, the message was to stop treating the creative economy as vague, informal or unserious and begin to understand its jobs, supply chains, export potential, infrastructure needs and recurring revenue streams. For creators, the message was equally clear: talent and visibility are no longer enough. Structure, ownership, documentation, IP protection and business discipline are what turn influence into economic power.
The session reflected one of the broader themes of the Africa Soft Power Summit 2026: Africa’s soft power is no longer only a question of culture, visibility or global admiration. It is increasingly a question of capital, ownership, market access, infrastructure and the systems required to ensure that the value created by African talent remains connected to African creators, businesses and institutions.