Africa’s creative industries have never been more visible, more influential or more powerful than they are today.
Our films travel without borders, our music dominates global charts, and our fashion inspires some of the world’s biggest runways.
Yet for all this cultural influence, the economic engines behind Africa’s creative brilliance have remained fragmented, underfunded and largely disconnected from the continent’s formal trade and investment frameworks.
This is precisely why Creatives Connect Afrika — the inaugural AfCFTA Forum and Festival on Tourism, Creative and Cultural Industries — arrives not just as another event on the African calendar, but as a timely and necessary intervention.
The event will take place from Monday, November 24 to Wednesday, November 26, 2025, at the La Palm Royal Beach Hotel in Accra, Ghana.
Held under the auspices of Ghana’s President, John Dramani Mahama, and the leadership of Wamkele Mene, Secretary-General of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Secretariat, the forum is designed to strategically transition Africa's creative sector, particularly film, music and fashion industries from cultural forces into high-value pillars of continental trade and investment.
And make no mistake: the timing could not have been better.
Necessity
For decades, Africa’s creative output has grown on the strength of talent, community and cultural momentum — not because of enabling policy, financing or well-structured markets. Nollywood expanded without a continental distribution system. Afrobeats conquered the world despite limited regional music infrastructure. African designers rose to global fame without a unified African fashion market.
In many ways, the creativity came before the systems that should have supported it.
Creatives Connect Afrika exists to bridge that critical gap by bringing policymakers, creators, investors, financiers and sector leaders into one shared space to ask — and answer — the urgent questions:
How do we protect African creativity, finance it, trade it, and scale it across a 1.4-billion-person market?
The fragmented nature of Africa’s 55 markets has long hindered creative mobility and trade.
A filmmaker in Ghana struggles to access francophone markets; a Kenyan fashion brand sells more easily in Europe than within Africa; a Tanzanian musician faces more logistical barriers performing on the continent than touring the diaspora.
For the first time, Creatives Connect Afrika puts these distortions at the centre of the conversation.
Turning point for creative economy
What makes this forum truly significant is that it is powered by three institutions whose collaboration finally gives the sector both legitimacy and structure.
The AfCFTA Secretariat provides the policy backbone, aligning the creative economy with continental protocols on Trade in Services, Intellectual Property Rights, Digital Trade and Investment.
The Black Star Experience Secretariat anchors the initiative nationally, aligning it with Ghana’s ambition to become Africa’s cultural capital and generate $5 billion from the sector by 2027.
Africa Tourism Partners brings the commercial machinery — B2B meetings, investment deal rooms, matchmaking, and business tourism infrastructure.
Together, they have built not just a festival, but a continental marketplace.
Major benefits for creatives
While policymakers and governments have much to gain, the clearest beneficiaries will be Africa’s creatives.
- Access to continental creative marketplace
For the first time, creatives will engage a platform intentionally designed to break down barriers between African markets.
This means smoother mobility, shared standards, cross-border distribution, and access to a much larger audience.
- Real deals, investors, opportunities
The event’s B2B sessions, investment clinics and matchmaking platforms will allow creatives to secure co-productions, financing, licensing deals, touring arrangements, digital distribution, and brand partnerships — all in one place.
- Stronger IP, digital trade protection
With the AfCFTA Secretariat leading conversations on intellectual property and digital trade, creatives can expect clearer protections, fairer compensation, and better enforcement across multiple jurisdictions.
This event marks the beginning of real value protection for African creators.
Strategic moment for Ghana
Hosting the maiden edition gives Ghana a significant competitive edge. Through the Black Star Experience, Ghana is positioning itself as the cultural and creative heartbeat of the continent — and Creatives Connect Afrika accelerates this ambition.
Accra becomes the convening ground for the policies, investments and dialogues shaping Africa’s creative future.
The influx of creatives, investors, financiers, policymakers and media drives tourism, hospitality revenues, business traffic, and global visibility.
And Ghana benefits early from new AfCFTA-aligned co-production networks, trade incentives, investment pipelines and mobility frameworks.
This is soft power, economic power and cultural power converging.
More than an event — Continental commitment
Creatives Connect Afrika is ultimately much more than a three-day gathering.
It is a strategic shift — the moment Africa moves from admiring its creative talent to actively constructing the systems that allow that talent to thrive.
It is where creativity meets commerce. Where policy meets artistic expression.
Where Africa begins trading with itself — culturally, economically and deliberately.
For creatives across the continent, this marks the start of a new era: one where their work can scale across borders, protected by African policies, financed by African capital and amplified by a continental market.
And for Ghana, hosting this historic maiden edition cements its place at the centre of Africa’s creative renaissance.
— Francis Doku writes the weekly ‘Explore Africa’ column, covering travel, culture and tourism transformation across the continent.
