Africa Has Talent. The Creative Business Academy Wants to Build the Businesses Behind It
You must have heard it countlessly that Africa does not have a talent problem but a business problem. That is actually true and we’d give more clarity to drive our point home appropriately.
There are musicians who can make records but cannot negotiate a publishing deal. Designers who can create collections but struggle with pricing and distribution. Filmmakers who can tell compelling stories but have little experience building sustainable production companies. That gap is what the Creative Business Academy for Africa is trying to address.
The Creative Business Academy has opened registration for its 2027 cohort, a ten-month program covering Music, Film and Fashion Business. The program begins on February 6, 2027 and is structured around weekends, with a subsidized fee of ₦500,000 or US$500 for international and diaspora participants. Scholarships are also available.
But the interesting thing about CBA for Africa is not simply that it is another creative-industry training program. It is the philosophy behind it.
Stop training creatives only to make things
The academy’s positioning is straightforward: participants are not simply there to study the creative industries. They are expected to run a creative enterprise.
The 2027 program is divided across three Schools; Music, Film and Fashion, with a shared Integrated Core covering areas such as ventures, finance, intellectual property, data, AI and pan-African trade.
This is really important because just as the creative industry needs artists, it also needs managers, producers, marketers, A&R executives, lawyers, business developers, finance professionals, distributors and entrepreneurs who understand how creative assets become businesses. The academy is effectively trying to train that layer.
The “real company” approach is what makes it interesting
CBA for Africa says participants work through a structure of 12 permanent Houses and eventually collaborate across disciplines. Music, film and fashion students are not treated as isolated groups. They can work together to develop an artist, a director and a designer, creating a cross-sector creative enterprise.
The program also culminates in actual public releases and a showcase rather than simply certificates. Students are expected to leave with a body of work and intellectual property they own. That is a much more useful proposition than another certificate that sits inside a CV because the creative economy is ultimately judged by what gets produced, sold, licensed, distributed and owned.
This is also about professionalizing the people behind the scenes
The creative economy often gets reduced to the visible person; the singer, the actor, the designer or the filmmaker but every successful creative career sits on top of an invisible commercial infrastructure.
Someone has to build the budget, another has to negotiate the contract, someone else has to protect the intellectual property, another has to develop the audience, another has to understand the numbers and another has to figure out how the work moves from Lagos to Nairobi, Johannesburg, London or Los Angeles.
That is the workforce CBA is trying to build. The academy says it already has more than 1,500 alumni and has educated more than 12,000 creatives across the continent, with alumni working across companies including Sony Music Publishing, Mavin, The Orchard, Audiomack and ONErpm. It also says alumni have founded more than 15 businesses.
Those numbers should still be judged against actual long-term outcomes, but they point towards an important idea: the creative economy needs business infrastructure just as much as it needs creative talent.
Africa’s next creative opportunity may be its creative managers
This is where programs like CBA become strategically important. Africa is already producing music that travels globally, films that attract international audiences, fashion that is influencing global culture and digital content that reaches millions.
The next challenge is making sure more of the economic value stays with the people and companies creating that work and that requires ownership. It requires better contracts, commercial knowledge and people who understand creativity as both culture and business. The creative economy will not mature simply because Africa produces more talented artists.
It will mature when more of those artists are surrounded by businesses capable of turning their talent into sustainable companies. That may ultimately be the real job of the Creative Business Academy and not teaching Africans how to be creative. Teaching them how to build businesses around the creativity Africa already has.
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