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Cairo-based African Export-Import Bank, also known as Afreximbank, is gearing up to launch a $1B African Film Fund in 2024 to support the continent’s burgeoning film industry.
Kanayo Awani, Executive Vice President of Afreximbank’s Intra-African Trade Bank, announced the initiative in the opening speech of the 2023 Canex (Creative Africa Nexus) Summit in Cairo on Friday.
She said the fund would oversee film financing, co-finance with large studios, finance African filmmakers and finance producers and directors of film projects across the continent.
Awani noted that Afreximbank had already announced the doubling of financing it was making available to the creative sector in Africa to $1B at the 2022 edition of Canex, and currently had $600M invested in film, music, visual arts, fashion, and sports projects.
“The very first film we financed recently premiered at the Toronto Film Festival,” Awani said, adding, “The Bank has several in the pipeline from Nigeria, South Africa, and Kenya, which should be on streaming platforms in 2024.”
Awani said the film and audiovisual industries in Africa currently accounted for $5B of the African continent’s GDP and employed an estimated five million people, with the potential to create over 20 million jobs and generate $20B in revenues annually in the future.
She noted, however, that sector faced several challenges, including limited access to financing and copyright infringement due to weak copyright laws, enforcement mechanisms and a lack of awareness.
Other issues included infrastructure and technology gaps, lack of capacity and shortage of skilled professionals and limited market access and international exposure, as a result of which African creative and cultural products often struggle to gain exposure and access to international markets.
In an earlier address, German-Ghanian actor Boris Kodjoe, whose credits include Grey’s Anatomy and Station 19, told the summit that African creativity was increasingly influential on the world stage but that Africa faced branding challenges due to external perception fuelled by traditional media’s depiction of poverty, famine, civil wars and migration on the continent.
He said this could be on the cusp of changing with rising demand for culturally specific global and quoted statistics suggesting that by 2030, Africa was projected to produce up to 10 per cent of global creative goods export worth roughly $200 billion or 4% of Africa’s GDP.
H.E. Albert M. Muchanga, Commissioner for Trade and Industry of the African Union Commission, echoed these sentiments in another address.
“I reaffirm my belief that the African creative industry has huge potential to be a source of employment and revenue to create the Africa we want – revenue from intra-African trade as well as revenue from the rest of the world,” he said.
Muchanga urged African countries to convert its “vast potential’ into plans and projects that yielded tangible results, stressing the need to also invest in protecting international property rights.
Canex is an Afreximbank initiative aimed at supporting Africa and the African Diaspora’s creative and cultural industries by providing financing and non-financing instruments to boost growth.
The seven-day Canex Summit is taking place within the confines of IATF2023, Africa’s largest trade and investment fair, which is running from November 9 to 15 in Cairo.
Pan-African financial institution Afreximbank was created in 1993 under the auspices of the African Development Bank.
It is headquartered in Cairo and has regional offices in the capitals of Zimbabwe, the Ivory Coast, Uganda, Nigeria and Cameroon.
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