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With New Funds, Finance Models and Entrants Into African Market, Industry Professionals Poise for Disruption — and Hope to Profit
Deep-pocketed funds and financiers are disrupting African business models, but distribution challenges continue to hold the industry back.
From providing equitable access to the growing number of funding mechanisms set up to support African content production to ensuring those schemes are able to adapt to the challenges of the local market, many producers expressed both their hope and frustration with a global finance model that doesn’t always seem well-suited to the practical realities of filmmaking on the continent. Regional and global streaming platforms have fueled a surge in production, but as was made clear by Amazon Prime Video’s abrupt pullout from the African market earlier this year, that model has left local producers at the mercy of decision-makers in far-off office suites. For many investors — whether it’s large-scale institutional funds or individual producers — the biggest hurdle is making sense of a dizzyingly large and fractured market of 1.2 billion riven by linguistic, cultural and economic divides and governments with their own competing agendas.
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