I have spent the last 25 years making films, documentaries, and public art inplaces where “creative infrastructure” is a verb, not a noun. In Kaduna, I coordinated Sahel Art’icipation: Special Inclusion with artists with disabilities. In Accra, I sat in the Generation Africa Documentary Lab. In Ouagadougou, I received the LE EAVE Prix for Eldorado Road, a film on migration. For too long, the model was simple: European institutions set the theme, the budget, and the distribution. African artists supplied the story, the access, and the risk. That model is collapsing because artists are refusing it.
In 2021, I scripted MAIRABOT for Al Jazeera’s Africa Direct. The story was Nigerian students who built a robot to protect health workers during COVID-19.The commissioning came from Doha, but the research, casting, and community consent came from Kaduna. The difference was ownership. We were not “talent for hire”. We were co-authors with IP and editorial say.
What equitable partnership looks like:
1. Shared budgets, not per diems: If 60% of production happens in Africa, 60% of the budget should be controlled by African producers.
2. Shared copyright: The film, archive, and data live in both places. Not only in aEuropean archive.
3. Shared credit: Directors, writers, and producers are listed by contribution, not geography.
When we do this, European partners get deeper, truer stories. African partners get sustainable studios, not one-off fees.
2. Mutual Learning: Trade Skill for Context.
Europe has strong systems: public funding, distribution networks, IP law, post-production pipelines. Africa has strong practices: community-based creation, oral archives, rapid prototyping with limited resources, and art that is already social work.
I saw this clearly while running a Theatre workshop with PWD clusters in Kaduna for the African Culture Fund. The European partner brought training in accessibility standards for festivals. The Nigerian artists brought a practice of “audience before stage” — performances in markets, mosques, and IDP camps because that is where the public is.
Neither side was “teaching”. We were translating.
How to design for mutual learning:
- Residencies that are two-way: Not only Africans in Europe. Fund European artists to live and work for 3 months in Jos, Kumasi, or Dakar, with a local co-lead.
- Skill swaps, not masterclasses: A Berlin colorist trains a Jos editor on DaVinci Resolve. That editor trains the Berlin team on filming safely in low-bandwidth, high-risk areas.
- Archive exchanges: European libraries hold 19th-century photographs of African towns. African studios hold oral histories of the same places. Digitize both, and curate together.
This builds competence on both sides, not dependency on one.
3. Shared Opportunities: Build Pipelines, Not Projects
The biggest gap is not talent. It is pipeline. An African filmmaker can win a prize and lack platforms for showcasing. A European gallery can want African textiles, and still not know which cooperative can deliver 200 pieces ethically.
As a culture entrepreneur, I now ask every partner: “What stays after the project ends?”
What is working now:
- Distributed hubs: The British Documentary Foundation’s Creative Catalyst Fund supported _Laureates_ in 2011. What stayed was a network of Nigerian doc filmmakers who still share fixers and fact-checkers today.
- Co-owned platforms: Instead of European festivals “programming Africa”, fund African-European curatorial collectives that program both ways. Example: a touring show that starts in Sheffield, moves to Kano, and ends in Accra, with the same artists and split ticketing.
- Market access with standards: EU creative SMEs need suppliers. African SMEs need buyers. Create a vetted “Creative Bridge” roster of studios, artisans, and post-houses that meet EU procurement rules, so collaboration is not slowed by due diligence every time.
When the opportunity is a pipeline, the next artist does not have to start from email zero.
4. Protect Memory, Not Just Market.
Africa’s creative ecosystems are archives of rupture and repair: insurgency, displacement, climate stress, urban growth. European ecosystems are archives of institutions, museums, and funding cycles.
If we collaborate only for product, we lose the deeper value: how art holds communities together.
In _Sahel Art’icipation_, three clusters of PWDs made work about being made invisible. The art was not the final exhibition. The process was the public. Parents who had never seen their child on stage were now sitting in the front row. That is resilience made visible.
European partners can strengthen this by funding process, documentation, and care. African partners can strengthen Europe by reminding it that art is not only content for a platform. It is a way communities remember themselves.
If we build for equity, mutual learning, and shared pipelines, then Africa and Europe do not “help” one another. We become one another’s infrastructure.
*Photo from Sahel Articipation Theatre Project for PWDs in Kaduna Nigeria: Funded by African Culture Fund 2024.
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