African creators do not lack talent or audiences — what they lack, panellists said at Moonshot by TechCabal on Thursday, is the infrastructure that converts attention into income. That thread ran through a session titled "Can African players build the infrastructure creators need?"

The panel brought together Richard Oyome, co-founder and COO of Raenest; Kene Okwuosa, founder and group CEO of Filmhouse Group; Darey Art Alade, co-founder and chief creative officer of Livespot360; and Kopano Cowen, CEO of Connect Channel. Kehinde Odusote-Fagbule of TechCabal Insights moderated.

The earnings gap set the backdrop. The Nigerian Creator Economy Report 2025 found that 56.45% of Nigerian creators earn less than $100 a month from their work, while 3.23% earn more than $5,000. The spread is the panel's thesis in numbers: where monetization works, income follows; for the majority, audience size alone does not pay. Money does reach some creators — Nigerian artists received more than ₦58 billion from Spotify in 2024, up 146% on 2023, according to the same report — a sign of what existing payout rails can already deliver when they reach a market.

Platform payouts are part of the problem. For years, brand deals were often creators' only route to income, because major platforms did not pay Nigerian creators directly until Meta switched on ads on Reels for creators in Nigeria and Ghana in 2024. Until that switch, reach on the biggest platforms built audiences but not pay cheques at home, which is why the panel kept returning to infrastructure rather than talent as the missing piece.

Oyome framed the remedy as expansion. "We need to make the market bigger," he said, adding that the fix starts with growth. "We could penetrate foreign markets, especially in film, through collaboration, to produce better quality and attract international audiences."

Getting paid from abroad is another barrier, and it explains why payments infrastructure keeps drawing capital. Raenest, which offers dollar, pound and euro accounts to freelancers and creators, raised an $11 million Series A in February 2025 and said it had processed more than $1 billion in payments for over 700,000 individual customers — scale that points to how much cross-border earning already runs through the market and how much depends on rails built for it.

Okwuosa rejected the idea that Nigeria's market is small. "I don't subscribe to the notion that the Nigerian market is small," he said. "It only feels that way because we haven't activated its size." The real brake, in his view, is piracy: "It limits the rewards and reach for creators."

How much piracy costs Nollywood remains uncertain — itself a sign of how little is measured. MultiChoice has put Nollywood's annual losses at ₦10 billion to ₦15 billion, based on audience data, while other industry figures run far higher. TechCabal's 2026 outlook adds that Netflix and Amazon Prime have cut African content spending, pushing more Nollywood filmmakers onto YouTube — a shift that puts platform terms and payout mechanics at the centre of Nollywood's revenue picture.

"Public-private partnerships can help expand the market," Alade said. "We need policy and legislation that make it easier for these collaborations to happen." Government has begun to move: the Creative Economy Development Fund is backed by a $200 million seed commitment from Afreximbank, according to the ministry. Whether that commitment converts into disbursed projects will be an early test of the policy piece the panel called for.

The panellists agreed that the next wave of investment in the creator economy need not be a new standalone product. It could be a partnership or an acquisition that links players already working on payments, production, distribution and policy. For African builders, the opportunity lies in connecting what already exists. The markers to watch from here: disbursement under the Creative Economy Development Fund, further platform payout switches across African markets following Meta's 2024 move, and consolidation among the payments, production and distribution players already operating in the market.