The Nigerian Entertainment Conference has released The State of Nigeria’s Creative Economy 2026. The data-backed report, produced in partnership with Frontyard Group, an innovation and investment engine powering Africa’s creative frontier, surveyed 377 Nigerian creatives, providing an avenue for them to air the challenges they face in their daily work and proffer solutions to help them.
The survey, conducted in the weeks after NECLive 2025, held at Landmark Event Centre under the theme “Powering Africa Through Creative Enterprise,” set out to map what actually stops Nigerian creative work from scaling. Its main finding is that the constraint facing the creative industry is not a lack of talent. It is the faulty systems around the talent: power, capital, contracts, talent pipelines, and payment rails.
These five recommendations attack those systems one by one.
1. Treat power and connectivity as creative-economy infrastructure. Power outages and related challenges ranked as the single most critical daily obstacle in the survey — above funding, access to equipment, and everything else. The recommendation follows from that ranking: backup power must be a non-negotiable feature of any creative hub, and advocacy for priority grid access in creative districts should be formalised at the state-government level. Any fund or programme that does not address electricity as a precondition, the report warns, is building on an unstable foundation.
2. Establish a Creative Economy Lending Facility. Access to affordable funding emerged as the top structural gap, ahead of distribution, training, and intellectual-property tools. Respondents are not primarily asking for grants, but for fair-rate, creatively literate financial products. The report recommends a lending window piloted with fintechs and development finance institutions, featuring simplified collateral requirements and repayment structures calibrated to project revenue cycles, because films, music albums, fashion exhibitions, and similar standalone projects do not generate income on a salary schedule.
3. Build a standardised contracts and payments framework. The diagnostic found a trust deficit inside the industry’s own ranks: 52% of respondents cite poor briefing as a recurring point of friction in collaborations, and 51% cite payment disputes. The report frames this as an infrastructure problem, not a cultural one — solvable with a standard suite of industry contracts (commissioning, licensing, collaboration, freelance) and a code of payment practice.
4. Establish a National Creative Talent Registry. Mid-tier technical talent — editors, sound engineers, colourists, and lighting technicians — scored an average accessibility rating of just 2.84 out of 5, with more than four in ten respondents describing such talent as difficult or very difficult to find. The report argues the skills exist, but what is missing is an organised marketplace to surface, verify, and hire them. A national registry of credentialed practitioners, anchored to a skills-training programme for operational roles, is its proposed fix.
5. Create a dedicated financial rail for creative exports. Payment processing and foreign-exchange barriers ranked as the number-one obstacle to exporting Nigerian creative work, even as less than 20% of respondents earn their primary income from international markets. The report calls on the Central Bank of Nigeria and leading financial institutions to develop a remittance and licensing payment corridor for creative exports, with simplified documentation and royalty-compatible payment structures. The world is consuming Nigerian creativity; the plumbing to convert that consumption into creator income does not yet exist.
These recommendations land in a sector of significant and growing economic weight that still suffers from significant unmet ambition.
Speakers at NECLive 2025 put the value of Nigeria’s creative economy at over $4.2 billion annually, while the Federal Government has set a target of growing the sector’s contribution to $100 billion by 2030.
Yet the 2024 National Creative Economy Policy remains under-implemented, and infrastructure gaps, funding limitations, weak intellectual-property protection, and distribution bottlenecks continue to keep Africa from capturing its share of the global creative economy, estimated at $2.25 trillion.
That gap between recognition and structure was the running theme of NECLive 2025 itself, where founder and convener Ayeni Adekunle argued that “the creative industry’s moment of global success must now translate into infrastructure, appropriate policies, and business frameworks.” Keynote speaker Steve Babaeko also declared the era of hustle over and the era of building begun.
