By Gift ChapiOdekina, Abuja

Research by Harvard University has warned that Africa is failing to capture the economic value of Afrobeats despite the genre’s rapid global expansion, urging urgent policy and structural reforms to prevent the continent from remaining a cultural producer without commensurate financial returns.

The warning dominated discussions at the launch of the 2025 Afrobeats Inaugural Policy Report, produced by Harvard University’s Centre for African Societies and Economies (CSASE).

Presenting key findings, the report’s author, Professor Olufunmilayo Arewa, said Afrobeats has reached a critical turning point, noting that while African creativity drives the genre’s global appeal, ownership, monetisation, and measurement systems are largely controlled outside the continent.

“Afrobeats is a historic triumph of African creativity, but structurally, the global boom is generating income almost everywhere except Africa,” Arewa said.

According to the report, Afrobeats generated an estimated $100 million globally in 2023, fuelled by rapid streaming growth and extensive international touring by Nigerian artists. However, Africa remains the world’s lowest royalty-collecting region, even as music consumption across the continent continues to grow.

The report attributes this imbalance to extractive global industry structures, opaque royalty and contracting systems, weak local data infrastructure, widespread informality, and underdeveloped African touring and live-performance markets.

Arewa explained that Nigeria’s largely informal economy has shaped how music is distributed and monetised. While informality helped expand reach and visibility in the early years, it has also weakened rights enforcement, revenue tracking, and the development of sustainable local systems.

“Informality is not a flaw; it is a factor,” she said, stressing that policy solutions must work with existing realities rather than ignore them.

Speaking at the event, Dr. Toyosi Akerele-Ogunsiji, founder of Rise Interactive Studios, said the roundtable was convened to critically examine Africa’s creative economy and address long-standing structural gaps. She called for stronger intellectual property structures, comprehensive audits of local and global royalty flows, better packaging of African music catalogues for licensing and investment, improved revenue tracking, and reliable data to support evidence-based decision-making by governments, multilaterals, and investors.

The report outlines five priority policy actions, including the development of regional creative-economy regulatory frameworks, strengthening local financial and business ecosystems, building robust African touring and live-performance markets, improving creative-economy data collection and analysis, and establishing African-centred intellectual property and contracting models.

The event brought together academics, policymakers, artists, and industry leaders, reinforcing calls for coordinated action if Africa is to benefit meaningfully from one of its most influential global cultural movements.

The report concludes that Afrobeats represents both a major opportunity and a warning for Africa’s place in the 21st-century cultural economy, raising critical questions about whether the continent can convert global cultural relevance into lasting economic power.

Closing the event, Kike Aluko Wahutu thanked participants and underscored the need for sustained collaboration among policymakers, researchers, and industry stakeholders to build a resilient, inclusive, and sustainable African creative economy.