Each March, International Women’s Day fills the calendar with campaigns, flowers, and carefully timed announcements. The day has real historical weight – born from early twentieth century demands for the right to work, vote, and organise. The question it rarely reaches is the one worth asking: not who is being celebrated, but who controls what they have built.

In African creative industries in 2026, that question has instructive answers. They’re economic, not symbolic. And they’re being written by women.

The ownership argument

In Senegal, Diarra Bousso grew up in a home where art and style were a daily language. She went on to study mathematics, worked on Wall Street, and came back to Dakar with a model for a fashion and lifestyle brand: nothing gets made until someone has asked for it.

DIARRABLU, the brand she built from her parents’ rooftop, uses proprietary mathematical algorithms to generate designs, puts them to a community vote before a single garment is cut, and produces entirely on demand – achieving a 60% reduction in waste, and cutting excess stock. Her supply chain is almost entirely Senegalese artisans. The IP – the algorithms, the methodology, the design system – is entirely hers. The value is in Bousso’s process, and the process is owned.

In South Africa, game studio Nyamakop spent years building something hard to copy. Relooted, released last month, is a heist adventure set in a futuristic Johannesburg in which the player recovers 70 real African artefacts from Western museums and private collections. The game was built by a team drawn from more than ten African countries. Mohale Mashigo – its narrative director, a novelist, and comic book writer who has also worked for Marvel and DC – is precise about ownership. Every artefact in the game maps to a real object with a documented history belonging to a named people.

That specificity isn’t just artistic rigour. The world of Relooted is built so it can’t be detached from its own context and repurposed elsewhere. Culture travels differently when it’s self-authored.

In Nigeria, Mo Abudu applies the same logic to distribution. EbonyLife Media – the production house and TV network she founded in 2012, whose films and series have drawn millions of viewing hours – launched EbonyLife ON Plus in November last year. It’s a membership-based platform designed to keep the value of African storytelling on the continent. The platform is new; the strategy is not: own the infrastructure, or someone else sets the terms.

Three countries. Three creative sectors. Find the point in the chain where value is captured. Own it.

Owned but exposed

AI-generated content has intensified the pressure. GenAI models are trained, in large part, on creative output they don’t pay for – and whether that output counts as a compensable input is now being tested in courtrooms and policy chambers. In African creative economies, where the volume of visual, narrative, and cultural material is vast and formal IP infrastructure is uneven, exposure is significant. Women’s creative output is feeding systems they don’t own.

The AI question and the infrastructure question aren’t separate. One is playing out in courtrooms. The other is playing out in markets.

Narrative control

Reaching the right markets requires a different kind of ownership. Africa isn’t a single market. It is 54 distinct countries, each with its own media landscape, languages, cultures, and decision-makers. Many communications partners offer visibility but don’t know the nuances of each market; they’re not present on the ground – so they offer approximation, which costs while the narrative is diluted.

The same logic that drives Bousso to keep her algorithms proprietary, that drove Mashigo and Nyamakop to build a game precisely, that led Abudu to build her own platforms rather than license outward – it applies here too. Who tells the story, in which markets, in whose language, through which channels: this is where narrative control is either held or lost. For brands to reach across Africa, brand communications must be African.

What happens next? 

International Women’s Day will generate thousands of posts this March. It’s worth watching what happens in the days after – whether the women building ownership across African creative industries control more of their work, their distribution, and their narrative than they did the year before. That is the only measure that matters.

This question anchored deliberations at the two-day Airlines, Capital and Connectivity Forum convened in Nairobi on 25–26 February 2026 by the African Development Bank Group in partnership with the African Airlines Association (AFRAA).

Despite strong demand fundamentals, Africa’s aviation sector continues to face structural constraints, including high costs of capital, fragmented regulatory regimes, infrastructure gaps, and limited access to long-term financing. To address these challenges, the Bank is advancing the Integrated Aviation Transformation Program (IATP), a continent-wide platform designed to modernise the aviation ecosystem and mobilise private, institutional, and concessional capital at scale. The programme seeks to align policy reform, innovative financing instruments, and project execution within a single, bankable framework.

The Forum brought together airline executives, transport ministers, regulators, investors, manufacturers, and development partners to explore how the IATP can accelerate coordinated delivery across the sector. Participants underscored aviation’s role as a strategic enabler of regional integration, trade facilitation, tourism, and economic diversification.

Opening the Forum, the Bank’s Director for Infrastructure and Urban Development, Mike Salawou, noted that while Africa’s aviation demand outlook ranks among the strongest globally, supply-side capacity and investment readiness have lagged. The IATP, he said, seeks to de-risk priority investments, support early pilot transactions, and restore confidence among commercial and institutional financiers.

From the industry’s perspective, AFRAA Secretary General Abderahmane Berthé highlighted the scale of the opportunity and the imbalance confronting the continent. “Africa represents nearly 18 percent of the global population but accounts for less than three percent of worldwide air traffic, reflecting structural and regulatory barriers rather than weak demand,” he said.

Remarks delivered on behalf of Kenya Airways described Africa as the largest structural aviation opportunity of the 21st century. Over the next two decades, one in four new global air travellers is expected to originate from Africa, driven by rapid urbanisation, a growing middle-income population, and a youthful demographic profile.

However, the industry’s financial performance remains constrained. According to the International Air Transport Association (IATA), African airlines are projected to generate net margins of only 1–2 percent, below the global average forecast of 3.9 percent in 2026. High fuel costs, heavy taxation, incomplete liberalisation and limited hub infrastructure continue to undermine profitability.

Connectivity remains a critical bottleneck. Intra-African traffic accounts for only about a quarter of total air travel, with many passengers required to transit outside the continent. Participants emphasised that full implementation of the Single African Air Transport Market is essential to unlock efficient intra-continental connectivity.

A keynote address delivered by Eric Ntagengerwa, Head of Transport and Mobility at the African Union Commission (AUC) on behalf of Lerato Dorothy Mataboge, Commissioner for Infrastructure and Energy, framed aviation reform as an imperative for sovereignty, integration, and competitiveness. He observed that the Single African Air Transport Market is the designated African Union Theme for the Year 2027.

Discussions over two days focused on practical delivery, including strengthening airline bankability, advancing climate-aligned aviation, developing cargo and logistics, building skills, and deploying innovative risk-sharing mechanisms under the IATP. Country experiences from Nigeria, Kenya, and Ethiopia illustrated how continental objectives can translate into coordinated national reforms and near-term investment opportunities.

Samuel Obafemi Bajomo, Senior Adviser to Nigeria’s aviation ministry, emphasised that forward-looking, pro-investment policy frameworks are critical to strengthening connectivity and unlocking Africa’s growth potential and positioning aviation as a catalyst for trade, tourism, and shared prosperity.

The Forum concluded with a clear message: Africa’s aviation demand is real, accelerating, and irreversible. The priority now is execution—aligning policy, capital and infrastructure to ensure aviation becomes a durable driver of inclusive growth and regional integration across the continent.

African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) (www.Afreximbank.com) welcomes GCR Ratings’ (“GCR”) latest Rating (https://apo-opa.co/40g6Vd1) action on the Bank, affirming the Bank’s international scale long and short-term issuer ratings of A and A2 respectively. The outlook was revised to “Stable” from “Rating Watch Evolving”.

GCR has also affirmed the international scale long term programme rating on the USD 5 billion Global Medium Term Note (GMTN) Programme of A.

The improved rating reflects GCR’s assessment of a “robust counter-cyclical mandate, underpinned by a strong track record and ongoing preferential creditor treatment (PCT) from shareholders.” South Africa became the latest country to affirm the Bank’s Establishment Treaty and Preferred Creditor Status when it recently signed the Instrument of Accession (https://apo-opa.co/4rdBtqK) to become a full sovereign member of the Bank. The report continued: “The Bank’s solid capitalisation and diversified funding profile provide significant buffers against emerging credit risks.”  The report also acknowledged the Bank’s diverse shareholding base.

The outlook change from “Rating Watch Evolving” to “Stable”, according to GCR, indicates that there is immaterial downside risk related to sovereign debt restructurings.

Commenting on the Rating action, Mr. Chandi Mwenebungu, Managing Director and Group Treasurer, Treasury and Markets at Afreximbank said: “We are delighted that GCR has affirmed its credit rating on the Bank and resolved the outlook to ‘stable’, particularly in the light of recent positive credit developments. We continue to assert that the Bank’s preferred creditor treatment is enshrined in the Bank’s Establishment Agreement, ratified by all member states. It is not a matter of opinion or convention; it is fact.

Mr Mwenebungu continued, “It is also pleasing to note that GCR acknowledges the Afreximbank’s strong liquidity and capitalisation, and resilient risk profile.  This is testament to the Bank’s financial and operational strength and that it has been able to demonstrate firm resolve in the face of continued macro-economic pressures and a challenging environment.”

Afreximbank’s risk management framework was independently assessed in 2025 and registered as complying with international standard ISO 31000:2018 (https://apo-opa.co/4le6xpd), which demonstrates the Bank’s commitment to maintaining best practices in support of  its mandate as the Continent’s leading Trade Finance Institution. The registration, issued by Certification Partner Global (CPG), follows rigorous independent assessments of Afreximbank’s enterprise risk management framework by external auditors, with zero non-conformities.