We are building the business behind African creativity. Not the next star — the executives, founders and operators who develop the star, release the work and make sure it pays.
We began as the Music Business Academy — the training ground for the people who run the rooms behind African music. Over five years we trained 1,500+ managers, A&Rs, marketers and founders, and educated more than 12,000 creatives across the continent.
For 2027 we’ve become the Creative Business Academy for Africa. The mission is the same; the canvas is bigger. We now build the business of three industries at once — Music, Film & Fashion — because the discipline that turns talent into an enterprise is the same in every creative field.
Business professionals developed across five cohorts of the academy.
Music on DSPs, a film premiered, a collection launched — to real audiences.
You finish on a stage at the AMEDI showcase with a body of work that’s yours.
Faculty, partners and 1,500+ alumni across the continent and diaspora.
The manager who closed the deal. The A&R who heard it first. The marketer who made the world care. The lawyer who made sure they got paid. Those people are rare — and they’re who Africa’s creative economy is desperate for.
CBA for Africa builds that business — and that business could be you.
Ten months operating a real creative enterprise, not a case study.
Creatives reached through open programmes, in four languages.
Real companies started by our alumni across the continent
Music, Film & Fashion — one academy, one ecosystem.
Africa’s creative economy is worth an estimated $58 billion — and growing faster than almost any sector on the continent. What it lacks is not talent. It is the business-literate people who can build enterprises around that talent.
Every great artist, director and designer stands on a business someone built. That business is a discipline — and it can be taught.
A $58B economy runs on managers, producers and operators who are rare across Africa. Demand for them far outstrips supply.
To build a generation of business-literate creative professionals who turn African talent into lasting, exportable enterprise.
Ten months built to make you the operator, not the act. You specialise, you integrate, you execute — and you finish having run a real creative company end to end.
Two months of deep craft inside your School — Music, Film or Fashion — learning the business of your chosen industry.
Three months of the shared Integrated Core — ventures, finance, IP, reputation, data and pan-African trade across all three Schools.
Five months running your company — develop the talent, release real work to real audiences, and present to the showcase stage.
The core idea: our students are the business professionals, not the talent. You don’t come to CBA to be discovered — you come to build the enterprise that discovers, develops and releases others.
CBA for Africa is delivered by CIIFA Limited — the Creative Industries Initiative for Africa — together with the Creative Talent Foundation, based in Lagos, Nigeria. Together they exist to build the infrastructure African creativity has always deserved.
The academy is Phase 1 of a wider “Creative Metropolis” vision — a long-term plan to build the institutions, enterprises and physical spaces that power the continent’s creative economy. CBA is where it starts: with the people.
Creative Industries Initiative for Africa — the academy’s parent institution.
The non-profit arm is widening access to creative business education.
Pan-African and diaspora in reach; Lagos-based at heart.
CBA is Phase 1 of a wider vision for African creative infrastructure.
CBA for Africa is led by operators who have spent their careers building the business of African creativity.
Founder & CEO
Founder of CIIFA and the driving force behind the academy. A veteran of the African music and creative industries, Godwin built CBA to close the gap he saw again and again: extraordinary talent, and too few people equipped to build the business around it.
Programme Director
Leads the design and delivery of the academy end to end — curriculum, faculty and the student experience. Elizabeth turns the CBA model into a working programme that runs across three Schools, twelve Houses and four languages.
Our faculty are practitioners, not lecturers — managers, producers, marketers, lawyers and founders working today across Music, Film & Fashion. You learn the business from the people currently running it.
Working executives and founders across the three Schools lead the core teaching — bringing live deals, real numbers and current playbooks into the room.
Leading international companies — among them The Orchard and Sony Music — contribute masterclasses and connect students to the wider global industry.
Specialist practitioners run hands-on workshops and craft camps, so learning is applied to the real work students are shipping that year.
Pan-African & diaspora. Faculty and partners span the continent and the diaspora, all anchored to a Lagos-based academy — so students build a network that is both deeply African and genuinely global.
Registrations for the 2027 cohort are open. Ten months that change your career start here.
