When the African Export-Import Bank unveiled a $1 billion fund dedicated to African cinema last year, the announcement drew international attention and no small amount of scepticism. A billion dollars for African film? Many have since wondered: where are the movies?
The answer, it turns out, is that they are coming — just not yet.
In May 2025, Afreximbank officially launched the Africa Film Fund through its investment arm, the Fund for Export Development in Africa (FEDA), under the broader Creative Africa Nexus — known as CANEX — initiative. The fund is designed to finance the full spectrum of Africa’s screen industries: feature films, television series, studio infrastructure, and post-production facilities across the continent.
Critically, this is not a grant programme or a government disbursement. It is structured as a private equity investment vehicle, meaning returns are expected over time from successful productions and media assets. Deals are negotiated individually, due diligence takes months, and agreements are rarely announced until they are finalised. That structure explains much of the current silence.
The Work Already Underway:
What is less widely known is that Afreximbank did not arrive at this moment empty-handed. Before the fund’s formal launch, the bank had already assembled a pipeline of creative-sector projects valued at over $600 million, spanning productions from Nigeria, South Africa, and Kenya, many of them already positioned for major streaming platforms. The $1 billion fund is designed to scale those existing investments, not start from zero.
Why You Are Not Hearing Much Yet:
Large-scale development funds of this kind do not move from announcement to visible output overnight. The current phase — running broadly through 2025 and into 2026 — is one of foundation-laying: establishing the fund’s legal structure, raising capital commitments from investors, identifying bankable projects, and building formal partnerships with studios and global streaming platforms.
That is unglamorous work. It rarely generates headlines. But it is the work that determines whether, in three to five years, the continent has a credible, well-capitalised film industry or another ambitious initiative that peaked at the press release.
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The Africa Film Fund sits within CANEX’s wider ambition to unlock the economic potential of Africa’s creative industries — film, music, fashion, art, and sports — by treating them as serious export sectors rather than cultural footnotes. The vision is one of jobs, cultural exchange, and export revenues generated not from raw materials, but from African stories told on African terms and distributed to the world.
Industry analysts have cautiously welcomed the initiative, noting that if executed well, the fund could enable larger-budget productions, solve the continent’s chronic distribution problem, and open the door to more ambitious international co-productions.
The $1 billion Africa Film Fund is real, it is active, and it is structurally sound. The films it finances, the studios it builds, and the careers it enables will be the proof — and that proof is still being assembled, one deal at a time.