First announced in Cairo in late 2023, relaunched in Algiers, “launched” in Kigali and finally given a manager in July 2026, Afreximbank’s pan-African film fund still carries the same headline figure: one billion dollars. The reality behind it is more fragile. The capital has yet to be raised. The manager has no public track record in fund management. The market’s cinema revenues are counted in millions. And the lender behind it has had its credit standing challenged.
On 8 July 2026, in Cairo, Afreximbank announced that One Street Studios had been appointed co-general partner of the Pan-African Film Fund. The announcement came through FEDA, the Fund for Export Development in Africa, which is the bank’s impact investment arm. Parts of the US entertainment press reported it as the official launch of a billion-dollar fund.
The bank’s own statement is more careful. It describes a fund that aims to mobilise “up to” $1bn. The distinction matters. In private equity, a fund only exists financially once it reaches a first close, when investors sign binding commitments. None of the communications published since 2025 discloses how much has been raised, who the investors are, or how much FEDA itself will contribute.
On paper, the scope is broad. The fund is meant to invest in production, studios, post-production, distribution, streaming platforms and cinemas. It will use a mix of equity, quasi-equity and structured financing, and will prioritise export-oriented projects. Afreximbank’s president, George Elombi, sees it as a way to “produce what we consume and consume what we produce”.
A promise in four acts
The story starts earlier than most people think. In November 2023, at the CANEX summit held in Cairo alongside the Intra-African Trade Fair, Afreximbank executive vice-president Kanayo Awani announced a $1bn film fund, promised for 2024. She said the first film financed by the bank had just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. She added that several Nigerian, South African and Kenyan productions were expected on streaming platforms in 2024.
In October 2024, in Algiers, the bank announced plans to set up a dedicated private equity film fund through FEDA. At the same time, it doubled its creative industries financing window again, to $2bn over three years. That window had already grown from $500m in 2020 to $1bn in 2022.
On 7 May 2025, in Kigali, the “Africa Film Fund” was officially launched, still described as “up to $1bn”. Hollywood lent its support: actress Viola Davis and actor Boris Kodjoe both welcomed the initiative.
Fourteen months later, the fund, renamed in the meantime, finally has a manager. The leadership had also changed. Benedict Oramah was president of the bank at the Kigali launch, and Marlene Ngoyi was running FEDA. The July 2026 announcement was signed by George Elombi and by FEDA’s new chief executive, Emmanuel Assiak.
FEDA’s size puts the ambition in perspective. In 2022, the subsidiary announced a first close of $670m across four investment strategies, with a target of $1.3bn by 2024. By May 2025, it reported just over $590m invested across all sectors. If the film fund reached its target, it would be larger than the parent fund’s entire first close. It therefore depends on outside capital, which has yet to be secured.
A manager chosen for its address book
One Street Studios describes itself as a “fully funded” studio that finances, develops and produces content, bringing project financing, publishing and screen adaptation under one roof. Its head, Lavaille Lavette, is now chief executive of the fund. She co-founded JVL Media with Viola Davis and Davis’s husband, Julius Tennon. Her background is primarily in publishing, as a bestselling publisher and author, and in social enterprise: she co-founded a petrol station linked to a literacy programme.
Marie Lora-Mungai is a consultant specialising in Africa’s creative industries. She says she helped design the fund’s original structure alongside PwC Nigeria. In her industry newsletter Hustle & Flow, she writes that neither Lavette nor One Street Studios has a public track record in film finance or fund management. She also points out that Davis’s own productions, including The Woman King, go through a separate company, JuVee Productions.
In her view, Afreximbank was betting less on fund-management expertise than on access to diaspora networks and “Black Hollywood” capital, which the films will need if they are to travel. She attributes the slow start not to any lack of commitment from the bank, but to the difficulty of finding enough bankable films at a time of very tight distribution.
One detail of her analysis deserves attention. She calls the vehicle a debt fund, in which “the money has to come back”. The official communication refers to a mix of equity, quasi-equity and structured financing. The Algiers announcement spoke of private equity. For a producer, the difference is anything but theoretical. A loan must be repaid whether or not the film succeeds, whereas an equity stake shares the risk.
One governance question goes unaddressed in the press releases. One Street Studios is both co-manager of the fund and a production company. What rules will govern investments in projects developed or produced by the manager itself? No conflict-of-interest policy, standard in any institutional fund, has been made public so far.
A market still measured in millions
Nigeria, the obvious showcase for this bet, illustrates the gap. According to FilmOne Entertainment’s box office data, cinema revenues in Anglophone West Africa (Nigeria, Ghana and Liberia) hit a record ₦15.6bn in 2025, roughly $10.4m. That was up almost 35% on the previous year. For the first time, Nollywood overtook Hollywood, with 49.4% of takings against 48.8%. The symbolism is strong, but the scale is modest: the fund’s target is nearly a hundred times those annual revenues.
The record also hides weaknesses. The market sold 2.79m tickets across 122 cinemas. Four films accounted for around 40% of Nollywood’s gross, and Lagos alone generated more than half of all box office revenue. Revenues have tripled since 2021, but admissions have not. Growth is being driven by ticket prices, in an economy where the naira has lost more than 70% of its value against the dollar since 2019.
At continental level, the figures Afreximbank quotes come from a 2021 UNESCO report. It estimated the sector at 5m jobs and a $5bn contribution to GDP, with potential for more than 20m jobs and $20bn. That is a potential, dependent on removing structural barriers, not a trajectory. The bank also presents the $5bn as “annual revenues”, whereas UNESCO referred to a contribution to GDP; the two are not the same thing.
The same report found one cinema screen for every 787,402 people, making Africa the most underserved continent in the world. Piracy absorbs between half and more than three-quarters of the sector’s revenue. Only 19 of 54 countries offer financial support to filmmakers. At the Kigali launch, the bank itself cited fewer than 2,000 screens across the entire continent.
Shrinking exit routes
A fund that expects to be repaid needs paying buyers. By prioritising exports, it relies on international ones. Yet the landscape has turned since the fund was designed.
In early 2024, Prime Video stopped commissioning original productions in sub-Saharan Africa. Netflix then made clear it would no longer commission Nigerian films, although it would keep licensing them. In March 2026, Canal+, now the owner of MultiChoice, announced the closure of Showmax, effective 30 April. The platform had posted trading losses of R4.9bn in the year to March 2025. The French group is now returning to pay-TV basics and commissioning films on television budgets, such as the ten-film slate ordered from Flying Whale, a label of Anakle Films.
The door is not closed. South Africa’s Heart of the Hunter became the first African film to top Netflix’s global chart. Nigeria’s Everybody Loves Jenifa was released in cinemas in more than thirty countries. But these successes remain exceptions: the global market rewards a handful of titles, not volume.
A lender under scrutiny
The fund is also arriving at a delicate moment for its sponsor. In June 2025, Fitch cut Afreximbank’s rating to BBB-, the lowest investment grade. It put the bank’s non-performing loan ratio at 7.1%, against the 2.44% reported by the bank. In January 2026, Fitch downgraded the bank to junk (BB+), then withdrew its rating altogether.
At issue was the agreement reached in late 2025 on a $750m loan to Ghana. Fitch saw it as evidence that the bank had not benefited from its preferred creditor status. Afreximbank cut ties with the agency, and the African Union’s African Peer Review Mechanism criticised what it called a flawed classification of the loans. The bank retains investment-grade ratings from Moody’s (Baa2) and S&P (BBB+). At the end of 2025, it reported more than $48.5bn in assets and contingencies, and $8.4bn in shareholder funds.
The link to cinema is indirect but real. An analyst at Pangea-Risk warned that higher funding costs could push the bank to pass them on to borrowers or to scale back new lending. And persuading private investors to commit to an asset class as risky as film, alongside a sponsor whose preferred creditor status is being questioned, is no easy task.
Who is the billion for?
That leaves the question producers are asking. Nigerian outlet YNaija puts it bluntly: private equity logic targets established production groups and distribution networks, not the director holding a script. Another benchmark fund on the continent, the $40m Next Narrative Africa Fund, requires budgets of between $1m and $5m. That is far above the cost of a typical independent Nigerian film.
In December 2025, an editorial in BusinessDay echoed complaints heard at the AFRIFF festival in Lagos. For many creators, it said, the money “exists more in press releases than in production budgets”. Nigeria’s public schemes have been similarly slow. The ₦5bn Creative Fund, managed through Providus Bank, had disbursed only ₦1.5bn by May 2024, to four producers.
And what about Francophone Africa? Afreximbank does have a regional office in Cameroon. But with a US-based manager and a focus on the Anglophone diaspora, it remains unclear whether the fund will reach projects from Central and Francophone West Africa. Film economics there often rely on other sources: European co-productions, public funds and television channels.
What to watch
The fund could succeed. Covering the entire value chain, from post-production to cinemas, addresses real bottlenecks, and bridging the continent and its diaspora makes economic sense.
But a billion announced is not a billion invested. A few indicators will show whether the promise becomes an industry. The first is the size of the first close and the identity of its investors, followed by FEDA’s own commitment. Next come the size of the tickets and the eligibility criteria, the rules governing the co-manager’s conflicts of interest, and finally the first investments and their amounts. Until those figures are public, the billion remains what it has been for nearly three years: a target.
Key figures
- Up to $1bn: the Pan-African Film Fund’s fundraising target, not available capital.
- $670m: FEDA’s first close in 2022, across all strategies.
- $10.4m: 2025 box office in Anglophone West Africa (Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia).
- 1 screen per 787,402 people: cinema density in Africa, according to UNESCO (2021).
- 7.1% vs 2.44%: Afreximbank’s non-performing loan ratio according to Fitch, and according to the bank.
