Forum Creation Africa Lagos: French Diplomacy at its best
When over 1,000 creators, entrepreneurs, diplomats and cultural leaders descended on Lagos from October 16 to 18, 2025, the city became something more than a conference venue. It transformed into a laboratory for what happens when Africa finally starts telling its own wealth creation story. Even if Forum Création Africa is organized by France's Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs in partnership with MansA (Maison des Mondes Africains), it is a genuine platform to advance the conversation on the future of Africa’s cultural and creatives industires. That platform wasn't just another cultural gathering. It was a decisive moment in the ongoing conversation about what happens when African creativity becomes economic strategy rather than just artistic expression.
The Mansa legacy: from pilgrimage to platform
There's something poetic in the naming. MansA takes inspiration from Mansa Musa, the legendary 14th-century emperor of Mali. Remember him? The richest man who ever lived, so wealthy that his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324 literally reshaped gold markets across the Mediterranean and Middle East. His influence echoes through every corner of the contemporary African creative conversation, where we're still grappling with how to position African goods and services as premium offerings rather than budget alternatives.
The parallel is intentional. Mansa Musa traveled with 60,000 people and 100 camels laden with gold. His journey wasn't about scarcity, it was about demonstrating abundance, sophistication, and the power of African wealth systems. Today, MansA operates as a cultural institution in Paris, a living bridge between Africa and the world, ensuring that this conversation about value, heritage, and economic transformation happens not in whispers but in the strongest possible voice.This same institution curated the Lagos forum, transforming it into something that felt less like a charity or sympathy initiative and more like a reckoning. A gathering of equals.
What happened in those three days
The conversations that unfolded across the Federal Palace Hotel's conference halls were remarkably candid. They weren't the polished speeches you expect at major forums. Instead, they were rigorous, sometimes uncomfortable, and deeply practical. Here is a recap of the few we attended and participate to with questions or insights.
AI and African Fashion: complexity over convenience
One thread that fascinated many participants explored artificial intelligence's role in African creative industries. Facilitator Selly Raby Kane led a detailed session examining how AI could reshape fashion, from virtual sampling that dramatically reduces waste, to design tools that democratize creativity for artisans lacking formal training.
But the conversation never became utopian. Instead, participants wrestled with real tensions: efficiency versus intention, access versus authorship, and the constant risk of AI flattening cultural specificity into generic "African" aesthetics.
Studios from across the continent shared practical examples. One from Lesotho demonstrated how AI accelerates complex cultural design work. The Matoha app shows AI sorting fabric composition, detecting polyester and cotton percentages, enabling waste mapping that transforms production processes. NamLab in Nairobi uses 3D digital samples to eliminate costly physical sampling before actual production. These aren't theoretical benefits; they're operational realities reducing costs and environmental impact.
Yet the deeper concern surfaced repeatedly: cultural ownership. When AI can generate a kente pattern in seconds, or when a digital model replicates Black aesthetics, the stakes shift from tools to protection. Ghana's recent GI (Geographical Indication) protection for Kente represents a crucial precedent, moving from passive observation to active ownership. Practitioners emphasized the need to shift from generic "African" labels to specific cultural attribution: Ashanti, Yoruba, Dogon. Precision protects.
One participant shared a decisive insight: with over 70 percent custom dataset control, ownership can be proven and licensed. The formula involves prompt detail, personal references, style combinations, and color signatures, markers that transform AI from a threat to authenticity into an amplifier of it.
The structural reality check
A second major thread cut through the conference with uncomfortable clarity: African creative industries are paralyzed by structural gaps, not talent gaps.
A participant summarized the Nigerian reality bluntly: the sector is largely informal, with fewer than five technical colleges for film, an education budget under 5 percent of overall spending, and apprenticeship-based training that builds hands but rarely critical thinking. The diagnosis wasn't new, but the willingness to name it plainly felt significant.
The gaps aren't mysterious. They're documented. Supply chains remain fragile—designers do all functions themselves, limiting scalability. Wholesale models are weak; consignment prevails, pushing risk onto creators. Digital adoption lags despite the presence of tech hubs. Senegal's story is telling: a gap between tech and fashion communities reflects mutual biases. Tech approaches problems with solutions; fashion builds collaboratively and conceptually. Two different languages.
Yet the conversation shifted when financing entered the room. Kiva Fund's model—offering debt, grants, lease-to-own arrangements, and LPO financing—isn't revolutionary, but it's functional. Require three years of operation, organized accounting, and a separate business bank account, and suddenly microcredit becomes accessible.
More revealing: the ecosystem fatigue with training. Multiple founders noted that what creators need most isn't another masterclass. It's capital. It's distribution. It's access to retailers who will stock their work at sustainable margins.
From incubation to wealth creation
The final thread connecting all others focused on a harder question: What actually scales African creativity into sustainable wealth?
Mr.Aigboge AIG-IMOUKHEDE, Chairman of the France-Nigeria Business Council, in a conversation moderated by Marie Lora-Mungai, reframed the entire conversation. He described himself as a "failed artist"—someone who left design and architecture for finance out of necessity. His insight: success doesn't start with beauty. It starts with the consumer.
His challenge to creators: Remove your product, and do users fight to get it back? If not, the idea doesn't have market weight yet. This consumer-validation lens revealed something striking across the forum. Most African creative entrepreneurs optimize for authenticity, heritage, and personal vision, all crucial. But they often underestimate the secondary layer: business acumen, team collaboration, clear KPIs, and ruthless clarity on impact.
Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't put in the work. Expect ten years to stability. Build a team and own part of something great rather than all of something small. These weren't sentimental statements; they were business principles spoken by someone who'd seen the difference between artistic passion and commercial durability.
The wealth creation framework that emerged felt like the conference's real takeaway. Three interlocking pillars: Knowledge (intellectual capacity and creative output), Finance (capital, hard assets, and resources), and Culture (the lived experience—food, music, art, community). Historically, Africa was strong in all three. The past two centuries saw that strength fragmented. The forum's implicit task: reassemble them intentionally.
The subtext: Africa stops asking permission
What struck many participants wasn't the individual sessions but the cumulative tone. The forum operated from an assumption that might sound simple but felt revolutionary: African creativity is an inevitable global force.
President Macron's virtual address positioned it explicitly. Lagos isn't a recipient of French cultural diplomacy; it's a hub generating it. Nigeria's Minister of Art, Culture, and Creative Economy framed it as Africa's "Destination 2030", not as aspiration but as inevitability.
MansA's Director-General Elisabeth Gomis spoke of the forum as a "shared tool" for stimulating discussion and enabling new stories to emerge. The language shifted from "supporting African creators" to "creating conditions where African creativity sets the terms."
This reframing matters. For decades, the narrative was: How do we help African creators access global markets? Lagos suggested a different question: How do we ensure African creativity shapes what global markets become?
The link to "Made in Africa"
This is where our Chronicles piece on pricing and positioning becomes essential context. We wrote about the persistent perception that African goods are expensive—overpriced for what they are. Mansa Musa's legacy sits opposite that narrative: African wealth, African luxury, African abundance.
Lagos confirmed what that piece argued: the problem isn't that Made in Africa goods are expensive. The problem is that Africa hasn't yet fully claimed the authority to define what premium means.
An artisanal t-shirt from Dakar might cost three to five times more than a mass-produced import. The forum's conversations suggested that gap isn't a market failure—it's a communication failure. We haven't yet built the systems, narratives, and retail structures that allow consumers to understand what they're actually buying: patient process, ancestral know-how, sustainable production, rarity, and authenticity.
When China and Portugal compete on price, they win through scale and optimization. When Africa competes, it should win through something different: irreplaceable cultural specificity, heritage that can't be replicated, and the story of a continent reasserting its creative voice. Our research project is still ongoing, learn more about it here www.moonlook.africa/insights
Jean-Noël Barrot, french minister of foreign Affairs visits the Lagos x Paris Pop up at Forum Creation Africa
What comes next
The forum concluded but its implications are ongoing. Multiple partnerships were announced. Training programs are launching. Capital is being mobilized. But the deeper work—the one that matters most, is structural.
It's building educational systems that teach business alongside craft. It's creating financing mechanisms that trust creator-entrepreneurs enough to offer capital without requiring ten years of audited accounts. It's designing distribution systems that reward specificity rather than volume. It's protecting cultural assets through legal mechanisms that go beyond international IP norms to honor communal ownership.
It's establishing Lagos, Dakar, Accra, Cape Town, and Cotonou not as emerging design capitals but as inevitable ones.
Three days in Lagos didn't solve these challenges. But they clarified what solving them actually requires: not sympathy or support, but structured excellence, intentional capital, and the absolute conviction that African creativity is non-negotiable to the future of global culture.
That conviction, finally, felt like it had landed not as aspiration but as fact.
This article draws on conversations, sessions, and insights from Forum Création Africa 2025, held October 16-18 in Lagos. The forum brought together over 1,000 participants across creative industries, with particular focus on fashion, digital media, music, gaming, and immersive technologies. More about the programming https://forumcreationafrica.fr