There is a peculiarity to the Nigerian creative economy that is easy to observe but hard to fully explain. The country exports culture at scale.
Its music dominates streaming charts from London to Toronto. Its films fill cinemas in diaspora communities across three continents. Its digital creators build followings that run into the tens of millions.
And yet, for most of the people doing this work, wealth has remained frustratingly elusive. The numbers exist, the audiences are real, but the financial returns have never quite matched the cultural weight.
Damilare Adeyemi and Alese Ayomide Salban have known each other for more than fifteen years, childhood friends whose paths through Lagos’s creative and professional worlds eventually converged around the same frustration.
Salban, who studied marketing, had grown tired of watching the Nigerian creator landscape narrow itself into a seemingly endless loop of short-form comedy skits.
Adeyemi, who holds a Master’s in Data Science from the University of Salford and brings experience from the fintech sector, was asking a different but related question: why were creators not building companies?
The more they looked, the more a single answer kept appearing. It was not talent. It was not even money, not entirely. It was structure. The scaffolding that turns creative output into lasting enterprise had simply never been built. And so, in 2025, they founded GAAGA World.
GAAGA World positions itself as something the African creative sector has not seen before: a full-stack creative venture studio.
The distinction matters. Traditional management companies take a commission from what a creator earns. GAAGA World takes a position in what a creator builds. Through revenue-share agreements and IP equity models, the company ties its own returns to the long-term success of the talent it signs. The alignment of interest is deliberate and, its founders argue, fundamental.
The timing is not accidental. The global creator economy is currently valued at approximately $500 billion and growing, according to Goldman Sachs.
Africa’s creative economy, per projections from the African Development Bank, is on course to reach $2.6 trillion by 2030.
Those are the kinds of numbers that attract capital when there is a credible thesis behind them. GAAGA World’s thesis is that the operating layer for this market does not yet exist, and that the company building it will occupy a category of one.
Adeyemi explains the gap in blunt terms. “There is money in this market. There is audience. There is cultural impact. What is missing is the infrastructure to take a share of it.”
“The creators have the influence but they have not had the financing, the production support, or the IP frameworks to convert that influence into long-term wealth. That is what we are building.”
The company’s offering spans talent management and professional career development, venture-style funding through revenue-share and equity agreements, access to studio infrastructure for music, film, and digital production, and brand partnership facilitation.
There is also a creator incubation programme that provides mentorship and digital tools to early-stage talent. No upfront costs to the creator. The capital risk sits with GAAGA World.
On the technology side, an Image Rights Licensing Platform is in development: a proprietary system that would establish a creator’s image and personal brand as a formal, tradeable asset class, drawing inspiration from the royalty structures that already exist in the music industry.
Adeyemi is careful not to overstate where it stands. “It is something we can do in the long run. The structure needs to be right. But the principle is sound.”
Salban’s diagnosis of the wealth gap is structural, not attitudinal. ‘Ten to fifteen years ago, Nigeria was producing more interesting creative content than we are consuming today, and the internet barely existed then,’ he says.
“Now we have smartphones, YouTube, global distribution, and brands willing to pay. And the dominant output is still skits. That tells you the bottleneck is not ideas. It is the environment around the ideas.”
Adeyemi draws a comparison to British content group Sidemen and creators like KSI, whose companies have expanded well beyond content into products, events, and media.
“They built brands. They looked at themselves as businesses. When you look at what most African creators are doing now, that ceiling still feels very far off. Not because the talent is not there. Because the infrastructure is not there. Yet.”
GAAGA World has chosen VVS Lagos ‘Afromodernism’ Week as the setting for its public debut, and the week is well underway.
Running July 5 to 12 across multiple venues in the city, VVS Lagos — now in its fifth edition — has spent years making the case that African creative excellence belongs on a global stage, drawing together fashion designers, artists, filmmakers, technologists, and a growing network of investors and brand partners.
The 2026 theme, Afromodernism, frames the week around the conscious reconstruction of African identities through the tools of the future, held in the soil of the past.
GAAGA World is embedded across the full eight days, with a station at every event. The company has moved through the opening gala, the panel conversations at Alliance Française, the private art collectors’ viewing at Blank Space Oniru, the trunk show at Mikano, and continues through the Future Labs exhibition and talks at Yenwa Gallery and British Council, the film experience, and the flagship runway show and closing party on July 12.
For a venture studio arguing that African creative infrastructure needs to be built from the inside, there is no more fitting place to make that argument than a week that has been doing exactly that in culture.
Nigeria has talent agencies. It has management companies. What it does not have, GAAGA World argues, is a single entity that combines investment capital, professional management, production infrastructure, and technology in a model where the creator retains ownership at the centre.
The long-term vision, as both founders describe it, is to become for African creativity what Y Combinator became for global technology startups: the institution that the continent’s most ambitious creators choose first, because it is built to take their ambitions as seriously as they do. That institution is now open.
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