A letter · CBA for Africa 2027
The Seventh Programme.
Dear friends,
In 2020 we started something small and called it MBA for Africa. A music business academy, because that was the industry I knew, and because I had spent years watching brilliant African artists sign things they could not read.
Seven years and six programmes later, more than 1,800 people have come through it. They are not a statistic to me. They are at Mavin, at Sony Music Publishing, at ONErpm, at The Orchard, at Audiomack, at YouTube, at Chocolate City. Some run their own companies now. A few of them teach on the programme that trained them.
Somewhere in those six years the thing outgrew its name. Music was never the whole problem. So it became the Creative Business Academy for Africa, and it now covers music, film and fashion.
2027 is the seventh programme, and it is the largest thing we have attempted.
Here is what it actually is, because I would rather be specific than impressive.
It runs for eleven months, from February to December 2027, in English, French, Portuguese and Swahili. We are taking between eight hundred and a thousand students from across the continent.
They will not sit in a classroom and study the industry. They will run one. The oldest schools understood this: you do not learn a craft and then practise it. You practise it, and the practice is the learning. The cohort is divided into twelve Houses, and each House operates three student companies, one for music, one for film, one for fashion. That is thirty-six real companies, each with a named leadership team and four working divisions, and every student holds a seat with their name on it and deliverables attached.
Those thirty-six companies work in service of nine Creative Focus Points: three Musicians, three Creative Producers and three Fashion Designers. Real talents, developed for real.
The output is at least nine finished pieces of work. Three EPs. Three short films. Three fashion collections.
Not nine business plans. Nine things you can listen to, watch and wear.
The shape of the year is simple. February to April, the students learn their School. In May the Creation Camps run: five days of writing, development and design, then ten to fifteen days of execution in the studio, on set and in the atelier, and by the end of that month the work is mixed, mastered and finished. In June the three Schools merge into one cohort. In July the work is released. From July to November they sell it, market it, account for it and live with what the market says back. In December, at the AMEDI Festival in Lagos, they graduate on the same stage where the work is shown.
Some of it will not work. Some companies will miss their numbers and some releases will land quietly. We will publish that too, because a programme that only shows you its winners is not telling you anything. A student who has failed once, safely and in public, with a team around them, is harder to frighten for the rest of their career. That is not a risk of the model. It is the point of it.
Registration is open now. It opened on 31 August. If you are a young African who wants to build the business behind the art rather than wait to be discovered by it, the door is open at cbaforafrica.org.
And if you are reading this from a brand, a foundation, an embassy or a newsroom, there is a version of this that involves you. We need partners: to fund scholarships through the Beneficiaries Fund and the Women's Fund, to seed the nine capstone projects, to hire the graduates, to tell the story properly.
We announce our 2027 partners in November, at CBA for Africa Week in Lagos. On a stage, in front of the incoming cohort and the people who will employ them. If you want to be one of those announcements, now is the moment to talk to me.
Twenty-five years ago somebody let me stand on a stage before I had earned it. Everything since has been an attempt to return the favour at scale.
Whatever I gather, I plant in the next generation.
The journey continues.
Everything about the programme, including registration, lives at cbaforafrica.org →