Google has partnered with Idris Elba’s Akuna Group on a program worth more than $1 million to bring AI tools and digital skills training to African creators, the company announced Wednesday at its first Africa Cloud Summit in Johannesburg.
As reported by Business Insider Africa, the initiative is expected to reach about 100,000 creators across Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, Kenya, and Sierra Leone.
The program will train underrepresented African creators in AI-powered storytelling and give them access to Google’s Gemini AI assistant and other digital tools. Google’s SVP for Research and Technology, James Manyika, framed the effort around cost. “We think about all those creatives who don’t have access to these enormous studio budgets,” he said in a statement. “AI is potentially a tool that can enable them to do work that they couldn’t otherwise do because they don’t have huge budgets.”
Elba, who has increasingly positioned himself as an investor in Africa’s creative economy, pointed to access rather than talent as the industry’s core constraint. “The barrier is not a lack of vision, it’s a lack of access,” he said during a video call at the summit. “Talent is everywhere; opportunity is not.” His Akuna Wallet will also support cross-border payments for creators through the program.
Access to Capital Remains the Sector’s Central Problem
The program lands against a backdrop of well-documented funding gaps for African creators. Research from Communiqué and TM Global found that only 4.2% of creators surveyed across Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, and Egypt have received institutional investment, with 54.2% saying they lack access to investors altogether. More than half reported never having received external funding, and six in ten earn less than $100 per month from their creative work.
That report also found African creators typically earn under $1 per 1,000 views on platforms such as YouTube, compared with $3 to $10 in the United States and Europe, a disparity that pushes many creators to build audiences abroad even as local monetization tools lag.
Against that gap, a program aimed at lowering production costs through AI access, rather than providing direct capital, targets a different point in the same constraint: creators who can produce more with less may need less funding to begin with, even as the institutional investment gap the report identified remains unaddressed.
Google’s initiative follows other regional efforts to address the funding side directly, including Chude Jideonwo’s $500,000 Fourth Mainland Creator Fund and Nigeria-based Endow’s roughly $8,600 Creator Fund, both launched in the second half of 2025.
Dragomir is a Serbian freelance blog writer and translator. He is passionate about covering insightful stories and exploring topics such as influencer marketing, the creator economy, technology, business, and cyber fraud.
Google has partnered with Idris Elba’s Akuna Group on a program worth more than $1 million to bring AI tools and digital skills training to African creators, the company announced Wednesday at its first Africa Cloud Summit in Johannesburg.
As reported by Business Insider Africa, the initiative is expected to reach about 100,000 creators across Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, Kenya, and Sierra Leone.
The program will train underrepresented African creators in AI-powered storytelling and give them access to Google’s Gemini AI assistant and other digital tools. Google’s SVP for Research and Technology, James Manyika, framed the effort around cost. “We think about all those creatives who don’t have access to these enormous studio budgets,” he said in a statement. “AI is potentially a tool that can enable them to do work that they couldn’t otherwise do because they don’t have huge budgets.”
Elba, who has increasingly positioned himself as an investor in Africa’s creative economy, pointed to access rather than talent as the industry’s core constraint. “The barrier is not a lack of vision, it’s a lack of access,” he said during a video call at the summit. “Talent is everywhere; opportunity is not.” His Akuna Wallet will also support cross-border payments for creators through the program.
The announcement comes alongside Google surpassing its five-year, $1 billion investment target in Africa, a milestone tied to broader cloud, AI, and connectivity commitments, including a new applied AI lab in Ghana and a planned connectivity hub in South Africa’s Eastern Cape.
Access to Capital Remains the Sector’s Central Problem
The program lands against a backdrop of well-documented funding gaps for African creators. Research from Communiqué and TM Global found that only 4.2% of creators surveyed across Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, and Egypt have received institutional investment, with 54.2% saying they lack access to investors altogether. More than half reported never having received external funding, and six in ten earn less than $100 per month from their creative work.
That report also found African creators typically earn under $1 per 1,000 views on platforms such as YouTube, compared with $3 to $10 in the United States and Europe, a disparity that pushes many creators to build audiences abroad even as local monetization tools lag.
Against that gap, a program aimed at lowering production costs through AI access, rather than providing direct capital, targets a different point in the same constraint: creators who can produce more with less may need less funding to begin with, even as the institutional investment gap the report identified remains unaddressed.
Google’s initiative follows other regional efforts to address the funding side directly, including Chude Jideonwo’s $500,000 Fourth Mainland Creator Fund and Nigeria-based Endow’s roughly $8,600 Creator Fund, both launched in the second half of 2025.
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