First founded in 2020, our goal at ASP is a simple one: to leverage the awesome (soft) power of the continent’s creative and cultural industries to propel economic growth at home, internationally, and by building bridges with wider communities around the world.
After working for many years in media tech, including as the MD of Spinlet, which at the time was Africa’s largest homegrown music streaming app, I began to realise the huge potential that these sectors had to offer, if only they could attract the right levels of engagement – and investment.
Today, we live in a world where African culture has gone mainstream, as exemplified earlier this year when Burna Boy had a packed-out Madison Square Garden eating out the palm of his hand! We want to celebrate that success, but also build on it, bringing more African creative and cultural pursuits into the mainstream, and helping to fuel the digital and knowledge economies of tomorrow on a global level.
A key part of ASP’s initial two year programme has been to establish May as ‘Africa Month’. There are already celebrations like Black History Month in February in the US, or October in the UK, and that’s great because they champion the diaspora community. But when we are thinking in terms of global blackness, the continent of Africa still gets left behind, and so we seek to paint a modern, accurate picture of what the continent is about today – and that cultural narrative of course, is best told by our creative industries!
