Is Now Investable From 340 applications across film, fashion, gaming, design,
publishing and digital media — 50 ventures made it through.
There is a tendency, still, to treat the creative industries as decoration, as something that sits alongside the economy rather than inside it. The announcement of the 50 entrepreneurs selected for Création Africa 2 quietly challenges that assumption. This is not a celebration of culture. It is a calculation.
Backed by the French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs, the Embassy of France to South Africa, Lesotho and Malawi, and the French Institute of South Africa, Création Africa 2 is one of the more serious attempts to formalise and scale creative businesses across the region. It is not a grant programme. It is closer to an investment pipeline, designed to take ideas that are often informal and insert them into systems of capital, mentorship and market access.
From 340 applications, only 50 ventures made it through. That ratio alone signals something. What it signals more precisely is this: the creative economy is no longer just being celebrated. It is being filtered, ranked and, for the first time in meaningful numbers, treated as investable.
Structure Over Sentiment
Création Africa 2 is built around a seven-week intensive mentorship phase beginning in February 2026. This is not light-touch support. Participants enter a structured environment combining business development training, strategic advisory and direct access to investor networks.
Implementation is being driven by UVU Africa through its CAPACITI platform, which focuses on what the organisation calls enterprise readiness. That phrase matters more than it might seem. One of the most persistent failures in creative sector support has been the gap between talent and structure, between the ability to make something and the ability to build a business around it.
“The creative economy sits at the intersection of entrepreneurship, innovation and cultural expression. It is not just about art. It is about jobs, scalability and sustained economic participation.”
Ziyad Cassim, CEO of UVU AfricaCultural and creative industries span film, fashion, gaming, publishing, design and digital media. They generate employment, attract investment and shape how economies present themselves to the world. They also carry narrative power, influencing how countries are positioned globally. France, through this programme, appears to understand that intersection rather well.
From Mentorship to Market
The programme does not end with mentorship. After the initial phase, participants pitch to a panel of judges. Only 15 will advance to a deeper incubation stage running from April to October 2026, and that second phase is where the programme becomes genuinely consequential. Finalists gain access to sector specialists, funding pathways and investor networks. This is where creative ventures begin to resemble scalable enterprises.
The narrowing funnel is deliberate. It reflects an uncomfortable but necessary reality: not every creative idea can scale. But those that can, if properly supported, can become significant economic actors.
A Diverse Cohort, A Shared Constraint
Among those selected is Phafane Nkotsi, founder of Bohlokoa Media Company, representing Lesotho. His inclusion places a local media enterprise within a regional cohort that spans fashion houses, gaming studios, design collectives and digital platforms.
Media businesses in smaller economies operate under compounding constraints: limited advertising markets, fragmented audiences and weak capital access. To position such a business within this pipeline reflects a broader and more accurate understanding of what a scalable cultural enterprise actually looks like.
What connects all these ventures is not only creativity. It is constraint. Capital access remains uneven. Markets are fragmented. Digital and physical infrastructure is inconsistent across countries. And yet the volume and quality of applications points to something real: the pipeline of creative entrepreneurship is expanding even where the ecosystem has not caught up.
The Strategic Case
Policy circles tend to prioritise what is easy to measure: mining, agriculture, manufacturing. Creative industries are harder to tidy up. Their value is often intangible, especially early on. But intangible is not the same as unreal.
Globally, the creative economy has been among the faster-growing sectors. It is labour-intensive, particularly for young people. It is exportable, especially in digital formats. And it carries cultural capital that compounds over time. For economies like Lesotho, which face structural limits in more traditional sectors, the creative economy offers an alternative pathway: not a replacement for what already exists, but a serious complement to it.
A Quiet Signal
It would be easy to file this away as another programme announcement. But something quieter may be underway. The creative economy is being taken seriously, not just rhetorically but structurally. It is being filtered, tested and positioned as a legitimate economic sector.
For Lesotho, participation is a start, not a result. The real measure is whether this exposure produces something tangible: revenue growth, new markets and a sustainable business built inside a constrained domestic economy.
Economies are not built only on what they extract or manufacture.
They are built, too, on what they imagine, create and send into the world.
