At a Glance
- Silverbacks Holdings and Helios spotlight Africa’s sports and entertainment as investable frontiers.
- Dedicated creative capital funds can drive structure, scale, and returns across Africa’s cultural industries.
- Partnering locally and creating liquidity pathways can unlock sustained growth in creative assets.
Africa’s investment landscape is expanding beyond traditional sectors. Sports and entertainment, long seen as “soft” markets, are emerging as serious asset classes attracting private equity.
Investors like Ibrahim Sagna’s Silverbacks Holdings and Temitope Lawani’s Helios are proving that with governance and structure, Africa’s creative economy can deliver sustainable, high-value returns.
From sports-tech platforms to streaming ventures, the continent’s creative capital is rewriting how investors view risk, opportunity, and value creation.
Silverbacks’ move into sports-tech and media demonstrates that governance, structure, and exit strategy can turn passion-driven ventures into scalable, profitable platforms.
Africa now needs dedicated creative capital funds, vehicles built to handle longer horizons and blended returns. Partnerships with local operators and regional players can strengthen execution, while creating secondary markets for media and sports assets will unlock liquidity and attract mainstream investors.
Most importantly, storytelling itself is capital. Every successful African sports league, streaming platform, or entertainment brand helps rewrite the global investment narrative, from aid and volatility to youth, innovation, and value creation.
1. Build institutional models, not passion projects
The biggest challenge isn’t the lack of talent or opportunity, it’s the absence of structure. Investors entering Africa’s sports and media ecosystem must institutionalise governance, monetisation, and IP frameworks. Silverbacks Holdings’ approach to building “platform businesses” in sports and entertainment offers a template: start with robust governance, create predictable revenue models, and design exits from day one. Without that, creative investments remain sentiment-driven rather than scalable.
2. Establish dedicated “Creative Capital” funds
Mixing sports and media assets within general private equity portfolios dilutes focus. Africa needs sector-focused funds that recognise the long-tail growth and flexible exits of creative industries. A “Creative Capital Fund” could attract blended finance, DFIs, and ESG-aligned LPs seeking youth employment, innovation, and cultural export exposure. This segmentation allows for tailored investment horizons, acknowledging that building an entertainment ecosystem takes longer than a fintech turnaround.
3. Partner locally, execute regionally
African creative economies are hyper-local. Investors must form Regional Operating Partnerships (ROPs) with credible partners in key markets like Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, and Egypt. Such alliances allow for faster scaling, localised content adaptation, and stronger regulatory engagement — key ingredients for successful expansion in fragmented markets.
4. Create liquidity pathways for creative assets
The absence of exit options keeps many investors away. Developing secondary platforms or structured exit mechanisms could transform sports and media from “illiquid passion plays” into investable products. Collaboration with exchanges, crowdfunding fintechs, or tokenised asset platforms could give investors a clearer line of sight on returns — a move that would de-risk the entire ecosystem.
5. Turn narrative into capital
In creative industries, storytelling is strategy. Investors like Silverbacks Holdings can leverage their media exposure to shape perception, through documentaries, data-driven insights, and global showcases of African innovation.
The result is “narrative capital,”a flywheel that attracts new investors by reframing Africa’s image from aid-dependent to asset-rich.
6. The opportunity ahead
With 60 percent of Africa’s population under 25, sports, entertainment, and media are no longer side stories, they are the infrastructure of identity, influence, and income.
If investment houses like Helios, Silverbacks, and emerging private equity players can merge financial discipline with cultural insight, they will unlock one of the continent’s most durable growth frontiers.
The next generation of African unicorns may not all be fintech startups, some will be sports-tech platforms, music rights managers, and streaming businesses built by investors who saw culture not as risk, but as opportunity.
