It has been a busy few weeks for Osahon Akpata, CEO of CANEX Creations Inc. (CCInc), the Cairo-based intellectual property investment and holding company shaking up film finance across Africa with support for features such as Cannes and TIFF-selected feature Clarissa.
After a short hop to the South of France for French President Macron’s Lumière Summit in September, Akpata headed to the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) to host the inaugural African Global Hub within the new market.
It marked his second trip to the festival under the CCInc banner after he attended last year with Idris Elba’s short film Dust to Dreams, which was one of the company’s first investments.
The hub at TIFF was CCInc’s biggest international non-African outing to date, after a strong presence in Cannes with Arie and Chuko Esiri’s Directors’ Fortnight-selected first feature Clarissa. The drama, transposing Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel ‘Mrs Dalloway’ to contemporary Nigeria with a cast led by Sophie Okonedo and David Oyelowo, also screened in TIFF.
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Hub highlights, says Akpata, included an industry screening of Marie-Hélène Roux’s Angelina Jolie-executive produced biopic Muganga: The One Who Treats, starring Isaach De Bankolé as Congolese doctor Denis Mukwege who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018 for his work treating and female victims of war time sexual violence as well as campaigning for justice at the risk of his own life.
Mukwege participated in a talk at the end of the screening alongside David Oyelowo and The Walking Dead and Black Panther actress Danai Gurira.
CCInc came to the rescue of the French-Belgian co-production, lead produced by Paris-based Petites Poupées Production, at the post-production stage to fill a gap in the budget. The special TIFF industry screening was aimed at giving an international sales boost to the title, which was released in France and Belgium last year, but has yet to release theatrically in other markets.
“The reception for Muganga was extraordinary. Watching more than 400 people experience the film and then welcome Dr. Denis Mukwege for a conversation moderated by Afua Hirsch, featuring David Oyelowo, Danai Gurira and director Marie-Hélène Roux, reinforced our conviction that this is a powerful story capable of travelling well beyond its origins,” says Akpata.
Other hub highlights included a showcase of six African works-in-progress including The Black Book 2: Old Scores, Nollywood director and producer Editi Effiong’s sequel to his 2023 breakout action thriller The Black Book; Lagos Fashion Week documentary Last Week in October by Nosarieme Garrick and homecoming drama Not God’s Plan by South African director Reabetswe Moeti-Vogt who previously made waves with Lockdown.
Akpata also cites a panel titled ‘Closing the Gap’ and looking at how Africa can move beyond celebrating African stories to financing and distributing them sustainably.
He was joined on stage by Janet Brown, Chief Commercial Officer of Tribeca Enterprises and formerly President of Global Content Sales at BBC Studios; Ethiopian-Canadian producer Tamara Dawit, Founder of Gobez Media and Co-Head of Studies of the EAVE Producers Workshop; and Adekunle Adebiyi of MBO Capital, the Lagos-based private equity and investment firm which has invested in Nollywood films such The Wedding Party 2, Moms at War, and New Money.
MBO Capital was also a partner on the hub alongside Nigerian film companies FilmOne Limited and Natives Filmworks as well as South Africa’s Gambit Films, which is known internationally for its partnership with Netflix and shows such as Unseen, Blood and Water and Blood Legacy and action thriller Indemnity.
“The objective was never visibility for its own sake. We wanted to put compelling African projects and filmmakers in front of buyers, distributors, financiers and other decision-makers,” says Akpata.
“The hub was consistently active, the works-in-progress screenings drew strong interest, our financing and distribution panel was well attended, and more than 400 people attended our special screening of Muganga. The audience response was remarkable; you could feel the emotional impact of the film in the room, particularly when Dr. Mukwege joined us afterwards. The next step is converting that engagement into commercial outcomes.”
What is CANEX Creations Inc.?
Intellectual property investment and holding company CCInc is a subsidiary of the Fund for Export Development in Africa (FEDA), which in turn is the development investment arm of the Cairo-based African Export–Import Bank, also known as Afreximbank.
Akpata was hired in April 2024 to build CCInc and was then made its CEO in September, 2025. The Nigerian banking veteran previously held positions at pan-African institution Ecobank and consultancy firm McKinsey and Company, after a degree in Accounting and Finance from Nottingham Trent University in the UK and a MBA in Media Management from Columbia. He says taking up the post was a natural move because creativity has always been part of his life.
“I started writing very young and published my first book when I was 11. I later produced the documentary Nollywood in Focus, and for much of the past 15 years I have worked on creative projects alongside my corporate career, including Iké Udé’s Nollywood Portraits and Amazing Graces,” he says, referring to the celebrated portrait projects by Nigerian New York-based photographer Udé.
“What changed was the opportunity to bring those two sides of my life together. My career in finance, consulting and corporate leadership taught me how capital is allocated, businesses are built and markets develop. My creative work showed me how much extraordinary talent and intellectual property can remain undervalued when the commercial infrastructure around it is weak,” he continues.
“That is what makes CCInc personally compelling to me. At my core, I am a creative person who also happens to understand business. I care deeply about proving that creativity can generate both cultural impact and commercial value and about building the structures that allow African creators and investors to participate meaningfully in that value.”
On the rationale behind the creation of CCInc, Akpata explains how it is part of Afreximbank’s wider push to get behind Africa’s creative industries.
“Afreximbank is a development finance institution. It’s been around for 33 years and has about $42 billion of assets under management. It’s mostly known for trade finance, but about six years ago, they decided that they were going to intervene in the creative industries,” he explains.
“Now you might ask why? Well, pretty much because they have a development mandate, and they were looking at what the possibilities and the demographics were of the continent. The median age is 19 and a half. It’s a very young population, and it happens that the creative sector is employing more people than any other industry in the age range of between 15 and 29.”
Research by the bank, he says, revealed that Africa’s contribution to global revenues in the creative and cultural industries was between two and three percent.
“Global revenues at the time were around $2.5 trillion. The bank was like, ‘Okay, how can we do something about increasing our share of the contribution to the global revenues and increase the opportunities and jobs that are there for young people by doing so? How can we intervene?,” says Akpata.
The answer was a strategy for the creative and cultural industries, called the Creative African Nexus Program, or CANEX program, revolving around six pillars of financing, capacity building, export promotion, policy advocacy, partnerships and twinning, and digitization. Afreximbank initially set aside $500 million for the initiative, which increased to $1 billion in 2022, and $2 billion in 2024.
“They started working on things within each of those pillars. On capacity building, they launched programs like the CANEX Music Factory, which teaches emerging artists how to record a song, and then release the songs onto DSPs,” explains Akpata.
“For export, they have something called CANEX Presents Africa, an export promotion program, taking, for example, 20 African designers to Paris Fashion Week to meet the market… and then under the financing pillar, they launched a film financing facility and a music development financing facility, which are debt financing products,” continues Akpata.
The program also saw Afreximbank get behind big infrastructure projects such as the renovations of the Félix Houphouët-Boigny Stadium in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire ahead of the 2023 Africa Cup of Nations and the Kensington Oval in Bridgetown, Barbados, ahead of the Cricket World Cup 2024. The bank looks at Africa and its diaspora, so the Caribbean is part of its remit.
CANEX Creations Inc is an offshoot of the wider CANEX program and grew out of the realization that the continent’s burgeoning creative industries were lacking seed money and bigger investment.
“What they realized very quickly was that because the creative industries have lots of very, very small businesses or startups, they needed some form of venture financing or equity financing options because of the nature of the products and the nature of the industry,” says Akpata.
“What the bank decided to do then was launch or register a company that did equity investments into intellectual property, and that company is CANEX Creations.”
As well as film investments such as Clarissa and Muganga, CCInc has also targeted the music industry.
“We’ve invested in music publishing, a catalogue of about 230 songs, with mostly Afrobeat stars, but film is a big part of our portfolio. What we see with film is that there are lots of great African stories but we need to have more people think about how to make this IP an investable asset class, where institutions are investing,” says Akpata/
He suggests that Clarissa – which CCInc helped finance alongside MBO Capital and Chapel Hill – could help encourage other financiers to get involved in the cinema sector following its worldwide rights deal with Neon.
“These Nigerian financial institutions are putting money into this film and partnering with Neon, who are distributing the film and doing international sales. We think that’s a very good model because if you can get African film content good access to the market with proper distribution and get some commercial success, that will encourage more investors to come in. We’ve very excited about the possibilities. We think there is a huge opportunity to create IP that is an investable class from the continent and its diaspora and for it to contribute more to the global landscape,” he says.
Akpata will not reveal the size of CCInc’s global budget but does give details on its investment parameters.
“We have a ticket size of between $500,000 and $5 million… We’re doing mostly venture investing and we only put a certain percentage towards a project, maybe 20 to 40%,” he says.
He says Afreximbank’s creative industries push, and within that CCInc’s mission to support African IP, is sparking interest both from within Africa and its diaspora.
“Now we’re actively talking about supporting the creative sector, we’re meeting all sorts of different people,” he says reeling off the names of Hollywood stars such as John Boyega and Viola Davis as well as Nigerian actress and singer Folake Olowofoyeku and French-Beninese musician and actress Angelique Kidjo.
“They can see that here is an African organization that is saying we want Africans to own their own IP. We want to commercialize the IP that comes out of the creative industries, we’re going to put some financing behind it,” says Akpata. “That is attractive, and it makes people come to us.”
