On the morning of March 12, 2026, Akunna Cook's Next Narrative Africa Fund named its much-anticipated inaugural cohort of nine film and television projects. I ended my dispatch on the news by stating that I'd have more to say later. Well, it's later...
Reactions continue to come in — on X, on Instagram, in emails and DMs, primarily from professionals on the continent, where a specific kind of exhaustion is clearly prevalent.
The announcement landed in an environment that, for many, feels close to hopeless when it comes to explicitly Africa-facing film and series financing. Canal+ plans to shut down Showmax following its takeover of MultiChoice, closing off one of the continent's most prolific commissioners of local screen work. Netflix had already pulled back from original commissioning in Nigeria and Kenya while saying it would continue investing selectively, with South Africa still its main base on the continent. Amazon had already stopped backing African originals in January 2024. At the same time, Afreximbank's promised $1 billion Africa Film Fund still looms, leaving the sector with another large financing promise that has yet to produce a visible, continent-wide production pipeline.
That's the view from 30,000ft.
Before getting into the analytical layer, it's worth being precise about what was actually announced, because, on the surface, the headline number and what these nine projects have received are not the same thing.
To be clear, I have zero inside knowledge of how the Next Narrative Africa Fund operates internally.
What's confirmed:
- These nine are development-stage projects drawing from the $10 million nonprofit venture studio, not the $40 million commercial equity fund. They are technically development grantees. The larger fund has not yet committed to any of them.
- The $10 million grant fund is meant to support development grants in the $20,000 to $100,000 range, though individual amounts for these nine projects have not been disclosed.
- NNAF said it expected to support 6 to 10 projects in this round, with the broader $10 million pool intended to support around 125 scripts over five years.
- The $40 million commercial equity fund comes later, for projects that are production-ready, financing up to 20% of any single production budget — meaning NNAF would be one piece of a larger funding puzzle each team would need to assemble on its own.
- NNAF expects the equity fund to partially back 20 to 25 projects total over the five-year window.
In Hollywood terms, the easiest way to understand NNAF is as a curated early-stage slate: it selects projects it wants to develop and may later move some of them into co-financing, investing up to 20% of production budgets in the roughly $1 million to $5 million-plus range, with a stated sweet spot of $3 million to $7 million, and the expectation that some of those projects will eventually generate returns.
What hasn't been answered:
- How the stated development timeline — 6 to 12 months in the submissions document, and 9 to 12 months in the grant agreement, with a two-year outside limit — will apply to each of these nine projects in practice
- What the process looks like between development grant and equity consideration; whether NNAF is actively involved in shaping each project during development or simply evaluates them when they return
- What specific role the advisory board plays in overseeing or supporting these projects during development
In plain terms, relying strictly on public-facing materials suggests that these nine teams have money to develop scripts. They do not yet have confirmed production financing from the larger fund. But the development money is still part of a larger commercial system. NNAF's own materials describe this stage as a pipeline for later equity investment, and grant recipients are required to give the fund a right of first negotiation on any later equity investment.
Back to the announcement itself. Once you understand the model, the first cohort starts to look less surprising.
NNAF is a commercial fund with a nonprofit development arm, led by Akunna Cook, whose background includes diplomacy and policy, and who has argued that African content is an undervalued global asset class. Nothing about that is dishonest. Cook has said plainly that she is not building a charity; her critique of "local for local" is that positioning matters, and that diaspora audiences expand the market, which can support larger budgets and wider international reach. That's a coherent argument. It's also exactly the argument that produces a cohort that looks like this one.
Look at the nine projects. The Esiri Brothers — Arie and Chuko — are, as far as I know, the only filmmakers in this cohort actually based on the continent, in Nigeria. Beyond that, the slate still leans heavily toward teams and individual names whose careers, access, and market relationships sit partly or largely outside the continent. Rapman (UK), Zoey Martinson (US), and Trevor Noah (US) are three obvious examples. And in some cases, the teams also include collaborators who are not African at all.
One of the nine projects is co-produced by a globally recognized media personality whose financial and industry connections far exceed those of most applicants. I'm not saying Trevor Noah doesn't have the right to make films. It's a different question: of 2,000 submissions, from 80 countries, this is where the money went first.
That lands differently depending on your perspective. Kenyan filmmaker Serah Mwihaki, who received a rejection from the fund earlier this year, wrote on X that seeing the cohort left her deflated. "If a guy like Trevor is competing in the same pool, then what are my chances?" Another post from Mildred Okwo said bluntly that by the time "American Nigerians" are done, homegrown Nollywood won't exist. Others raised fears that, once high-profile funds like this establish relationships with a particular class of "African filmmakers," streaming platforms and other commissioning bodies operating on the continent will follow suit, leaving local talent behind.
Meanwhile, if you are in a room in New York or London where "African content" is being discussed mainly as a business opportunity with "untapped potential," the slate probably looks sensible. Commercial and global-facing, in Cook's own terms. Not wrong, exactly. But that describes a different initiative than what many African filmmakers and producers thought they were submitting to.
To be sure, the filmmakers on this list are trying to get films made. That's it. You take the support where you find it, and nobody should be faulted for that. I hope the projects are good. I hope some of them travel. I hope there is some forward-moving ripple effect felt at home. At this stage, any larger meaning is still unresolved.
Objectively, two different expectations are weighing on the launch. The frustration stems from the gap between what the name "Next Narrative Africa Fund" seemed to promise many continent-based applicants and what the fund's own criteria actually favored.
The last three to five years have seen a string of funding announcements of all kinds, some with large headline figures and presented as opportunities for African creatives and screen sectors. For filmmakers, writers, and producers on the continent working under financial scarcity, each one can feel, even briefly, like a real opening. And each time, the slow realization sets in that the path from the numbers to their doorsteps either doesn't exist or runs through a very specific set of gatekeepers who are not looking for what they're making.
A fact: funds that are expected to return money to investors usually back the projects they think can make money. The funds set up to back filmmakers in Enugu, Mombasa, Bamako, and Harare are often small and undercapitalized. The well-capitalized funds are designed to find something adjacent — your story, your setting, your world — but filtered through talent and infrastructure that already have a track record in rooms with money.
Another fact: African governments and institutions must treat film and television as serious economic activity. That means practical support: tax rebates or cash incentives that make production cheaper, co-production agreements and regional collaboration that help producers raise money with partners in other countries, and, most importantly, public funding systems strong enough to help local production companies stay alive between projects. Countries like Senegal, Morocco, and South Africa already have versions of this, albeit at varying levels of operability. Much of the rest of the continent still does not.
At the continental level, the African Union adopted the statute for the African Audiovisual and Cinema Commission in February 2019. It still has not received the ratifications needed to take effect. The body was supposed to help with policy, training, distribution, data, and the longer-term development of the sector. Seven years later, it's still waiting. That tells you where this sits on the priority list.
In the absence of sturdy public support systems, a single private fund like the NNAF begins to bear the weight of an entire missing structure. It looks like more than it is. And when that fund then behaves like the commercial vehicle it was set up to be, the disappointment hits harder because people are responding to more than one selection list. They're responding to the larger lack of support that made this slate matter so much in the first place.
NNAF will produce some films. Some of them will probably be good. The production requirement — at least 50% shot on the continent — means jobs, crews, and spending in local economies, and that's not nothing. But it's not the same thing as a full-fledged fund designed mainly for African filmmakers on the continent.
There has been a lot of conversation leading up to and around this announcement. I understand all of it. And honestly, I'm tired. I've covered enough of these moments that I'd rather wait to see what actually gets made, and whether the fund delivers on the scale Cook has publicly set for it — not just as a source of backing for a few already-packaged, diaspora-leaning projects, but as proof that film and television produced on the continent, by filmmakers on the continent, can attract serious commercial investment at scale.
Originally published as an Akoroko Premium report.
