By Elizabeth Jacobs
Afrobeats is one of Africa’s most powerful modern exports. It has crossed borders with ease, reshaped global pop culture, and given African youth a confident voice on the world stage.
Yet for many African musicians, that success feels incomplete.
This contradiction was impossible to ignore at the Lagos launch of a 2025 Report on Afrobeats authored by Harvard University graduate Professor Olufunmilayo Arewa. The Launch was hosted by Harvard Law School’s Center for the Study of African Societies and Economies (CSASE). Artists, policymakers, and industry leaders gathered not to celebrate chart positions, but to confront a harder truth: Afrobeats may be global, but the economic systems around it still fail African creators.
The report confirms what many artists already know, namely that Africa remains the lowest-earning region globally for music royalties, despite producing one of the world’s fastest-growing genres. This is not a talent issue. It is a policy and infrastructure failure.
When Touring Africa Is Harder Than Leaving It
Many have seen this failure up close.
While planning a small African tour, artists run into a wall of visa costs, delays, inconsistent requirements, and last-minute cancellations. Ironically, touring Europe is often cheaper and easier than performing in three African countries.
That reality is not just frustrating; it is economically irrational. Every cancelled African show means lost income for artists, sound engineers, dancers, venue staff, transport providers, and designers — most of them young people. When African artists cannot tour Africa, we export opportunity along with culture.
Why the AfCFTA Creative or Cultural Visa Matters
This is why one of the CSASE report’s most important recommendations — an AfCFTA creative or cultural visa — deserves urgent attention.
A continent-wide creative visa would allow musicians and their teams to move freely across African borders, cutting costs and delays that currently make intra-African touring unviable. More importantly, it would help artists build sustainable audiences at home before chasing global stages.
This is not just about music. It is about jobs and trade.
Touring supports an entire ecosystem including venues, hospitality, transport, fashion, marketing, media, and technical crews. In a continent where over 60 percent of the population is under 25, the creative economy is one of the most realistic engines for youth employment. Treating it as an afterthought is a costly mistake.
Afrobeats Is Already an Economic Force
Afrobeats already functions as a form of intra-African trade. It moves language, fashion, technology, and capital across borders faster than many formal sectors. Yet African governments continue to treat music as entertainment, not infrastructure.
Professor Arewa argues in the CSASE report that Africa’s fragmented markets weaken our bargaining power. As long as African artists rely on foreign systems for touring, distribution, data, and royalties, they remain price-takers in an industry they created.
Regional coordination, stronger copyright enforcement, transparent royalty systems, and local ownership are not abstract ideas. They are the foundation of a fair creative economy.
From Panels to Policy
The Lagos launch of the Harvard CSASE report must not end as another well-attended discussion.
African governments need to act by implementing a creative visa under AfCFTA, modernising music regulation, and investing in local touring infrastructure. Artists, too, must organise, educate themselves, and push collectively for better terms in a global industry that profits from their work.
Afrobeats has already proven its cultural power. What it has not yet secured is economic justice for the people who make it.
If African artists must leave Africa to survive, then the global success of Afrobeats remains unfinished business.
The CSASE report offers evidence and solutions. What is required now is the political will to let African creativity move freely — and finally pay fairly — on its own continent.
Elizabeth Jacobs wrote in from Abuja,and can be reached via jeckems4@yahoo.com
