African cinemagoers’ appetite has been growing exponentially and the market now faces a massive shortage of cinema venues. Africa’s film and audio-visual industries could create over 20 million jobs and contribute $20 billion to the continent’s combined GDP according to the UN cultural agency, UNESCO. UNESCO also reported that Africa’s potential as a film powerhouse remains largely untapped, despite significant growth in production across the continent. While Nigeria alone produces around 2,500 films a year, there is only one cinema screen per 787,402 people in Africa, creating an unassailable opportunity for the exhibition companies to expand into this untapped market.

In light of this, we are organizing the META Cinema Forum – Africa to bring the cinema stakeholders together to identify collaborative opportunities that can help in closing these gaps.

Furthermore, storytelling in Africa has been one of the most profound ways to communicate, teach values, life lessons, preserve history and traditional culture. Storytelling has also been deeply rooted in the African culture. Coming into the age of cinemas and technological advancements, African storytelling is taking shapes that are propagating beyond Africa. In addition, Africa hosts vibrant filmmakers from a variety of cultural backgrounds adding rich content to the market. The forum will host a content market – the ‘Africa Film Market’. The content market will focus on nurturing these filmmakers, providing them with a launchpad and providing worthy opportunities to the investors, producers and studios.

The forum is well-positioned to be the largest gathering of cinema investors in Africa as it is a collaborative effort between the National Film Authority of Ghana and the cinema convention organiser -the Great Minds Group.