Technology for Social Change and Development Initiative Tech4Dev has released a comprehensive report on the economic value and growth potential of Nigeria’s creative industry.
The 150-page document, tagged ‘State of Creative Innovation Ecosystem in Nigeria Report 2025’, was released at the Nigeria Creative Ecosystem Report Dissemination and Creative Tracker Launch held at Radisson Hotel, Ikeja, Lagos.
The document presented key insights and opportunities for the growth and global scaling of Nigeria’s creative economy, including the film industry, music industry, fashion industry, and content creation industry.
The report also covered the value chain for the four key sectors, while observing the different components from creation to consumption.
Its findings are based on extensive research conducted across seven states — Lagos (southwest), Kano (northwest), Cross River (south south), Anambra (southeast), Plateau and Kwara (north central) and Adamawa (northeast) — representing the nation’s six geopolitical zones.
The findings ascribed distinct creative identities to each state.
Lagos is characterised as “a mature, commercially vibrant ecosystem” while Kano is reported to be “deeply rooted in cultural industries,” particularly film.
Anambra is said to “hold a strong artisan and SME-driven creative activities” while Cross River is described as a hub for “heritage and festival-led creative expression”.
Plateau is noted for its “content innovation and performance arts”. Kwara possesses an “emerging ecosystem with latent creative clusters” while Adamawa is “described as a fragile context with pockets of cultural revival”.
Michael Odionga, chairman of the Music Publishers Association of Nigeria (MPAN), celebrated the moment as a critical response to longstanding calls for reliable data on the thriving sector.
“We should actually have a coalition that would help this whole thing grow. Let us not just work in silos, which is the major problem we have actually been having,” he said.
“A lot of people work in silos. Let us come together. Let us support development for tech. Let us support this initiative. Let everybody be on board so that we can actually get something out of this.”
Oladiwura Oladepo, co-founder and executive director of Tech4Dev, underscored the economic importance of the project.
She emphasised that the creative economy is the second-largest employer of labour in Nigeria, stressing the need for adequate data to grasp the industry’s full potential.
“Know how they can, it will help to also inform like decision making, know where to channel resources and what areas that more money and more resources should be put into to enable the industry to be better,” she said.
She revealed that the data-gathering process, which included interviews and consultative sessions, collected a robust sample size of over 1,700 participants.
However, Michael John, former country manager at Tech4Dev, noted that the team faced difficulties in capturing quantitative data due to connectivity issues in some regions.
“Okay, so the presentation in there is for the NCEGII project, the Nigeria Creative Economy Innovation and Growth project,” he continued.
“The project is in partnership with the Foreign Command Development Organisation, particularly the UK tech hub, and the idea behind the project was to ensure that we were able to do a thorough investigation of Nigeria’s creative economy and map it from a value chain standpoint.
“A lot of research has been done in the past, but none has actually taken the standpoint of the value chain, which means understanding how value is created, from creation/conceptualisation to production…to distribution, getting it into the hands of consumers and exhibition.
“This was done across seven states and across four key industries—the music, fashion, film and last but not least, content creation, which we have rightly named micro video. These industries are very fundamental to the creative economy.”
Download the full report here.
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