Afreximbank has appointed One Street Studios as Co-General Partner of the Pan-African Film Fund, a vehicle set up to mobilise as much as $1 billion for the continent’s film and creative industries.
The announcement was made in Cairo on 8 July 2026 by the African Export-Import Bank through its development impact arm, the Fund for Export Development in Africa, known as FEDA. According to a statement carried by the Africa Newsroom press service, the appointment places One Street Studios alongside FEDA as joint managers of the vehicle.
What the appointment means
FEDA and One Street Studios will now serve as Co-General Partners of the Fund, sharing responsibility for deploying capital across the sector.
The arrangement pairs a development finance institution with a production outfit. One Street Studios brings a model that combines financing with content development, taking projects from script stage through to screen. The studio also positions itself as a bridge between the African diaspora and creators on the continent, backing storytellers it says have been overlooked by mainstream funding routes.
FEDA, for its part, supplies the balance sheet. As the impact investment subsidiary of Afreximbank, it was created to close the equity funding gap across African trade and industry, and the Pan-African Film Fund extends that mandate into the creative economy.
How the money will be used
The Pan-African Film Fund is not limited to financing individual films. Afreximbank says the Fund will support a diversified portfolio spanning content production, infrastructure and distribution, using a mix of equity, quasi-equity and structured financing.
In practice, that means the initiative is expected to back television and film production, help build studios and post-production facilities, and support the wider distribution of African content on streaming platforms and in cinemas. Afreximbank has framed this as an attempt to build a globally competitive film ecosystem, rather than a one-off pot of production money.
Voices behind the deal
Dr George Elombi, President and Chairman of the Board of Directors of Afreximbank, said the partnership behind the Pan-African Film Fund was timely, describing it as a bridge between the diaspora and geographic Africa that would let the continent’s creative economy take fuller ownership of its own narratives.
Lavaille Lavette, Chief Executive Officer of the Pan-African Film Fund and Managing Partner at One Street Studios, said Africa’s creative industries were entering a defining moment. She added that the Fund would mobilise long-term capital to support creators, strengthen production capacity and build sustainable global distribution routes for African storytelling.
Emmanuel Assiak, Chief Executive Officer of FEDA, said African storytelling carried extraordinary cultural depth and universal relevance, and that the Pan-African Film Fund was designed to let creators produce world-class content while connecting them to global audiences and long-term investment capital.
Roots of the Pan-African Film Fund
The idea did not appear overnight. Afreximbank first flagged plans for a private equity film vehicle at CANEX WKND in Algiers in October 2024, building on remarks made a year earlier by Kanayo Awani, the bank’s Executive Vice President for Intra-African Trade, who told the 2023 CANEX Summit that available creative sector financing had already grown from $500 million to $1 billion.
The Pan-African Film Fund was then formally launched in Kigali, Rwanda, in May 2025 under Afreximbank’s Creative Africa Nexus programme, known as CANEX. At that stage, Professor Benedict Oramah, then President of Afreximbank, described film as a cornerstone of CANEX, while Marlene Ngoyi, then CEO of FEDA, said the initiative was about building a thriving creative ecosystem rather than simply financing individual titles. Actress Viola Davis and actor Boris Kodjoe both publicly welcomed the launch at the time.
The naming of One Street Studios as Co-General Partner now moves the initiative from launch announcement into an operating structure, with a named management team in place.
The scale of the opportunity
The case for the Pan-African Film Fund rests partly on figures published by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, which estimates that Africa’s film and audiovisual industry already generates around $5 billion in annual revenue and employs more than five million people across the continent.
Yet the industry has long been constrained by weak infrastructure. Screen International has reported that the continent has fewer than 2,000 cinema screens in total, alongside limited post-production capacity and patchy access to digital distribution platforms. The Fund is meant to address exactly these gaps, rather than only backing scripts and productions.
Afreximbank itself is a sizeable institution. At the end of December 2025, its total assets and contingencies stood at more than $48.5 billion, with shareholder funds of $8.4 billion, giving some sense of the balance sheet standing behind the Pan-African Film Fund and FEDA’s other investment programmes.
A milestone for CANEX
Afreximbank has described the appointment as a significant milestone in its wider CANEX strategy, which aims to turn Africa’s creative industries into a globally competitive sector capable of driving economic growth, job creation and cultural influence.
For now, the Pan-African Film Fund remains a work in progress rather than a finished portfolio. Its backers have set out an ambition to mobilise up to $1 billion, but the pace at which that capital reaches producers, studios and distributors across Africa will depend on how quickly FEDA and One Street Studios can turn the new partnership into signed deals.
