Last night, a leading African influencer, Wode Maya, visited our home with his wife and baby. Over tea, we spoke candidly about the real obstacle facing creators like him: monetising a platform that already commands enormous reach.
Wode Maya is a Ghanaian aeronautical engineer-turned-YouTuber known for promoting Africa through authentic storytelling. With millions of followers, he travels across the continent and the Caribbean, reshaping global perceptions of these regions through culture, tourism, and enterprise.
He has more than 3 million followers on Facebook, most of them in Africa, yet his primary income comes from a YouTube audience largely based outside the continent. At first glance, this feels unfair. But it is not a failure of talent or effort. The explanation is simple: ARPU, the average revenue per user.
Creators earn when businesses advertise to their audiences. And,businesses advertise where purchasing power exists. In markets where followers can be easily converted into customers, advertising flows and creators monetise.
This is why ARPU is the quiet engine of the global digital economy. It determines what each follower is truly worth. In the United States or Europe, a follower represents real, bankable demand, supported by seamless payment systems, integrated digital marketplaces, and consumers with the ability to spend. Every view carries economic weight.
In Africa, the passion, engagement, and scale are immense. But the systems that convert attention into income remain fragmented across borders, currencies, and payment infrastructures. A creator may command millions of followers, yet those followers are locked within small, disconnected markets.
This is why African musicians can reach tens of millions of listeners across the continent but earn disproportionately less than what they receive from much smaller audiences abroad. The issue is not influence but rather the structure of the markets.
Interestingly, Africa neither lacks demand nor the purchasing power. The continent’s 1.5 billion people include roughly 400 million middle-class consumers, larger than the entire population of the United States and approaching Europe’s population of 450 million. The potential for creators like Wode Maya to earn significantly more for their hard work than they do currently exists.
The financial backbone of this digital activity is equally compelling. In 2024, global mobile money transactions reached approximately $1.68 trillion, up from $1 trillion in 2021. Africa alone accounted for about $1.1 trillion, around 65% of global transaction value and 74% of transaction volumes. This is extraordinary. Africa already dominates mobile money globally.
Yet here lies the paradox: most of that $1.1 trillion circulates within national borders. A Ghanaian wallet operates in Ghana; a Kenyan system in Kenya and parts of East Africa at best; a Nigerian platform in Nigeria. They do not fully connect.
Now imagine if they did. A creator in Ghana could sell instantly to Kenya. A fan in Nigeria could pay a musician in Rwanda in local currency. A business in Côte d’Ivoire could advertise online to target consumers in South Africa and with that businesses in Africa will be motivated to place adverts on the internet. Once businesses can sell easily across Africa, they will advertise more aggressively. And, when they advertise, creators earn. The constraint is simply to do with the incentive deficit presented by our small, fragmented economies.
Africa by 2024, had 1.1 billion registered mobile money accounts, which is 53 per cent of all global accounts. Our $1.1 trillion mobile money ecosystem and over a billion account holders are spread across 55 countries, with multiple currencies, disconnected payment systems, and uneven logistics. Compare this with the United States, the European Union, China, or India, which have markets unified by integrated payment systems and digital trade frameworks that convert online audiences into customers.
In those markets, scale drives monetisation. In Africa our fragmentation rather suppresses revenue. What we, therefore, need is a functioning continental architecture of a single market that transforms Africa’s demographic and digital potential into real economic value. This is what our influencers must understand and appreciate why they need economic integration to scale.
This is because a connected Africa would look like this: seamless payments through PAPSS and interoperable mobile money; free movement of people, capital, cultures and services; integrated digital trade; and goods moving across borders with ease.
The GSMA projects that with fully integrated payment systems, Africa’s $1.1 trillion mobile money market could expand rapidly to $2–3 trillion, a huge incentive for advertisers. With that expansion would come jobs, scalable African platforms, and globally competitive creators.
The African Union has already built many of the rails for that ride. Except our political leaders have simply refused to connect many of them. The policy framework already exists. The Abuja Treaty of 1991 set the goal of a single African economic community by 2028. Since then, we have adopted the AfCFTA, the Free Movement Protocol, the Digital Trade Protocol, the Investment Protocol, etc. Our leaders know what to do. Sadly, they appear to be in no rush to implement the needful.
Yet, the path forward requires courage. Simply put: leadership. We have known what to do for more than three decades since the Abuja Treaty. We have signed, we have articulated, but implementation has been slow. Caution, inertia and territorialism have arrested momentum. The real gap is not clever ideas or accessible markets, it is the political will to act with urgency and to align every sector behind a shared goal: a single, digitised, borderless Africa.
This is why creators must lead. Africa’s influencers, musicians, developers, and digital entrepreneurs are not merely content distributors, they are market-makers, culture shapers, and agenda setters. They stand to gain the most from a borderless Africa because their work is inherently transnational. The vitality of their brands depends on a seamless, scalable market; their success mirrors the health of the continent’s digital economy.
This is why this appeal is to creators. We need you to help mobilise millions of Africans, people of African descent and friends of Africa, to demand of our leaders to implement the treaties and protocols they have already adopted, which will combine to create the single market that Africans need.
For creators, the implications of a borderless Africa, as set out in the 12-point agenda of Africa Prosperity Network’s “Make Africa Borderless Now! Movement” matters directly to you: those who produce content, music, software, and services.
Cross-border payments would convert followers into paying customers in real time. Free movement of people would enable tours, collaborations, and scale. Digital trade integration would open doors for selling content and services across borders. Streamlined logistics and harmonised standards would remove friction for goods, enabling scale. These are the practical foundations of monetisation and it is why the Make Africa Borderless Now! Movement must be owned and driven by the continent’s creators.
China and India, with similar populations sizes like Africa, did not rise as digital giants because they were inherently more innovative. They rose because they invest, confident of their unified, connected, borderless economic environment and size.
In short, Africa could also build its own version of a vast, thriving marketplace, an ecosystem where ARPU rises not because Africans become wealthier overnight, but because the market enables transactions at scale. When systems integrate, it changes everything. Payments become reliable, commerce grows, and logistics catches up. Continent-wide advertising by African businesses becomes the norm, digital markets deepen and global platforms begin to reprice Africa more fairly. That is when our creators can earn directly from their biggest audiences: African consumers. That is why we need you, as creators, to be at the forefront of demanding action from our leaders.
This is the logic behind the Make Africa Borderless Now! Movement, launched in February 2026. Our goal is simple: secure 10 million signatures by February 2027 and present them to African leaders at the next AU Summit. To stress, the demand is equally simple: implement what has already been agreed. It is not about politics. It is about unlocking the full value of Africa’s creators by removing the barriers that keep followers as numbers instead of customers.
So please, be the champions of this movement. Sign. Share. Mobilise. The day Africa becomes a single market of 1.5 billion people is the day every follower becomes a customer. It is the day Africa’s creators begin to earn their true value.
If you act with urgency, you, as a creator, will become the lead champion redefining Africa’s growth and prosperity. Your followers will not just be fans. They will be customers, partners, and participants in Africa’s agenda for a continent of shared prosperity.
I invite all creators across Africa and the diaspora to become ambassadors of the Make Africa Borderless Now! campaign.
The author, Gabby Asare Otchere-Darko, is the Founder and Executive Chairman of Africa Prosperity Network, organisers of the Make Africa Borderless Now! movement. He may be reached at: gabby@africaprosperity.network. For More information please click: www.makeafricaborderlessnow.com
To donate or add your signature to the ten million and support the movement, visit: www.makeafricaborderlessnow.com
To download the APD 2026 Action Compact, visit: https://africaprosperitynetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/APD-Compact-Feb-2026.pdf
To download the Make Africa Borderless Now! Movement Manifesto, visit: https://africaprosperitynetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/4-MAKE-AFRICA-BORDERLESS-NOW-Manifesto-1.pdf
