Lagos-based Nsibidi Fables is doing something few African creative companies have attempted at scale: fuse entertainment, education and technology into a single business, and convince investors it isn’t three separate bets dressed up as one.
The company’s flagship animated project, a series on Amanirenas, the one-eyed Kandake of Kush who defied Rome, is meant to prove the model works.
In a discussion with BD Weekender, Tony Effik, a global managing director at Google and founder of Nsibidi Fables explains the company’s leadership to press on the numbers, the infrastructure, and whether “sovereign” African AI is not just a slogan, but a strategy. Dipo Oladehinde brings excerpt:
You’re building at the intersection of entertainment, education and technology. Which of those three is actually generating revenue today, and which is being subsidised by the others?
Today, our entertainment division, Nsibidi Fables, and our education division, Nsibidi Academy, are the primary revenue anchors, through outsourced content production, monetisation of content on social platforms, and fees from teaching AI and content production in schools. Our technology platform, Nsibidi Zip, is earlier stage. It’s a cloud-hosted set of agentic production tools that we use internally first, what Silicon Valley calls dogfooding, before taking it to market as a business-to-business product: white-label production automation, infrastructure for ad agencies and production companies, tiered enterprise licensing. We don’t see these as three units competing for capital. Entertainment aggregates volume, technology optimises production speed, and education scales a certified user base. Each feeds the others.
