Digital Creator Africa Academy: A School to Structure Pan-African Duanju

Ifeoma 'Oma Areh is working from a straightforward idea: if Africa is already consuming short-form mobile stories at scale, it now needs a method and an organization to produce, structure, and monetize that energy. Alongside Elijah Affi, she co-founded Digital Creator Africa Academy, a pan-African platform designed to train the next generation of digital storytellers specializing in microdrama and to fill a critical gap in Africa’s creator economy.

Her starting point is personal, almost trivial, yet revealing. She says it plainly: “I’m addicted to these stories.” In other words, this is not an isolated taste, but an audience behavior that can become market data. For her, the goal is not to “prove” that duanju can work in Africa, but to turn an existing habit into a production pipeline with cadence, standards, and a viable business model.

Adapt without copying

Oma Areh rejects a mechanical import of Chinese or Western formulas. Microdrama mechanics work, but execution must align with African storytelling codes: rhythms, references, and a serialized approach that resonates with local audiences. Her logic is to adapt the method, not replicate the form.

Digital Creator Africa Academy fits into this approach: industry-ready training, storytelling frameworks that can be replicated at scale, and market-driven business models. Their shared ambition is to position Africa not only as a source of creative talent, but as a global engine for original digital IP, equipped to compete, scale, and lead in the future of short-form and emerging screen storytelling.

The hard part remains monetization. Oma Areh describes a persistent imbalance: African audiences are real, sometimes massive, but platform confidence and revenue-generation capability remain points of friction. She sums it up as: “I get the audience, but when it comes to making money…” In other words, the economic value of African audiences is still underestimated, and imported models do not automatically fit local realities.

In that context, training becomes a business lever as much as a creative one. It is not only about learning to tell stories in 9:16, but about producing with scalable frameworks, thinking market-first, and building a pipeline that makes microdrama viable, sustainable, and monetizable.

Registration: https://www.digitalcreatorafrica.academy/

Interview conducted by Blessing Azugama

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