From baskets to Afrobeats, the world craves what Africa creates.

When Lorenza Marzo left her job as an auditor in Milan several years ago for a life refresh in Africa, the Italian ended up in Tanzania, helping a women’s cooperative in a remote border area improve the production and marketing of basketry for export.

An early challenge was educating the women that buyers exist beyond their corner of the coastal East African nation, best known to travelers for Mount Kilimanjaro and the wildlife wows of the Serengeti. The women view a basket as a functional item for storage; Marzo says to sell it as a decorative object means working on the “consistency of finishing a product that is beautifully made” and matches customer expectations for size and design.

Customers also needed a mindset reboot, to embrace wares produced at the grassroots. Marzo says the Western market has become so used to precision, machine-made goods that “it has lost the capacity of accepting the small imperfections of handmade items.”

Export potential

To declare there’s potential in Africa’s creatives segment would be a whopping understatement. While the output of artisans is overflowing, and visibly so when you travel across countries, Africa’s share of global creative goods exports is only 3 percent, reports the United Nations Development Program. And that equals less than 1 percent of Africa’s economic output. The bottom line: it’s time for Africa’s endlessly imaginative artistic entrepreneurs to get more creative – in marketing and selling overseas.

In Midtown Atlanta in 2024, Kenya’s leader and first lady cut the ribbon to open a boutique for Kenyan designer clothing and textiles – the first U.S. branch of an East African chain, Vivo Fashion Group, run by Nairobi-based Wandia Gichuru. Far more weighty matters crowded President William Ruto’s schedule in a visit that ended at the White House. Yet the store opening showed what African entrepreneurs can reap by focusing on America – for customers and for publicity in the world’s biggest consumer market.

African music artists already have figured this out. Nigeria’s Burna Boy topped Billboard’s U.S. Afrobeats Artists chart in 2023 thanks to the massive American radio play for his songs “amid the R&B/hip-hop format’s growing acceptance of Afrobeats tracks,” industry-chronicler Billboard noted. Originating in Ghana and Nigeria, Afrobeats fuses complex, polyrhythmic percussion, including traditional drums, with Western pop and hip-hop sounds, explains the music site Soundtrap. Artists with roots in South Africa (Tyla) and Cameroon (Libianca) have stormed the charts by riding this musical wave.

Measuring Africa’s artistic and fashion production for export to America is a tricky task. Of the USD 29.3 billion in goods the U.S. imported from sub-Saharan Africa in 2023, USD 1.4 billion was apparel – the sixth-largest category, and USD 258 million was precious jewelry. The data fades beyond that. Africa’s phenomenal output in wood and stone carvings, basketry, textiles and other artisanal products awaits wider exposure in the American and European markets.

Behind the baskets

WomenCraft, the enterprise Marzo has scaled up, started in a refugee camp in Ngara, Tanzania, near Burundi and Rwanda to help village women gain a measure of independence through business amid political instability in that borderland. After the camp closed, the effort lived on as a social enterprise. WomencCraft employs about 500 basket weavers in 20 villages, a tight-knit group. “We don’t go and buy random baskets from random people,” Marzo says. “We have been working for 17 years with the same artisans, making them grow.”

Growth means more than crafting baskets. Rural women working hard, and collectively, to make steady money can create friction with husbands used to taking charge of finances and scrutinizing their wives’ handiwork. Workshops helped men and women in the basket-making communities understand how to cope with changing family dynamics and resolve conflicts.

To cushion the women from shifting fashion trends, WomenCraft prefers to sell through boutiques overseas rather than big retail chains, aiming to foster long-term relationships. Marzo advises that Americans or Europeans who want to explore investment and trade with artisans should collaborate with folks already working on the ground. And they should commit to being there, to ensure the work is getting done.

Since Bill Clinton’s presidency, America has used the African Growth and Opportunity Act – up for renewal in 2025 – as its vehicle to encourage trade with sub-Saharan Africa. The law permits duty-free entry of more than 1,800 products on top of more than 5,100 items eligible under the Generalized System of Preferences. Yet with tariffs from Washington popping up everywhere, the future of AGOA as a sales channel looks shaky.

Of the 32 African countries eligible for duty-free exports to the U.S. under AGOA, 12 have national strategies that include trade in handicrafts, including Ghana, Kenya, Senegal, Tanzania, and Zambia, according to the 2024 AGOA report from the U.S. trade representative, the president’s chief negotiator on global imports and exports.

A city for film

Another level of creative action occupies Africa’s economic growth agenda. While in Atlanta, Ruto stopped by filmmaker Tyler Perry’s sprawling studio complex, where the sequel to the Afro-futurist sensation Black Panther was shot. (Atlanta’s many studios have made the Georgia metropolis a global hub for film and TV production, including Marvel superhero flicks.)

“We’re trying to monetize talent, we’re trying to see what we can do with creatives, with the art,” Ruto said at the studio facility. Perry’s investment in a “city” for film “gives it a completely different perspective.”

Former American diplomat Akunna Cook has started the Next Narrative Africa fund, billed as a USD 40 million initiative to finance “commercially viable” African film and media projects. The fund is offering script development grants up to USD 100,000, a towering sum in a market where writers usually are paid a small fraction of that amount.

Film, fashion, music and arts and crafts will star at the Creative Africa Nexus exhibition during the Intra-African Trade Fair in Algiers in September 2025. Around 35,000 visitors are expected for the gathering in Algeria’s coastal capital, organized by the African Union and the African Export-Import Bank. Former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo calls the event, “the largest, holistic trade fair championing the continent’s growth and development.”

Back in Tanzania, making baskets contributes to how Africa is seen from afar, far from WomenCraft’s busy villages. Marzo says, “Here there are skilled people, cultural richness and the possibility of making business.”