By Counsel Obadia Ismail
In the quiet corners of our cities and the humming margins of our villages, a new class of entrepreneurs has risen. They do not wear suits. They carry no briefcases. Their tools are cameras, voices, melodies, likenesses, and the unshakable urge to create. They are the creators. And for far too long, the system that underwrites prosperity - the banks, the regulators, the insurers - has been hesitant to see them for what they are. Businesspeople.
This hesitation is not born of malice. It is born of caution, of convention, of the stubborn familiarity of old rules. But these rules were written for industries with smokestacks and inventory sheets, not for the rhythm of a TikTok trend or the royalties of a song played in Kampala, Lagos, Nairobi, and Gulu at the same time.
If we are honest, it is not the creative sector that is informal. It is our thinking that remains underdeveloped.
A Sector Overflowing with Potential
The global creative economy is not a fantasy. It is a marketplace with UNCTAD Creative Economy Outlook (2018 and 2022) estimating that the creative economy contributed $2.25 trillion globally, accounting for around 3% of global GDP and generating nearly 30 million jobs already worth trillion.
Africa’s share is growing by the day. In Uganda, the evidence is all around us. Turn on a phone. Scroll through a feed. Our dancers, comedians, filmmakers, and storytellers have become global exports. Afro Mobile, Swangz Avenue, Talent Africa - these are not hobbies. They are companies. Yet the financial infrastructure that serves them remains primitive because traditional banking models are not calibrated to measure or monetize digital creativity.
To this day, a bank manager will look at a musician with a million subscribers and see a risk rather than an opportunity. This is not merely unjust. It is uneconomical.
What Holds Us Back
There are reasons, of course. The incomes are irregular. The records are patchy. The intellectual property systems are still maturing. Many creators are not yet registered as businesses. But these are not immovable barriers. They are solvable problems - if the financial institutions; and banks are willing to apply modern tools to modern realities.
Technology as the Equalizer
We live in an age where data is more revealing than documents. Every stream, every view, every download is a data point. Banks can now build digital profiles for creators that are more accurate than paper trails. With the right partnerships - telecoms, collecting societies, and digital platforms - it is possible to track income, engagement, ownership, and reputation in real-time.
Platforms like YouTube and Spotify already do it. African platforms like Mdundo and Boomplay do it too and the latest in town are the likes of Afro Mobile and Next Influencer platform. With their help, banks and Financial institutions can begin to construct new models of creditworthiness that reflect how creators earn and grow.
Banking Designed for the Creative Class
Imagine a digital bank built from the ground up for creatives. Not a traditional branch, but a platform that allows a YouTube comedian to borrow against their projected ad revenue. Or a music producer to access health insurance because they have registered their beats and licensed their catalog. These are not speculative ideas. They are already in motion elsewhere.
In the United States, intellectual property is collateral. In the United Kingdom, royalty-backed loans are standard practice. Afreximbank has committed over one billion dollars to this very vision across Africa. Uganda should not trail behind. We should lead.
The Law Has a Role to Play
Rights must be enforced. Copyright systems must be respected. Collecting societies must be professionalized. And the law must recognize what the market already knows: that intellectual property is property in every sense of the word.
This is not just an economic issue. It is a matter of justice. To deny a generation of young Africans access to finance simply because they choose to write songs instead of code is to misunderstand both their value and our future.
Time to Act
The creative economy is not coming. It is already here. It is being streamed, watched, downloaded, and danced to across the continent and beyond. The question is whether our financial institutions will evolve to meet it.
By anchoring solutions on data, digital payments, and trust in the creative value chain, it can not only solve long-standing challenges—but redefine banking culture. The Creative Content Economy with the new normal of influencers and content creators, is the future
Uganda has the talent. We have the tools. And if we align our policies, our platforms, and our principles, we may yet give our young creators something even greater than likes. We may give them leverage.
Let us leverage Technology to Solve Banking Challenges in the Creative Sector
Let us begin.