Home Advantage: Why NECLive 2026 Is Betting on Nigeria’s own market
When NECLive returns on November 12 at Alliance Française in Lagos, its theme will be “Home Advantage: Transforming Local Demand into Global Power.” It’s a phrase that borrows from sport, but the argument underneath it is economic, and a report published a few months before the conference lays out why.
The State of Nigeria’s Creative Economy 2026, produced by NECLive with Frontyard Group, surveyed 377 creative professionals across eight sectors in the weeks after last year’s conference. Its central finding is that Nigeria’s creative sector is not short of talent. What holds it back is the system around that talent.
The paradox the theme responds to
Nigerian culture travels. Nollywood is the world’s fifth-largest film industry, and the report notes that over 70 per cent of watch time on content from Nigerian channels comes from outside the country. Yet fewer than 20 per cent of the creatives surveyed say international markets are their main source of income.
The report puts the gap down to infrastructure, not appetite: the world is consuming Nigerian creativity, but the payment and foreign-exchange systems needed to turn that into creator income do not yet exist. In other words, global demand is already there, and the money isn’t reaching the people making the work.
The report’s findings on daily working life explain why. Power outages and poor internet were ranked as the most disruptive daily obstacles, above funding delays, regulatory red tape and even intellectual property theft. Eighty-three per cent of respondents said they lose more than 10 per cent of their productive workweek to non-creative tasks like logistics, contract management and chasing payments. And on emerging technology, 36 per cent said they avoid AI tools mainly because of subscription costs, which the report describes as a cost divide, not a skills divide.
None of this has stopped the sector growing. Motion pictures and music production grew 8.86 per cent in the first quarter of 2026, which the report describes as growth achieved despite the infrastructure, not because of it.
Reading “Home Advantage”
If a creative economy is built on strong local demand, reliable systems and fair payment, it can compete abroad from a position of strength, the way a team plays better on home ground. The report’s closing recommendations for government, investors and the private sector point the same way, treating power and connectivity as creative infrastructure and fixing the payment rails that stand between a global audience and a Nigerian creator.
