Image Commercially Licensed From: Unsplash
Representation is everything. If you are one of the groups not represented by most modern streaming services, like the 1.2 billion people of Africa, you take notice. With over 300 million people worldwide streaming anime last year, you would think that some of them would depict African people, their rich culture, and their many beautiful languages. Sadly, they do not.
Afrowatch Founders and creators Damola Obaleke, a software and computer engineer, and his partner Ikechukwu Collins, a mechanical and back-end engineer, have developed a streaming service that has the potential to impact 18% of the world’s African population and a third of the world’s people who watch anime.
Damola credits the inspiration to his brother. “He just started talking to me about how he’s a big anime fan, right, and how there’s Japanese, Chinese, and American anime, and then I asked him what about African anime? He said not that he had seen, and I was like, ‘Interesting. That is true.’” “A light bulb went off in my head” says Damola
“There’s a huge market of Africans that like anime and animation. Still, there’s no African anime in African languages, no animation in Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Twi, Xhosa, Somali or Ashanti etc…. And that essentially was what sparked the start of the company.”
The two graduates of Loughborough University in England have been partnering up for a while. They met in science class during Foundation Year in Lagos, Nigeria, before heading to the same university. Obaleke and Collins even helped one another with their final projects: 3D printing and a reconfigurable liquid metal antenna. And, what’s more important, they are gym partners.
The two are no strangers to start-ups, including a crowdfunding application for businesses in Africa to invest via equity and a mobile dating app that interfaces with the Unity game engine.
After talking to his brother, Damola dove into coding the platform and researching the market. Just in time, too. The animation industry is currently worth $394Bn. Forecasters project that the industry will grow to $594Bn worldwide by 2030. The African animation industry is growing too. Today it is valued at $12.3Bn and is expected to grow 8% over the next five years to $15 or $16 billion.
While the monetary opportunities are significant, Damola is passionate about the fact that Afrowatch “will allow people to see themselves, hear their native languages, some of which are nearly lost, and preserve the stories and culture of many groups of people that are currently unrepresented.”
The creation of the African-focused platform will not only give subscribers access to current animation and African movies already streamable by location, but Damola Obaleke intends to start a studio to create and license original content for the platform. He hopes to inspire a new generation of VFX 3D and 2D artists from Africa to create content that connects people across continents and represents the rich cultures of Africa.
With Afrowatch, subscribers can view content from anywhere and any place in Africa. Obaleke explains, “It’s not by your IP address or location. Just go on the platform, pick the country you want to view from, and you get the content from that country.”
Another piece that is unique to Afrowatch is the social aspect. They have incorporated following and follower capabilities so that viewers can share their favorites with others and get followed when they make like-minded recommendations. “On Afrowatch, they will have a streamlined collection of content.”
The team at Afrowatch are building waitlists of people excited to subscribe. And soon, Damola Obaleke and Ikechukwu Collins will be launching the beta and celebrating. Not only will they be celebrating the success of the software, but Obaleke adds, “celebrating diversity, representation and reconnecting youth with their roots.”
