Collette & Esther Are Taking Their Creative Vision to Zambia for Africa Creative Market 2026

Table of Contents

• What Is Africa Creative Market and Why Does It Matter?
• Who Are Collette and Esther?
• Why Zambia Is the Right Stage for This Conversation
• The African Creative Economy Is No Longer a Side Note
• Collette, Esther, and the Bigger Picture This Trip Represents

What Is Africa Creative Market and Why Does It Matter?

There is a particular kind of excitement that comes with watching African creatives pack their bags not for a Western stage, but for one built entirely on African soil, by Africans, for Africans. That is exactly the energy surrounding the upcoming Africa Creative Market 2026, which is set to take place in Zambia and is already generating serious buzz across the continent’s creative communities. At its core, ACM is a gathering designed around a single, powerful premise: that Africa’s creative economy is not only worth investing in, it is capable of sustaining itself, scaling globally, and producing world-class output on its own terms. The event draws together a wide cross-section of talent including artists, designers, filmmakers, entrepreneurs, industry executives, and cultural innovators who converge to share knowledge, build connections, and open doors that might otherwise remain closed.

ACM is not a typical conference where suits sit on panels and speak in vague corporate language. It is deliberately designed as a capacity-building platform where real conversations happen, real deals get made, and real skills get transferred. Workshops, masterclasses, pitching sessions, and networking events all form part of the programming, making it a genuinely practical experience for creatives at various stages of their careers. For many attendees, ACM has functioned as a launchpad – a place where a conversation in a hallway turned into a collaboration, or where a pitch in front of the right audience became a funded project. As the 2026 edition draws closer, the announcement that Nigerian creatives Collette and Esther will be attending has added another layer of anticipation to what is already a highly anticipated gathering.

Who Are Collette and Esther?

If you have been paying attention to the Nigerian creative space over the past few years, then Collette and Esther are not names you encounter for the first time here. Both women have carved out visible, respected presences within Nigeria’s creative and lifestyle ecosystem, each bringing her own distinct perspective and expertise to a generation of African talent that is rewriting the rules about what success in the industry looks like. Their individual journeys reflect the broader story of an African creative class that is increasingly confident, globally connected, and unapologetically rooted in its own culture and identity. Whether through content creation, brand work, community building, or advocacy for creative industries, these two represent exactly the kind of voices that ACM was built to amplify.

What makes their participation at ACM particularly compelling is the combination they represent. Both Collette and Esther are not simply creatives who produce great work in isolation – they are also communicators and connectors, people who understand that the value of a platform like ACM extends well beyond the individual. When someone like them walks into a room full of African innovators and industry players, the conversations that follow tend to ripple outward. Their presence at ACM 2026 signals something meaningful: that the event continues to attract participants who are not just looking to receive, but to contribute, collaborate, and help build the infrastructure that the African creative economy still needs.

Why Zambia Is the Right Stage for This Conversation

Lusaka may not be the first city that comes to mind when people think about Africa’s creative hubs, but hosting ACM 2026 in Zambia is a deliberate and intelligent choice that speaks to what the event is really trying to do. For too long, conversations about Africa’s creative economy have been concentrated in a handful of cities – Lagos, Nairobi, Johannesburg, Accra – leaving enormous swaths of the continent underrepresented in the broader narrative about where African culture is going. By planting its 2026 edition in Zambia, ACM is expanding that conversation geographically and making a statement that no single city holds a monopoly on African creative energy. Zambia has its own thriving arts and music scene, its own emerging entrepreneurial culture, and its own generation of young creatives who deserve access to the kind of networks and resources that ACM brings with it.

There is also something symbolically important about a pan-African gathering choosing Southern Africa as its home for this particular edition. The region has historically produced some of Africa’s most compelling cultural exports, from music to visual art to literature, yet it often operates slightly outside the spotlight that West Africa’s entertainment machine tends to generate. ACM in Zambia creates an opportunity for cross-regional exchange that could produce genuinely unexpected collaborations – a Nigerian content creator connecting with a Zambian filmmaker, or a Ghanaian brand strategist partnering with a Zimbabwean designer. These are the kinds of connections that reshape industries quietly but permanently, and Zambia’s central location within the continent makes it a natural gathering point for exactly this kind of meeting of minds.

The African Creative Economy Is No Longer a Side Note

The numbers behind Africa’s creative economy have been getting harder to ignore for several years now. Nollywood is consistently ranked among the world’s most prolific film industries by volume, producing thousands of titles annually and driving a home video and streaming ecosystem that reaches diaspora communities across every continent. Afrobeats has gone from a regional sound to a genuinely global genre, with artists like Burna Boy, Wizkid, Davido, and Tyla racking up chart positions and stadium bookings that would have seemed implausible a decade ago. The fashion industry, anchored by designers from Lagos to Accra to Johannesburg, has been earning serious recognition on international runways and in major retail conversations. All of this represents not just cultural achievement, but economic activity – jobs, intellectual property, export revenue, and brand value that is accumulating at a meaningful scale.

Yet despite all this momentum, the infrastructure that supports African creative businesses still has significant gaps. Access to funding remains inconsistent. Rights management and intellectual property protection are still underdeveloped in many markets. Distribution networks that can move creative products efficiently across borders and into global markets are still being built. These are exactly the kinds of structural challenges that a platform like ACM exists to address, not through wishful thinking, but through practical conversations between people who understand the problems from the inside. Every edition of ACM is essentially a collective problem-solving session disguised as a creative gathering, and the 2026 edition in Zambia looks set to carry that tradition forward with a strong and diverse lineup of participants.

Collette, Esther, and What Their Zambia Trip Actually Signals

Strip away the travel announcements and the excitement for a moment, and what Collette and Esther heading to Zambia for ACM 2026 actually represents is a generational posture. These are creatives who understand that the work of building Africa’s creative economy is not something that happens in one city or one country, and it is not something that gets done by a handful of gatekeepers deciding who gets access to what. It gets done by people who are willing to show up, travel the continent, sit in rooms with strangers who might become collaborators, and invest time in conversations that do not have an immediate, obvious return. That willingness – to look beyond the familiar and engage with the broader pan-African creative project – is what distinguishes the people who are genuinely shaping this industry from those who are simply operating within it.

Their participation also puts a human and recognizable face on ACM for audiences who may not have been familiar with the event before this announcement. When someone with an established following says “I’m going to this thing,” it introduces that thing to an entirely new audience and adds credibility to the platform in the eyes of people who trust those voices. ACM benefits from the association, and Collette and Esther benefit from the visibility and the network. It is the kind of mutually reinforcing relationship that healthy creative ecosystems depend on, and it is a small but telling illustration of how Africa’s creative community continues to build itself – not waiting for validation from outside, but creating the stages, filling the seats, and writing the narrative on its own terms. Zambia 2026 is shaping up to be exactly that kind of moment, and these two will be right in the middle of it.