A nexus of pan-African cultural entrepreneurship and social change with roots at Harvard
by J. Williams
When Nneka Ezeigwe (HBS ‘15) and Jacques Jonathan Nyemb (HKS ‘16) co-founded OmenaLab in summer 2015, they acted on their bold vision of exposing Africans and the rest of world to the continent’s rich cultural heritage. OmenaLab is a pan-African hub for cultural entrepreneurship. It accelerates cultural projects trying to scale, and provides them with access to financing, institutional support from larger organizations, and business consulting services.
At its core, OmenaLab is a socially minded startup that ultimately strives to create a point of convergence for African artists and art-lovers.
The organization supports projects in eleven sectors: music, television, cinema, radio, video games, visual arts, print media, books, concerts and festivals, architecture, and advertising. This broad scope has created a platform from which to attract a variety of creative projects from across Africa and the diaspora.
Sustainable Cultural Projects
Currently, OmenaLab works with two ventures, Akoa Productions and Festival à Sahel Ouvert. Akoa Productions is a Paris-based educational cartoon project that highlights the historical contributions of black people in Europe from antiquity to the 18th century. “Much of this history has been left out of conventional history books and we think that re-telling these stories will help to build cultural pride and integrity among black people in Europe,” wrote Ezeigwe in an email to the Center for African Studies.
OmenaLab’s other project under incubation, Festival à Sahel Ouvert, is an annual music and dance festival in Mboumba, a rural village in northern Senegal. The festival’s organizer, Xavier Simonin, strives to promote economic empowerment, health, and education through cultural activities and plans to expand the festival to other rural locations in West Africa.
OmenaLab is also screening other ventures, including in fashion. Its staff and board of directors include experts in management consulting, television media, law, health care venture capital, engineering, policy analysis, and marketing, all of whom are passionate about the creative industry in Africa. They draw from their wide-ranging skills to create business plans, find institutional partners, and provide management tools to the African cultural projects they advise.
Pan-African Vision
The initiative prides itself on its international staff and the pan-African ideal it embodies. Headquartered in Nigeria and Luxembourg, the company has a clearly global outlook, with nationals of Algeria, Cameroon, Canada, Côte d’Ivoire, France, Luxembourg, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, Togo, and the United States on the team. OmenaLab’s Executive Directors, Jacques Nyemb and Nneka Ezeigwe, coordinate a transnational operation with staff members on at least three continents at any given time.
Despite this challenge, they recognize the importance of the pan-African ethos and the role the diaspora can play in spreading African culture. “From the USA to Brazil, Mexico, Europe, and even Asia,” wrote Ezeigwe, “we can see expressions of African culture that are part of the pan-Africanist ideal.” “We need to celebrate our common origins.”
Harvard Roots
OmenaLab began as an idea of connecting artists to each other to foster mutual support and cross-disciplinary collaborations, a dream the founders concretized at while students at Harvard. Originally from Lagos, Ezeigwe was President of the 2015 Africa Business Conference at Harvard Business School, which drew over 1500 attendees. Nyemb, a Cameroonian lawyer trained in London and Paris, co-heads the Africa Caucus at Harvard Kennedy School, from which he will graduate with a Master’s in Public Administration in May 2016.
Whilst at Harvard, the two co-founders collaborated on several projects, in the process realizing their shared love for the arts. Ezeigwe, who originally aspired to become a writer before receiving an engineering degree from Imperial College in London, believes that “arts and culture are very great guardians of heritage and pride.” She shares this sentiment with Jacques Nyemb and the other members of her team, one of whom, Junius O. Williams ‘18, is President of the Harvard Africa Business and Investment Club (HABIC). Similarly, one of OmenaLab’s directors, Eric Kacou, graduated as a Mid-Career/Master’s in Public Administration Edward S. Mason Fellow from Harvard Kennedy School in 2011.
OmenaLab’s co-founders hope to tap into the rich network of resources Harvard has to offer. “Harvard can be an extraordinary platform to gather all the knowledge resources we may need to advance our mission. In addition, I am hoping that the strong network of art enthusiasts can help us in fundraising,” they wrote in an email.
Moving forward, OmenaLab will continue to incubate projects across Africa and the diaspora. It has established a framework to advise projects, establish international partnerships, and promote the industry more broadly. With a mission statement of positioning “the cultural industry as a vehicle for economic prosperity and social transformation across Africa,” OmenaLab typifies a promising cultural venture with an explicitly social outlook.