Bolanle Austen-Peters Wins Top Culture Award at Africa Soft Power Gala 2026 in Nairobi
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| Bolanle Austen-Peters (Nigerian lawyer and filmmaker) |
Bolanle Austen-Peters, the founder of Nigerian theatre, film, and cultural businesses, has won the ASP Architect of Culture Award. She received the prize at the Africa Soft Power Gala & Awards 2026 in Nairobi. The award recognises her work over more than 20 years to build the foundations of modern Nigerian theatre.
The award was presented by H.E. Zainab Hawa Bangura, Under-Secretary General and Director-General of the United Nations Office in Nairobi, at the final Gala of the Summit on 23 May 2026. The award highlighted Austen-Peters as one of the creators of Africa's creative economy—a topic that Africa’s top cultural, financial, and political leaders had spent the previous days looking into.
Originally trained as a lawyer, Austen-Peters worked in Nigeria and abroad before starting Terra Kulture in Lagos in 2003. She first designed it as a cultural home for Nigerian art, language, literature, food, and heritage. By her own account, she was driven by one question: what happens to a people’s culture when there are too few institutions built to protect, develop, and pass it on?
With Saro the Musical, she helped start a new era for modern Nigerian theatre. She proved that local stories could be produced with high ambition, precision, and commercial success. Through BAP Productions, she followed this up with Wakaa! The Musical, Fela and the Kalakuta Queens, and Moremi the Musical. These productions created jobs, trained crews, built audiences, and showed brands, investors, and cultural institutions that African theatre could attract huge crowds and steady demand.
That work then expanded into films, including 93 Days, The Bling Lagosians, Collision Course, Man of God, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, and House of Ga’a. Each film extended the range of Nigerian storytelling and reached new audiences. Through Terra Kulture and the Terra Academy for the Arts, she has also built a training system behind the scenes. This has helped develop actors, writers, producers, designers, and technical crews across the wider Nigerian creative industry.
Her recognition at the ASP Gala 2026 matched the main message of the Summit: that culture turns into real influence only when it is backed by institutions, and that talent becomes a proper industry only when it is paired with training systems, production facilities, and long-term funding.
Earlier in the Summit, on 22 May, Austen-Peters spoke on a panel called Creators as Economic Power. There, she argued that African creative businesses should be funded with the same serious discipline as any other major industry. She pointed to the Cannes Film Festival as an example of what a serious creative economy looks like. Cannes is an annual €800 million industry that brings economic value to restaurants, fashion, hotels, tourism, and production services. She noted that African creative businesses bring similar value to multiple sectors, but African banks still wrongly label them as too risky.
The panel was one of the most popular sessions at the Summit. It also featured Oladapo “D’banj” Oyebanjo, CEO of The C.R.E.A.M Platform; Ken Osei, Principal Investment Officer at the International Finance Corporation (IFC); and Brian Mogeni, CEO of Wowzi. During the session, D’banj revealed that Afreximbank had bought shares in his platform instead of giving him a loan, and Osei confirmed that the IFC is investing in sports and entertainment arenas across the continent.
The main idea behind both the panel and the Gala award the next night was the same: Africa’s creative economy has reached a point where it needs proper institutional infrastructure to match the global cultural influence the continent already has.
Austen-Peters was honoured alongside two other African women who have changed their respective fields. Faith Kipyegon, the Kenyan middle-distance runner whose three back-to-back Olympic gold medals in the 1,500 metres changed women’s athletics, received the ASP Gold Standard Award. It was presented by George Odhiambo, Managing Director of National Bank of Kenya, and accepted on her behalf by her long-time coach Patrick Sang.
The late Koyo Kouoh, the Cameroonian-born curator who changed how the world understands African contemporary art, was given the ASP Creative Legacy Award after her death. It was presented by David Kinyua, Chairman of Renaissance Capital, and accepted by Neneh Diallo, Founder of NDG Agency. Kouoh was appointed in December 2024 as the first ever African woman to lead the Venice Biennale’s International Art Exhibition. She died in Basel on 10 May 2025, but the team she chose went on to open her exhibition exactly as she had planned.
Together, the three winners proved the single point that the Summit had spent four days making: African excellence lasts when it is built on strong institutions, not just on individual talent.
The Africa Soft Power Summit 2026 took place in Nairobi from 20 to 23 May. This was its seventh year, and the theme was Africa’s Compound Interest: Aligning Ecosystems of Finance, Creativity and Human Capital for Growth. The Summit, founded and led by Dr Nkiru Balonwu, has become one of the top meetings for African business, politics, technology, media, finance, and creative leaders. It brought together guests from across Africa and the diaspora, alongside VIPs including H.E. Zainab Hawa; Ms Ummi Bashir, Principal Secretary of Kenya’s State Department for Culture, the Arts and Heritage; and His Majesty Alfred Nnaemeka Achebe, the Obi of Onitsha.
Across four days of talks, the Summit pushed one clear idea: Africa’s next ten years will depend less on having lots of talent, culture, and consumers, and more on the systems, institutions, and infrastructure that allow that activity to grow into lasting economic value for the continent. For Austen-Peters, whose career has been a long effort to achieve exactly that, the award was both personal and meaningful for the whole industry: a Nigerian institution-builder celebrated at a continental Summit for work that has helped change how African creative economies are valued, funded, and understood.
