Africa Prod Fest 2024

Through advanced technical training, co-creation sessions, workshops, and professional encounters, the festival enabled producers, beatmakers, sound engineers, DJs, and music publishers to strengthen their skills and explore new avenues for collaboration. Hosted in a temporary cultural third space set up in Kribi—with a recording studio, stage, exhibition areas, and artist accommodation—the festival also served as a pilot for a locally anchored, structured support model, generating tangible benefits for participants.

Among the 120 professionals selected from over 300 applications, 10 women DJs were highlighted through a partnership with the Moféac association, which advocates for greater female representation in music production in Cameroon. These participants benefited from workshops in beatmaking, sound engineering (live and studio), music publishing, and DJing, organized by areas of expertise. Additionally, a two-and-a-half-day core curriculum addressed key industry fundamentals: copyright, software tools, music professions, and emerging opportunities in artificial intelligence, with insights from Michael Turbot, R&D expert at Sony Music.

The final three days of the festival were devoted to a creative bootcamp, during which five original tracks were produced. These songs will be released in 2025 under the Likoda Prod label, in collaboration with Peer Music and other international partners. A digital library project, Africa Prod Synch, is also in development to monetize these works, particularly in the audiovisual and gaming sectors. Each evening, “after-work” concerts brought together the local audience and festival participants for live performances, showcasing emerging talent in a professional yet festive atmosphere. Representatives from partner cultural institutions—including the French Institutes of Togo, Gabon, Congo, Rwanda, the Goethe-Institut, MASA Lab (Côte d’Ivoire), and the South Korean label CTGA—facilitated professional mobility to Kribi, underscoring the regional and international scope of the initiative.

Africa Prod Fest is not limited to its inaugural edition: training and residency programmes will continue throughout the year in Kribi, with the goal of supporting 20 artists in their professional development. Songwriting camps are also being planned in Nigeria and South Korea, reinforcing a strategy of South-South and South-North cooperation. By combining training, creation, professional networking, and dissemination, the festival fosters the emergence of a strong and export-ready African sonic identity, while addressing the concrete needs of artists. The next edition of the festival is scheduled for 2025.