Why Kenya's creative economy should be empowered to thrive

When I first came to Kenya at 20 years old, it was as an anthropology student at Harvard University planning to spend a semester abroad in East Africa, having already lived and worked for a summer in West Africa and eager to expand my knowledge of the continent. Those three months planned quickly stretched to six, as I fell deeply in love with Kenya and its culture and spirit.

I studied at the University of Nairobi; learned Kiswahili, travelled across the country; and wound up living in a small Nandi farming village outside Kapsabet, learning enough Kinandi to interview the elders about their changing ways of life and making friends, there and throughout Kenya, who remain friends to this day.

It is in this spirit of warm allegiance and of gratitude for the richness and uniqueness of Kenya that I look forward to attending the US-Kenya Creative Economic Forum in June. As I learned from listening to those Nandi elders 35 years ago, there is nothing more vital or more effective, in any culture and throughout the world, than storytelling. The ability to create authentic and original narratives is a superpower – whether in spoken words or literature, dance or music, sports or theatre, motion pictures or television or political speechmaking or songwriting.

And thus it’s no surprise that creative industries and economies are some of the fastest-growing and most potent forces for empowerment and prosperity across the globe. We are living and working in a time of colossal upheaval, which is a daunting prospect for all of us, but a rare and phenomenal opportunity as well.

As industries convulse, as long-standing global structures and hierarchies shudder, and as traditional orders and expectations crumble in this radically reinventive era, there are openings for new ventures and voices – including Kenyan ventures and voices – that have long been suppressed and ignored. And nowhere is this truer than in movies and television.

My company, Invention Studios, is based in Hollywood but partners with Kenyan creators to develop their films and series into worldwide hits. Parasite was a 2019 movie out of South Korea, filmed entirely in Korean, that went on to make more than $260M in global box office, win the Academy Award for best picture, and change Korea and how the world views it forever. RRR was a movie made in India, almost entirely in the local language of Telugu, that grossed almost $270M at the box office and instantly obliterated expectations of so-called Bollywood movies while inspiring a new generation of Indian filmmakers to think bigger and to earn globally-sized revenues as a result.

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There is nothing to say that the next Parasite or RRR won’t come from a Kenyan filmmaker, thus creating jobs, profits, and worldwide admiration and investment for Kenya in the process. It is my honour to be part of that effort.

And it is my pleasure, and the culmination of my 35-year friendship with Kenya and Kenyans, to help empower the country’s creative economy to thrive, along with all the participants of the 2025 Creative Economy Forum.