Nigerian creativity is one of the country’s most successful exports, and one of its least organised marketplaces. Nollywood films travel the continent, Afrobeats fills rooms far from Lagos, and Nigerian fashion shows up on runways abroad — yet an investor wanting to find, value and back these assets has had no single front door. The Ministry of Arts and Culture’s new portal is an attempt to build one.

The Ministry has launched an online portal showcasing Nigerian films, music, fashion and tourism assets to global investors. The proposition is straightforward: gather the country’s creative output into one organised, browsable window so that capital looking for African cultural assets can see what exists and who is behind it. For a sector whose value has always been real but scattered, visibility is itself a form of infrastructure.

The commercial logic rests on a familiar friction. The creative economy generates enormous cultural reach but converts it into formal investment unevenly, partly because the deal flow is informal and hard to find from outside. A government-curated shop window does not create the talent — that was never the shortage — but it lowers the search cost for the capital, and search cost is often what keeps money on the sidelines. Visibility precedes valuation.

The portal’s worth will be decided by what sits behind the homepage: whether listings carry the rights, revenue and contact detail a serious investor needs, and whether it connects to the rest of the ecosystem rather than standing as a brochure. A directory that informs is useful; one that enables a transaction is valuable. Nigeria’s culture has never struggled to be seen. The task now is to make it just as easy to be backed.