Bolanle Austen-Peters Wins ASP Architect Of Culture Award At Africa Soft Power Gala 2026 In Nairobi

Bolanle Austen-Peters, the Nigerian theatre, film and cultural-enterprise founder, has been honoured with the ASP Architect of Culture Award at the Africa Soft Power Gala & Awards 2026 in Nairobi, in recognition of more than two decades of work building the institutional 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 at Nairobi, at the closing Gala of the Summit on 23 May 2026. The recognition positioned Austen-Peters as one of the architects of the creative economy Africa’s most senior cultural, financial and policy leaders Hawa Bangurae preceding days examining.

Trained as a lawyer, she worked in Nigeria and internationally before founding Terra Kulture in Lagos in 2003, originally conceived as a cultural home for Nigerian art, language, literature, food and heritage. The question driving the work, by her own account, was what happens to a people’s culture when there are too few institutions built to preserve, develop and transmit it.

With Saro the Musical, she helped usher in a new era of modern Nigerian theatre by demonstrating that local stories could be produced with ambition, precision and commercial viability. Through BAP Productions, she followed with Wakaa! The Musical, Fela and the Kalakuta Queens and Moremi the Musical, productions that created jobs, trained crews, built audiences and showed brands, investors and cultural institutions that African theatre could command scale and sustain demand.

That work expanded into film, including 93 Days, The Bling Lagosians, Collision Course, Man of God, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti and House of Ga’a, each extending the range of Nigerian storytelling and the audiences it could reach. Through Terra Kulture and the Terra Academy for the Arts, she has also built the training pipeline beneath the spotlight, developing actors, writers, producers, designers and technical crew across the wider Nigerian creative industry.

The recognition at the ASP Gala 2026 reflected the Summit’s central argument that culture becomes influence when it is supported by institutions, and that talent becomes industry when it is paired with training systems, production capacity and long-term capital.

Austen-Peters had appeared earlier in the Summit on the Creators as Economic Power panel on 22 May, where she made the case for African creative businesses to be financed with the same discipline applied to any other major industry. She pointed to the Cannes Film Festival as the benchmark for what a serious creative economy looks like, an 800 million euro annual industry whose economic value extends across restaurants, fashion, hospitality, tourism and production services, and noted that African creative businesses generate comparable cross-sector value but remain misclassified inside the risk frameworks African banks continue to apply.

The panel, which 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; and Brian Mogeni, CEO of Wowzi, was one of the most closely watched sessions of the Summit. D’banj disclosed that Afreximbank had taken an equity position in his platform rather than extending a loan, and Osei confirmed that the IFC is investing in sports and entertainment arenas across the continent.

The thread running through both the panel and the Gala recognition the following night was consistent: Africa’s creative economy has reached a moment that requires the institutional infrastructure to match the cultural influence the continent already exports.

Austen-Peters was honoured alongside two other African women whose work has reshaped their respective fields. Faith Kipyegon, the Kenyan middle-distance runner whose three consecutive Olympic gold medals in the 1,500 metres have redefined women’s athletics, received the ASP Gold Standard Award, 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 reshaped the global understanding of African contemporary art, was honoured posthumously with the ASP Creative Legacy Award, presented by David Kinyua, Chairman of Renaissance Capital, and received on her behalf by Neneh Diallo, Founder of NDG Agency. Kouoh, who had been appointed in December 2024 as the first African woman ever to lead the Venice Biennale’s International Art Exhibition, died in Basel on 10 May 2025; the team she had chosen carried her exhibition to its opening exactly as she had planned.

Together, the three honourees represented a single argument the Summit had spent four days advancing: that African excellence becomes durable when it is built on institutional foundations, not individual brilliance alone.

The Africa Soft Power Summit 2026 took place in Nairobi from 20 to 23 May, in its seventh edition, under the theme 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 most senior convenings of African business, policy, technology, media, finance and creative industry leadership, and brought together delegates from across Africa and the diaspora, alongside dignitaries 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 conversations, the Summit advanced a single thesis: that Africa’s next decade will depend less on the abundance of its talent, culture and consumer base than on the systems, institutions and infrastructure that allow that activity to compound into lasting economic value for the continent. For Austen-Peters, whose career has been one long argument for exactly that proposition, the recognition was both personal and structural: a Nigerian institution-builder honoured at a continental Summit, for work that has helped reshape how African creative economies are valued, financed and understood.