Pan-African AI company Gebeya and US-headquartered non-profit IREX have opened a dedicated application pathway into CANEX Create-Thon 2026, giving alumni of IREX programmes access to one of the continent’s larger AI creative challenges.
The Create-Thon is part of Creative Africa Nexus, the African Export-Import Bank initiative supporting a creative economy valued at close to $59 billion. It runs across three categories — music, video and games — with participants building AI-powered creative products rather than business applications.
The partnership provides IREX alumni with an exclusive application route and prize opportunities for standout AI solutions. Neither the prize amounts nor the application deadline were disclosed.
Built on African infrastructure
The competition runs on Gebeya’s Dala Studio, which lets creators build by describing what they want in natural language rather than writing code — opening participation to non-technical entrants.
The detail the announcement leaves out is where that platform runs. Gebeya launched Dala in December in partnership with Cassava Technologies, combining Cassava’s African data centres and GPU infrastructure with Gebeya’s tooling to deliver AI tools hosted and operated on the continent. That makes the Create-Thon an unusual case in African AI: creative tools built by an African company, running on African compute, aimed at African creators — at a moment when most continental AI activity depends on foreign infrastructure.
“AI is changing who gets to create technology,” said Amadou Daffe, chief executive of Gebeya. “The next generation of African innovation won’t be defined by who can code the fastest. It will be defined by who can identify meaningful problems and build solutions that improve lives.”
Aleksander Dardeli, IREX president and chief executive, framed Afreximbank’s platform as treating African creative talent “as an economic force, not just a cultural one,” and said the value of such programmes lies in what participants build afterwards. “I’ve seen what happens when young innovators get the right tools at the right moment,” he said. “They don’t just participate; they build things that outlast the program that got them started.”
The music category enters contested ground
The three tracks cover AI-powered composition and production in music, AI-driven storytelling and editing in video, and interactive experiences in games.
The music category lands in an active argument. AuraaAfrica founder Gift Lubele told a Johannesburg gathering in July that 94% of AI music models are trained on Western data, with African data accounting for 0.04%. Ugandan producer Benon Mugumbya, who uses AI in his own workflow, has argued the outputs remain recognisably synthetic — too clean, missing what he called soul. Spotify introduced AI Persona labelling this month, and Ugandan lawyer Hamza Ssekamate has noted that African copyright frameworks have not kept pace with voice cloning or style replication.
A competition asking African creators to build AI music products is therefore doing something more consequential than running a hackathon. If the outputs are trained on African material and built on African tooling, they address the representation gap Lubele described. If they are not, they add to it.
Participants also gain access to mentorship and a pan-African network of creators and industry contacts. Afreximbank has separately backed the creative sector through a $1 billion Film Finance Facility and a technology accelerator offering up to $250,000 in equity support.
