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This report builds on work I first published nearly a year ago and have continued to update behind the scenes since, with the goal of making the record as complete and accurate as possible. That process has included long waits for responses, clarifications, or confirmations from officials, and in some cases, no response at all. As Q2 kicks off, this feels like a good moment to share what we've learned over the past 10 months. Our April 2026 updated 54-country registry documents each country's level of activity, confirms agreement-level arrangements, separately verifies official non-treaty cooperation agreements, and identifies gaps where no official record has yet to be located across sources as of April 6, 2026. This data set, brought to you by African Screen Intelligence (ASI), covers 21 African countries with confirmed official agreement-level film or audio-visual co-production status, plus two countries with separately confirmed official non-treaty cooperation instruments on record. The results don't follow the usual assumptions. Nigeria, home to one of the continent's most active film production sectors, only signed its first confirmed official agreement-level audio-visual co-production arrangement in 2025. South Africa, meanwhile, has the densest agreement network in the registry and continues to position itself as the continent's most connected production base. Regionally, Morocco and Tunisia have long-standing ties to Europe and have used them to build treaty networks. West Africa is seeing more activity. Nigeria, Côte d'Ivoire, and Senegal have all signed new agreements or appear in the current agreement map with recent activity. But gaps remain. Ghana falls under "no official record located" in the reviewed official source set. Most of East and Central Africa is still absent from the confirmed agreement-level map, with Kenya and South Africa as the exceptions. France remains the most frequent treaty partner, with agreements registered across multiple African countries. But others are entering. China has signed cooperation MOUs that appear here as non-treaty instruments, not agreement-level entries. Brazil's 2025 agreement with Nigeria is a rare example of direct South-South engagement between two large cultural economies. Morocco's position also includes multiple intra-African agreements, including Benin, Côte d'Ivoire, Egypt, Mali, Niger, and Senegal.
