African creators can build a global audience from their first post, but getting that audience to pay them, reliably and across borders, is still hard. Payment infrastructure that works every time would fix it, the founders of Selar, Mainstack and Raenest said on a panel at Moonshot by TechCabal.<\/p>\n
The panel focused on everyday creators, far from the top tier with millions of followers, and most of them earn little. The Nigerian Creator Economy Report <\/a>2025 found that 56.45% of Nigerian creators earn less than $100 a month from their work.<\/p>\n Ayobami Oyaleke, founder and CEO of Mainstack, which he described as a \u201ccommerce platform and financial back office for creators\u201d operating in about 150 countries, said an audience is revenue waiting to be collected. \u201cAs much as you have the audience, there\u2019s a revenue path for you,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The trouble is that most creators don\u2019t know how to turn a following into income, or they hit a wall when they try to collect it. \u201cTools only give you the pipe,\u201d Oyaleke said. \u201cYou\u2019re still the one running the volume.\u201d Mainstack\u2019s approach is to treat every creator as global from the start so that a first $100 from a buyer abroad doesn\u2019t get lost to payment failures.<\/p>\n Douglas Kendyson founded Selar in 2016 after fielding requests at Paystack from people who wanted to sell digital products online but faced \u20a6150,000 quotes for a website and unreliable payments. A decade later<\/a>, Selar is bootstrapped and profitable and says it has paid out more than \u20a618 billion ($12.9 million)<\/a> to nearly 400,000 creators.<\/p>\n Kendyson was clear about what a platform should leave to creators: Selar does not find customers for them, which he called \u201ca very tasking thing.\u201d Its affiliate network, which lets marketers sell a creator\u2019s product for a commission, now brings in more revenue than its subscriptions, he said.<\/p>\n Sodruldeen Mustapha, co-founder and CTO of Raenest, which helps African freelancers get paid from abroad, said the payment feature that matters most is control. Creators already export their talent, he argued, and their earnings should follow: collected from a client anywhere, in any currency, and under the creator\u2019s control once they land.<\/p>\n The three founders agreed on the core problem. A creator in Lagos can have followers in Europe and the United States from day one, but the money struggles to make the same trip.<\/p>\n Kendyson, when asked what the next generation of creators needs, reached for nothing new. A decade in, he said, a new payment gateway seems to appear every week, \u201cyet payments are still very fractured for a lot of us.\u201d The infrastructure that fixes it, he said, \u201cdoesn\u2019t even have to be particularly unique. It just has to work.\u201d<\/p>\n Source: <\/p>\n African creators can build a global audience from their first post, but getting that audience to pay them, reliably and across borders, is still hard. Payment infrastructure that works every… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnigerianews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnigerianews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnigerianews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnigerianews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnigerianews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6251"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/globalnigerianews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6251\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnigerianews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnigerianews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnigerianews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}