Carry1st and COD:M are launching the Creators College — a five-day, fully-funded program designed to build the next generation of African Call of Duty: Mobile content creators. The first cohort of 10 is already in.

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There's a version of the African gaming story that gets told a lot: enormous potential, passionate players, talent that punches above its weight, given the odds stacked against it. It's a true story. It's also incomplete, because potential without infrastructure is just a compliment.

The COD: M Creators College is an attempt to close that gap, and the first cohort is already underway.

Built by Carry1st in partnership with Call of Duty: Mobile and Infinix, the Creators College is a fully-funded, in-person development program for emerging African COD: M content creators. Hotel, accommodation, feeding, transportation; all covered. Five days in Lagos. Four days of structured learning, workshops, collaborative sessions, and hands-on livestream training. Ten creators selected from across the continent. No fees, no conditions, no catch.

The first cohort has been chosen. Their education starts now.

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The Landscape That Made This Possible

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Call of Duty: Mobile arrived on African phones in a big way, but the infrastructure around it — the publishing, the payments, the community scaffolding — took time to catch up. Carry1st, Africa's leading mobile games publisher, has spent years building exactly that scaffolding: local payment systems, regional tournaments, community activation, and West African expansion for COD:M. The Carry1st Africa Cup, their flagship tournament, is now an officially recognized qualifying event for the COD:M World Championship. The pipeline from African player to global competitor exists.

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What hasn't existed, until now, is an equivalent pipeline for creators.

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The gaming content creator economy in Africa operates under structural disadvantages that most people outside the ecosystem don't fully reckon with. Internet costs money, and not cheap money. A decent streaming setup — the kind that makes a stream actually watchable — runs into hundreds of dollars in a market where that sum represents real financial sacrifice. The algorithms that surface content to global audiences were not designed with African creators in mind. And the knowledge infrastructure that creators in the US or UK take for granted (mentorship networks, creator schools, brand relationships, monetization playbooks) largely doesn't exist here in organized form.

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The creators who have broken through anyway have done it through sheer resilience, often by reverse-engineering what worked for creators in other markets and figuring out what translated and what didn't. They built careers in spite of the environment, not because of it.

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Oluwasaanufunmi Ajayi, Carry1st's Community and Events Lead, frames it directly: "The ecosystem has caught up, and brands are starting to put real resources behind the talents on the continent; the talent has always been there, and many have risen through the ranks despite the many challenges. But now we are looking to accelerate the ecosystem's growth with initiatives like this."

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The Creators College is the most concrete expression of that commitment Carry1st has made yet.

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What the College Actually Is

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Let's be specific about what kind of program this is, because "creator development initiative" can mean almost anything and often means very little.

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This is not a two-hour webinar with a certificate at the end. The Creators College runs across four full days of programming, with a structured syllabus that covers both the craft and the business of content creation.

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The art of content comes first: narrative storytelling, recreating virality, understanding what makes something worth watching and worth sharing. This is the most undervalued skillset in the creator economy. Most aspiring creators think about going viral as a matter of luck. The better ones understand that virality has patterns, and those patterns can be studied and learned.

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Branding is the next layer. A creator without a clear identity is just someone with a camera. The college addresses what it means to have a voice and a lane, and how to protect and develop that identity as an audience grows.

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Collaboration for growth follows, arguably, the most underrated lever available to emerging creators. The most effective growth strategy for a creator with a small audience is to get in front of someone else's audience. The mechanics of that, how to find the right collaborators, how to structure the partnership, how to make it mutually valuable, is a teachable skill.

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Monetization strategy covers the "okay, I have an audience, now what?" question. Turning attention into income is not automatic. It requires understanding of brand deals, audience monetization tools, sponsorship pitches, and how to build multiple revenue streams without compromising the content.

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Livestreaming technique and viewer retention get into the technical and psychological sides of one of gaming content's highest-value formats. Going live is different from posting a video. It demands real-time energy management, audience engagement, and the ability to make something worth watching in the moment, without edits.

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And notably, the program carves out dedicated time for mental health within the creator economy.

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That last item matters more than it might initially seem. Burnout is an occupational hazard in the creator space, and it disproportionately affects creators who are grinding in resource-constrained environments without the support structures available to more established creators. The consistency that brands and algorithms reward requires showing up repeatedly, often without clear reward, over long periods of time. The psychological toll of that is real, and most programs that claim to develop creators don't acknowledge it at all. The fact that it's a named part of the curriculum here signals something about Carry1st's understanding of what a sustainable creator career actually requires.

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Creators arrive with their laptops, engage in real assignments, gain hands-on experience with a professional streaming setup, and leave with connections to 9 other creators who operate at the same level and understand, from experience, exactly what the grind looks like.

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The Gap This Is Trying to Close

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Ajayi is blunt about the specific problem the program is solving at the individual creator level.

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"The gap is everything that comes after," he says. "The resources; internet, gaming and streaming equipment, because that stuff is expensive, the consistency, the strategy, the long-term thinking, the 'okay I went viral once, what's next?' moment. A lot of creators are one good break away from a real career, but they don't have the foundation to catch it when it comes. That's the gap. That's what we're closing."

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The "one good break away" framing is the most honest description of where most talented African creators are stuck. The viral moment happens. The brand inquiry comes in. The opportunity arrives. And then, without a foundation, without the systems, the strategy, the professional skills to turn a moment into a career, it evaporates.

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This is the part of the African creator story that doesn't get told enough. The narrative tends to stop at the success story: creator breaks through, creator blows up, creator gets the deal. What gets edited out is the much larger number of creators who had all the raw talent and one good moment, and couldn't hold on to it because nobody had ever taught them how.

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The Creators College is designed to change that calculation; not just for this cohort, but as a proof of concept for what creator development in the African gaming space can look like.

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Who Made the Cut

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Applications closed March 2nd. Ten creators were selected from across the continent.

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The selection criteria were specific. Carry1st wasn't looking for the most polished profiles or the biggest follower counts. They were looking for something harder to fake and more predictive of long-term success: consistency and resilience. Creators who already had a voice, a style, an audience, even if that audience was small, and who showed up regardless.

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Ajayi describes the ideal candidate plainly: "We wanted to see a string of consistency or resilience; they already have something. A voice, a style, a following, even if it's just 50 people, they show up regardless."

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That's a more sophisticated selection criterion than it might appear. Following count is a lagging indicator. Consistency under resource constraints, showing up and creating when the internet is slow, and the equipment is borrowed, and the algorithm isn't cooperating, is a much better signal of who will actually be able to use the skills the program provides.

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The ten creators who made it through that filter are now in the program. "The instruction is simple," Ajayi says. "Show up ready to learn and work, and your life will be changed forever."

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Why the Networking Piece Is Underrated

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There's a component of the Creators College that tends to get mentioned last in these kinds of programs, almost as an afterthought. It shouldn't be.

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Putting ten creators with the same specific challenges in the same physical space for four days is not incidental to the program's value; it might be the most important part. The loneliness of the content creation grind is genuinely hard on people. The feeling that nobody around you quite understands why you're spending your weekends recording videos that maybe fifty people will watch, the second-guessing, the irregular feedback loop of content performance, these things compound over time and take a psychological toll that is difficult to articulate to people outside the creator world.

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The Creators College cohort will leave with nine people in their network who understand that experience from the inside. People they made content with. People they shared workshop sessions with. People who saw them struggle with a live-stream setup and pushed through it anyway. That network has real career value, and it will only grow as the program runs more cohorts and the alumni base expands.

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In markets with mature creator ecosystems, these networks form organically through events, through industry gatherings, through YouTube meetups, TikTok Creator Funds, and so on. They don't yet form organically at scale in the African gaming space. Carry1st is manufacturing the conditions for them to form, which is exactly the kind of infrastructure work that doesn't make headlines but shapes industries.

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What Comes Next

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The first cohort is not the last. The Creators College is designed as a repeating program, and the structure Carry1st has built; the curriculum, the selection process, and the partnerships are built to scale.

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For the ten creators currently in Lagos, the stakes are personal. But the significance of this cohort extends beyond their individual careers. They are, in a real sense, the proof of concept. The creators who come after them will benefit from everything this cohort learns and demonstrates. In any ecosystem, the people who move when the infrastructure is just becoming real tend to shape what it becomes.

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African gaming has been building toward a moment where it has the institutional support to develop its own creator class, not import a template from elsewhere, but build one that actually fits the ecosystem. That moment is now.

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Follow along with Carry1st on Instagram, X, and Facebook for updates from the Creators College as it unfolds.

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The COD:M Creators College is a Carry1st initiative in partnership with Call of Duty: Mobile, designed to develop the next generation of African gaming content creators.