Idris Elba and Google will give 100,000 African creators, including in Ghana, free access to Gemini AI tools as part of a wider push that includes a planned creative village.

The announcement matters for Ghanaian creators specifically, since Elba, whose mother is Ghanaian, has named the country as the site of a planned production hub alongside the free software rollout, signalling long term investment rather than a one time gift.

Google and the Elba Hope Foundation will jointly fund about $1 million worth of access to Google’s Gemini AI assistant and other digital tools for roughly 100,000 creators in Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, Kenya and Sierra Leone. James Manyika, Google’s Senior Vice President for Research and Technology, said the grant targets “those creatives who don’t have access to these enormous studio budgets.”

Elba framed the initiative as solving an access problem rather than a talent gap, arguing during a video appearance at Google’s AI summit in Johannesburg on Wednesday that vision is not scarce among African creators, but tools and opportunity are.

Africa’s media and entertainment market is valued at about $93 billion and is projected to grow to $118 billion by 2031, according to Mordor Intelligence. Despite that scale, the continent has fewer than 3,000 cinema screens, a gap Elba has cited as evidence that funding alone will not fix the industry’s infrastructure problems.

Elba has tied the AI grant to a broader investment push that includes the planned creative village in Ghana, a studio complex in Zanzibar, and Akuna Wallet, a fintech platform built to speed cross border payments to African creators. Earlier this month, King Charles III knighted Elba at Windsor Castle for his youth and community work, and Danone, in which Elba holds a stake, agreed to buy the nutrition company Huel for about €1 billion.

Some industry observers have questioned whether free software access can offset deeper problems, including patchy internet connectivity and uneven digital literacy across the continent, arguing that the real test will be how well Google and Elba support creators after the initial rollout.

The grant follows Google’s wider push to expand AI adoption in Africa. The company plans to select 15 African startups for an AI program starting July 21, part of a goal to back 50 African ventures by 2028.