This is Business Daily on the BBC World Service. I'm Vivian Nunes. It's been a tough year for most of the entertainment industry.

Production shutdowns or limited filming bubbles have been costly and time-consuming. But one sector is booming.

Animation, especially in Africa. We have an incredibly young and talented population in South Africa where I'm based, for example,

Pixar and a lot of the other big studios actually do a lot of their animation work here.

We hear from animators and producers from across the continent on wide demand for their films

has never been higher.

If you look at the people who have won awards internationally, who are making collaborations

with Hollywood, with people in different industries across the continent and in Europe,

there's a lot of women at the forefront of that. Business Daily from the BBC.

Animation has been a popular storytelling medium for the past 100 years. In the 20th century,

it was dominated by American animation studios such as Walt Disney. Later came anime productions

out of Japan. But in the past few years, a new animation hub has been quietly building in Africa.

Today on Business Daily, we hear how animators across the continent are creating content that's chiming with local audiences.

Others are being commissioned by studios overseas for production services.

Last year, Netflix acquired its first African animation, a cartoon starring four teenage

girls set in a futuristic Lusaka, Zambia.

And while so much of the global entertainment industry has been shut down by the pandemic lately,

animation is proving pretty COVID-resistant. Nick Wilson is the founder of the African Animation Network, which aims to

support and promote the industry. He's based in Johannesburg. There's some incredible, innovative

work coming out of, you know, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Egypt, Uganda,

South Africa, Mozambique, Burkina Faso.

Wherever we've been able to kind of scratch the surface and connect the community, we've found

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