When the Nigerian star Burna Boy stepped out before an adoring crowd at New York’s Citi Field this summer, he confirmed himself as pop royalty. Weeks earlier, in London, he had filled an 80,000-capacity venue. In New York, he became the first African artist to sell out an American stadium.

He sang his new single, Sittin’ on Top of the World.

It was yet another milestone for Afrobeats, a West African musical genre that is becoming a global sensation. Afrobeats songs were streamed over 13 billion times on Spotify last year, up from eight billion in 2021; the genre’s biggest hit, Rema’s Calm Down, was a fan phenomenon at the soccer World Cup in Qatar. Countless TikTok dance challenges were born.

“It’s a great time to be alive,” said Laolu Senbanjo, a Nigerian artist living in Brooklyn. “Whether I’m in Target or an Uber, I hear the Afrobeats. It’s like a bridge. The world has come together.”

African artists seemed to be on red carpets everywhere this year – at the Grammy Awards, which added a new category for Best African Music; at the Met Gala, where the Nigerian singer Tems came fringed in ostrich feathers; and at the Cannes Film Festival, where a young French-Senegalese director, Ramata-Toulaye Sy, was a breakout star.

African fashion had its own shows in Paris and Milan. In Venice, Africa is the focus of this year’s Architectural Biennale. Last year, an architect from Burkina Faso won the prestigious Pritzker Prize. In 2021, Tanzania-born Abdulrazak Gurnah won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

“Africa’s not just one place,” he said in an interview. “It’s complicated and complex; differentiated, contrasted.”

Long viewed in the West as a niche interest – or worse, exotica – African culture has become the continent’s soft power, and, increasingly, a source of hard cash.

The world’s fastest growing music market is in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the main industry body. By 2030, Africa’s film and music industries could be worth $20 billion and create 20 million jobs, according to UNESCO estimates. Young Africans are honing their talents, sensing an opening.

In Nairobi, hundreds in a poor neighbourhood are learning to play classical music. Scriptwriters and animators are shaking off the clichéd image of a continent defined by famine and conflict to tell new stories – frothy reality shows, gritty gangster tales and even children’s cartoons, made in Africa by Africans, that have aired on streaming services like Disney+ and Amazon Prime.

This summer, Supa Team Four, a cartoon series about teenage superheroes from Zambia who save the world, aired on Netflix. The theme is power — girl power, teen power but also plain electricity: The chief villain tries to knock out the city power grid.

Malenga Mulendema, the show’s creator, worked with a team across six African countries, and said that the movie Black Panther, when it came out in 2018, “paved the way” for new depictions of Africa. “People want to box us in,” she said. “But when you have multiple shows like this you can’t box in, anymore, what it means to tell an African story.”

The commercial potential of Africa’s cultural might is only starting to be realised. Netflix has spent $175 million in Africa since 2016, but has plans to invest $2.5 billion in South Korea. It was not until 2004 that a work by an African artist sold for over $1 million at auction, according to Hannah O’Leary, the head of modern and contemporary African art at Sotheby’s. Since then, another 11 have passed that bar‌. “But the market is still hugely under-realised,” she said.

Foreign companies are looking to cash in. This year gamma, a music company owned in part by Apple, set up an office in Lagos, hoping to discover the next Burna Boy, or even a host of smaller stars. “We’re going straight to the source,” said Sipho Dlamini, a gamma executive.

Born in Zimbabwe but raised in Watford, outside London, in the 1980s, Mr Dlamini remembers being bullied because of his background. “We were called names,” he said. “All kinds of names.”

Now, “African” is a badge of pride. “Historically, the image was what people saw on TV: kids starving, kwashiorkor and flies,” he said, referring to a severe form of malnutrition marked by a swollen belly. “Now they will tell you they are dying to come to Cape Town, to Mombasa, to Zanzibar. It’s cool to be African.”

Zeinab Moawad wondered if she was wasting her time. The 18-year-old stood outside the tutoring centre in Cairo where she had spent a year cramming for college entrance exams. But even if she was granted a place in Egypt’s best engineering or medical schools, she doubted that it would lead to a good job.

“We’re on our own,” she said.

Not long ago, technology was the big idea for enabling Africa to leapfrog its way out of poverty.

Start-ups sprouted in countries like Nigeria, South Africa and Morocco. Innovative technologies, like M-Pesa, brought mobile banking to tens of millions of people in Kenya. Women-only coding schools emerged. Microsoft and Google established major centres in Kenya, the self-styled “Silicon Savannah” of East Africa. Optimists spoke of an “Africa rising.”

But while technology brought billions in investment, it failed dismally on one crucial front: creating jobs.  The continent’s working-age population – people aged 15 to 65 – will hit one billion in the next decade.

“That’s a problem,” said Mo Ibrahim, a Sudanese-born telecommunications tycoon and philanthropist.

It is also a problem for the world, said Aubrey Hruby, an investor in Africa and an author of The Next Africa. She said, “After climate change, Africa’s jobs crisis will be a defining challenge of our era.”

Elsewhere, the answer was industrialisation. In the 1970s and 1980s, when China, South Korea and Japan were the engines of population growth, their factories were filled with young people producing clothes, cars and TVs. It made them rich and lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty.

Africa is poorly positioned to repeat that feat. Other than South Africa and a handful of countries in North Africa, most of the continent has failed to industrialise. In fact, it is losing ground: Africa’s share of global manufacturing is smaller today than it was in 1980.

Infrastructure is an obstacle. Six hundred million Africans, or four in 10, lack electricity. An average American refrigerator consumes more power in a year than a typical person in Africa. Major roads and railways often lead to the coasts, a legacy of extractive colonialism, which inhibits trade between countries. And the baby boom endures, smothering economic growth.

Other regions, like East Asia, prospered only after their birthrates had fallen substantially and a majority of their people had joined the workforce – a phenomenon known as the “demographic transition” that has long driven global growth. Britain’s transition took two centuries, from the 1740s to the 1940s. Thailand did it in about 40 years.

But in Africa, where birthrates remain stubbornly high – nearly twice the global average – that transition has proved elusive.

The picture changes greatly from one country to another. In South Africa, women have two children on average, while in Niger they have seven. Some smaller economies, like those of Rwanda and Ivory Coast, are among the world’s fastest growing. But on the whole, the continent cannot keep pace with its swelling population.

Adjusted for population size, Africa’s economy has grown by 1 per cent annually since 1990, according to the global consulting firm McKinsey & Company. Over the same period, India’s grew 5 per cent per year and China’s grew 9 per cent.

Despite making up 18 per cent of the global population, Africa accounts for just 3 per cent of all trade.

For legions of jobless and frustrated young Africans that leaves only one good option: Get out. Every year, tens of thousands of doctors, nurses, academics and other skilled migrants flee the continent. (At least one million Africans from south of the Sahara have moved to Europe since 2010, according to the Pew Research Centre.) Migration is such a feature of life in Nigeria that young people have a name for it –  “japa,” Yoruba slang that means “to run away.”

And the countries they leave behind depend on them to survive. In 2021, African migrants sent home $96 billion in remittances, three times more than the sum of all foreign aid, according to the African Development Bank.

“The African diaspora has become the largest financier of Africa,” said Akinwumi Adesina, the bank’s head.

In fact, the majority of young migrants do not even leave the continent, moving instead to other countries in Africa. But the plight of those who gamble their lives to travel further – left to die in sinking boats by the Greek Coast Guard, gunned down by Saudi border police or even stumbling through Central American jungle to reach the United States – has become a potent emblem of generational desperation.

The new big idea to invigorate African economies is the transition to green energy. African governments and investors are angling for a piece of the global effort, sure to involve trillions of dollars in the coming decades, which they hope can deliver Africa’s much-sought-after industrial revolution.

Africa has 60 per cent of the world’s solar energy potential and 70 per cent of its cobalt, a key mineral for making electric vehicles. Its tropical rainforests pull more carbon from the atmosphere than the Amazon. Ambitious ventures are taking shape in numerous countries: a dazzling solar tower in Morocco; a $10 billion green hydrogen plant in Namibia; a Kenyan-made machine that extracts carbon from the air.

The Africa Climate Summit, which took place in Nairobi in September, not only galvanised those seeking to profit from the climate transition, it also produced a bullish new narrative.

“Africa is neither poor nor desperate,” President William Ruto of Kenya said.

Whether young Africans can truly tap the potential of the coming energy revolution depends on other factors, too, not least the capacities of their entrenched and aging leaders.