Supporting a new generation of cultural entrepreneurs

Since November 2025, MansA Lab, MansA’s incubator, has been welcoming cultural entrepreneurs through a program that combines mentoring, training, shared resources, and networking. Open to innovative narratives and formats, it gives special priority to individuals who are underrepresented in traditional programs.

By MansA
Published on July 20, 2025

The MansA Lab incubator was designed to serve as a catalyst to support a new generation of creators, cultural entrepreneurs, and project leaders. It is aimed at individuals active in the cultural and creative industries—artist-entrepreneurs, curators, producers, emerging media outlets, and hybrid organizations—who are exploring new forms, narratives, and uses. More than just support, this incubator aims to be a resource hub and an acceleration program, as well as a space where the conditions for a genuine paradigm shift in the cultural field are collectively built.

The incubator is open to a wide variety of sectors and formats: media (print, digital-only, magazines, platforms, web radio, podcasts, newsletters, photography…), publishing (fiction and nonfiction, comics, manga, webtoons…), film and media (web documentaries, web series, interactive fiction, feature films, production companies…), fashion, as well as cross-media or transdisciplinary projects involving music, graphic design, or video games…

The selected projects stand out for their development potential (emerging or in-progress projects), their capacity for innovation (creative, editorial, technological, economic, or social), their potential to renew perceptions of the African world, their commitment to creating synergies with the MansA ecosystem, and the fact that their content is rooted in the African continent or its diaspora communities (the Americas, the Caribbean, Europe, the Indian Ocean, etc.).

Beyond providing individual support, MansA Lab aims to bring together a committed community that serves as a hub for reflection and a laboratory for ideas. This community is an integral part of the MansA ecosystem, which combines an on-site program with a broader, connected network. 

The incubator is thus built on three complementary pillars:

- Personalized support: mentoring, training in project management, strategy, business models, editorial and artistic content, communications, and fundraising.
- Shared resources: access to workspaces, production tools, legal advice, sectoral expertise.
- Strategic networking: connections with institutional partners, cultural venues, funders, and actors in social and artistic innovation.

The MansA Lab incubator offers a customized 8-month program. Selection is open through a call for applications for projects in the early stages or in development, with a particular focus on groups that are often underrepresented in traditional support programs: people from African diasporas, working-class neighborhoods, and geographic areas with limited access to major cultural centers.

Recognizing regional disparities, the project’s scope also includes the French regions in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Thanks to support from the AFD, each cohort includes projects from Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, Réunion, and Mayotte.