‍The room at Cafe One, Victoria Island wasn't supposed to feel like school. And mostly, it didn't.

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When you walked in on Friday afternoon, the energy read somewhere between a workshop and a hangout — creators hunched over laptops, workbooks open, someone cracking a joke in the back. Opemipo Fasanya, who co-covered the event, had been watching the Creators College from the outside for a few days before stepping inside. The view from social media hadn't prepared him for what was actually happening. "Before I went there, what I was seeing online looked more like fun," he says. "I wasn't really seeing the learning aspect. But when I went there, I actually saw — oh, they're actually learning about this. They even had a book."

That gap between what the Creators College looked like from the outside and what it actually was on the inside is, in some ways, the whole story. Carry1st built something that didn't announce itself as serious. It just was.

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The Room

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The Carry1st COD:M Creators College brought together ten emerging African Call of Duty: Mobile content creators for five days of structured programming at Cafe One, Victoria Island, Lagos. Hosted by Carry1st in partnership with Call of Duty: Mobile and Infinix, the program covered everything from content strategy and branding to monetisation, collaboration, and mental health. Accommodation, feeding, and transportation were fully covered.

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The ten creators selected came from across the continent, each chosen not for the size of their following but for something harder to manufacture: consistency under pressure. Showing up, creating, and building even when the resources weren't there and the algorithm wasn't cooperating.

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Tecna, a South African creator who left a career as a Monitoring and Evaluation Practitioner to pursue gaming content full-time, came in knowing exactly what she wanted. "I want to turn gaming content creation into job opportunities for others," she says. "I applied because I believed Carry1st was offering the exact opportunity I was looking for to get to a level where I could offer others a job to work with me or for me."

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Saphra came in with 46 followers and what she describes simply as audacity. "I applied on pure audacity," she says. "I had 46 followers and a dream to become a COD:M streamer and content creator. I thought, why not me? The worst answer I could get was no."

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By the end of the week, Saphra had done her first-ever livestream, made her first TikTok withdrawal, and peaked at 700 concurrent viewers — numbers that, for a creator who walked in with 46 followers, represent something more than a milestone. Fasanya was watching. "Tecna supported Saphra because that was Saphra's first livestream ever," she recalls. "She was really scared and nervous, and Tecna was supportive, motivating her."

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If Tecna was, as Fasanya describes her, "the big mommy of the class," Saphra was its beating heart.

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The People

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Saphra arrived at the Creators College with 46 followers and, by her own description, pure audacity. "I applied on pure audacity," she says. "I had 46 followers and a dream to become a CODM streamer and content creator. I thought, why not me? The worst answer I could get was no."

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She came in with a specific, modest goal: learn how to set up a proper livestream. What she left with was considerably more. "I didn't expect how much the program would shift how I think about content as a whole," she says. By Friday's livestream lab — where every creator went live in real time, some for the first time — Saphra had her first ever stream. She was terrified. Tecna, the South African M&E practitioner turned full-time creator, stayed close. By the end of the stream, Saphra had pulled in 700 viewers.

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For context: that was her first livestream. Ever.

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Tecna came with different baggage; not inexperience, but years of grinding without a map. She left a stable career as a Monitoring and Evaluation Practitioner to pursue content creation full-time, a decision that still requires explaining to people around her. "You must figure out a lot on your own and support yourself or build your own support system from scratch," she says. "There isn't exactly much financial support, resources, and it is not a well-known career path, so you must do a lot of explaining and research on your own."

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She's made it work; she's part of Carry1st's existing creators programme and earns monthly income through agreed deliverables — but she arrived at the Creators College carrying the weight of having done it largely alone. What she found was nine other people who understood that weight without needing it explained.

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The most striking thing she took from the week wasn't a tactic or a framework. "Stop undervaluing what you provide as a content creator," she says. "I wouldn't have let negative comments get to me and monetisation opportunities pass me as much as I allowed them to." Two years of self-doubt, compressed into one lesson.

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The Livestream Lab

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Friday afternoon was the live lab, and it was the most revealing session of the week.

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Up to that point, the learning had been largely internal — workshops, peer sharing, discussion. The livestream lab made everything visible. Creators were coached through setup by Prime, then sent live. Five things were being tracked across every stream: kiosk management, audience interaction, and three others that moved too fast to write down. The point wasn't perfection. It was execution under real conditions, with real viewers, in real time.

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One creator, Diehard, hadn't even planned to stream. He set up, went live almost on impulse, and walked away with roughly $90 in earnings from a stream he wasn't supposed to do. He still didn't believe it by the time he logged off.

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Saphra hit 700 viewers on her debut. Tecna, already experienced, was watching the room, and what she saw changed how she thinks about her own work. "I used to have very limited ways of how I created my own content," she says. "After being around other content creators and seeing how much they create daily, it has made me bolder and even more determined to diversify my content."

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The Panel

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Before the livestream lab, Friday had opened with a panel session featuring creators King and Fae, alongside others from the wider COD:M community. The format was relaxed: insights, questions, honest conversation about what the career actually looks like from the inside. King's personality meant it was funny as often as it was instructive, which is its own kind of teaching.

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The panel did something the workshops alone couldn't: it showed the ten creators what a few years of doing this seriously looks like. Not the polished brand version, but the real one, with all the friction and the lessons and the things you figure out by getting it wrong first.

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What Changed

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By Saturday, the final day, something had shifted in the room. The closing ceremony, gift presentations, and the mental health session — which addressed burnout, sustainability, and what it actually costs to show up consistently over time — landed differently because of everything that had come before. These weren't creators receiving information anymore. They were creators with context.

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Saphra describes the transformation in her content precisely: "Before, I was just posting. Now, I'm building. I approach content like a business. There's planning, execution, and strategy behind it. I'm thinking in terms of growth, consistency, and value, not just uploads."

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Tecna puts it differently, but it amounts to the same thing: "It's smarter and more strategic. I am now more intentional about what I want my content to make my community feel."

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Both of them arrived at the Creators College already creating. They left knowing what they were building.

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What It Means

The COD:M Creators College was never just a training program. It was a proof of concept — for what structured investment in African gaming creators looks like, for what happens when you put the right people in a room together and give them time and space to grow, and for the kind of ecosystem that becomes possible when brands stop treating African creators as a downstream audience and start treating them as an upstream investment.

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Ten creators walked into that room. None of them left the same.

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The first cohort is just the beginning. Follow Carry1st on Instagram, X, and Facebook to keep up with what comes next.

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