How Teddy Kossoko is championing the games industry in Senegal
gamesindustry.bizA new gaming hub is set to blossom in Senegal following a €300,000 investment announced last month.
It's the result of a partnership between Toulouse-based games studio Masseka, the French Embassy in Senegal, the DER (General Delegation for Rapid Entrepreneurship in Senegal), and Dakar-based studio Kayfo Games.
The funding will see the creation of a hybrid structure – part incubator, part development studio – in the Senegalese capital. The aim is to boost the local industry, and put Senegal on the West African gaming map, with developers invited (and paid) to train in the new hub from September.
The project is led by Teddy Kossoko, an engineer by trade who created Masseka in 2018 – a games studio focusing on African cultures. He's also behind Gara, a marketplace to distribute and monetise games across the African continent.
"I've been in the video games industry for approximately nine years," Kossoko tells GamesIndustry.biz. "I [initially] wasn't in this space, I was an engineer in science and management working in the space industry. I was born in the Central African Republic and when I arrived in France, when I left my country in 2012, I started to notice that there are a lot of people that don't really know the African continent.
"I was looking for a way to tell African stories, so that's why I started building games, and created the first video game company in France focusing on African stories. And two years later, we started building a platform, kind of a Google Play Store for Africa, [called Gara]. It's a platform in which we integrated all of the payment systems we can have on the [African] continent because people don't have credit cards to pay, so we created another ecosystem."
The creation of the Dakar
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