SEVEN YEARS ago, when Jason Njoku moved back in with his mother into their public housing apartment in Deptford, southeast London, he felt like a failure. He was 28 years old and broke after failing to launch several businesses in Britain. Then, one day, Njoku’s mother asked him to find her DVDs of some of her favorite Nigerian movies.
The first place he looked was the internet. Surprised to find no online catalog of movies from Nollywood, Nigeria’s hugely popular film industry, Njoku resorted to buying the few DVDs available from local businesses and asking Nigerian friends in the U.K. to fly caseloads of films back to London after visiting. But that experience sparked an idea— taking Nollywood movies from markets in Lagos and putting them on the web. “It didn’t make sense that something so popular seemed to have no online presence,” he says.
Nollywood generates $600 million in revenue annually and creates over 1 million jobs, making it the country’s second-biggest employer after agriculture, according to a 2014 U.S. International Trade Commission report. Nollywood produced over 1,800 films in 2013; Hollywood released 659.