At the African Podcast and Voice Awards ceremony on 28 September 2024, The Expansive, hosted by John Sanei and Erik Kruger, was named Podcast of the Year. The published podcast winners list runs to 23 awards, from fiction and true crime to children's programming, spirituality and technology. No later edition has published a winners list. This is a look at what that document shows.
Awards lists are usually read for the top line and thrown away. This one is worth keeping, because the categories are a better description of African podcasting than any market estimate currently available.
Start with the headline anyway, because it is not the obvious result. Podcast of the Year at the 2024 African Podcast and Voice Awards went to The Expansive, a South African show about leadership, organisations and the future hosted by John Sanei and Erik Kruger. Not a comedy format, not a celebrity interview show, not a chart act. A business and ideas podcast took the continent's most visible podcasting prize, which is a modest but real data point about what African audiences and juries take seriously. The show is still running: its Apple feed carried a new episode in June 2026.
The more useful information is underneath. The published winners list runs to 23 podcast awards, and the category names are the story. Fiction went to The Talking Phoenix by Austin Okeke. Crime went to True Crime South Africa by Nicole Engelbrecht. There is a children's category, won by Solid Gold Story Time by Lynn Joffe, and a technology and innovation category, won by Mtambo Podcast by Duke Mtambo. Comedy went to Mevrou Mevrou Podcast by Gerda de Sousa and Dianne Broodryk. There is an award for podcast art, won by Unspoken Podcast by Awino Awiti, which only exists in a market where cover design is understood to be part of the product.
A scene has a few talk shows and a chart. An industry has a fiction category, a children's category, and an argument about cover art.
That spread matters because of how African podcasting is usually described, including by us. The Nigerian census found society and culture leading with 113 shows and news trailing at 21, a shape that invites the lazy conclusion that the continent produces conversation and little else. The awards list is evidence against that reading. Somebody is making audio drama. Somebody is making true crime with enough craft to be judged against it. Somebody is producing for children, which is the hardest audience to monetise anywhere in the world and therefore the clearest sign that a producer is doing it for reasons beyond a quick sponsorship.
The other thing the list does is name people. Awino Awiti, Duke Mtambo, Charles Kojo Vandyck of Alternative Convos, Emmanuel Waheed of Men in Motherland, Mo Sibyl of The More Sibyl Podcast: these are working producers with verifiable output, and a directory or a commissioning editor can act on that. Our own directory now carries 493 verified shows, and lists like this one are how the gaps in it get found. The Expansive went in this week for exactly that reason.
The caveats are worth stating plainly. This is the most recent APVA winners list we can verify, from a ceremony held on 28 September 2024, and we could not find a published winners list for a later edition. Award results are also a measure of who entered and campaigned, not a census of quality, and self selection is real: shows with production support are more likely to submit than shows without. Nothing in a winners list tells you about revenue, and a trophy has never paid an editor.
Still, the document does one thing that market-size projections consistently fail to do. It names actual shows, made by actual people, in categories that only exist if somebody is making work in them. For an industry that spends a lot of time being estimated, twenty three specific answers is a useful place to start.