Kenya’s Mona Ombogo is among the four African screenwriters who have been selected to participate in the 2025 AuthenticA Series Lab, a programme which gives screenwriters a unique opportunity to shape their original ideas into episodic storytelling across any genre. The other participants are Gamel Apalayine (Ghana), Joladé Olusanya (Nigeria/UK) and Reem Morsi (Egypt/Canada). The four were choses from a list of 168 applicants representing over 24 countries and over 30 genres of television series.
Ombogo is known for projects such as Volume (Netflix), Tosh Gitonga’s music drama for which she won Best Writing in a Series at the 2024 Africa Magic Viewers’ Choice Awards; Kash Money (Netflix) and the third season of Single Kiasi from Insignia Productions, and Maisha Magic Plus telenovelas Shanga and Salem. Her series Generation A (with Louise Kamwangi), was one of the 38 projects presented at the Red Sea Souk Project Market 2024 where it won a grant, and a five-week summer residency at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts.
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The aim of AuthenticA is to ensure that upon completion of the programme, participants will have professionally developed pitch decks, their pilot scripts, and a series bible to support their proposals for funding and support. Writers own all the intellectual property rights of the material developed during the programme.
The fourth edition, which kicked off in the first week of September with an 8-day in-person residency in the Western Cape, South Africa, will continue with online sessions until mid-December. A second in-person residency is scheduled in Geneva, Switzerland, from 19 January to 19 March 2026, followed by the final residency in Lille, France, from 20 to 27 March 2026. There, participants will pitch their projects during the African Series Pitch at the Series Mania Forum – Europe’s largest co-production market and festival, attended by talent scouts, sales agents, broadcasters, investors, and distributors.
Run by Realness Institute in partnership with The StoryBoard Collective and the Canada Media Fund, AuthenticA Series Lab is led by Emmy-nominated film/television producer and writer, and Interim Managing Director of the Realness Institute, Mehret Mandefro as Director of Producing and Showrunning; with Selina Ukwuoma, an award-winning freelance script consultant as Director of Writing Programmes.
“Giving African writers the time and space to get closer to their voice remains a critical intervention in a landscape that underinvests in the pre-writing and writing phase of development,” says Mandefro.
“Due to the hundreds of applications for our programmes, the Realness Institute is in a unique position to survey the breadth of stories storytellers from across the African continent have to tell,” says Ukwuoma. “We see a well of untapped potential, that brings vision rooted in the wisdom of the spaces from which they come and our job is to show them how they can take people on the journey with them.”
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