Why Representation Is an Economic Development Strategy, Not Just a Nice Idea

A few years ago, I sat with my son at a bookstore, watching him scan shelf after shelf of superheroes. None of them looked like his father. His uncles. His grandfather. Him.

I’ve spent most of my career thinking about economic development — building bridges between Silicon Valley and Nigeria, advising on risk and compliance across healthcare, fintech, and government, speaking at the UN and the World Bank about what it takes for economies and communities to grow. But that day in the bookstore taught me something those rooms hadn’t: you cannot build sustainable economic opportunity for a community that has been taught, subtly and repeatedly, that its stories don’t belong on the shelf.

So I wrote the book I couldn’t find. Akiti the Hunter — the first African superhero series in U.S. children’s literature, rooted in Yoruba mythology — wasn’t a departure from my work in economic development. It was an extension of it.

This week gave me a stark reminder of just how long “waiting for recognition” can actually take.

On August 18, 2026, Angélique Kidjo became the first Black African performer to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame — in the Walk’s entire history. The only other African-born honoree before her was Charlize Theron, in 2005. Think about that timeline: an institution built to celebrate global entertainment achievement went 21 years between its first and second African-born honorees, and this week marked the very first time a Black African was recognized on it at all.

That’s not a story about one industry being slow. It’s a pattern. It’s what happens, again and again, when representation is treated as something that trickles down eventually, rather than something built deliberately from the start.

Here’s the part of my own story that surprised even me.

This year, Akiti the Hunter became a Top 5 Amazon Bestseller. It’s now part of California’s statewide Indie California digital library collection. It’s cataloged on TeachingBooks.net, used by educators building diverse curricula in classrooms nationwide. And it’s now expanding into animation — because the same instinct that told me representation matters in a picture book tells me it matters just as much on screen, where the reach, and the impact, multiply.

None of that happened because representation was a “nice to have.” It happened because there was real, unmet demand — a market that had been systematically underserved for decades, waiting for someone to build for it, rather than wait for permission to be recognized.

That’s the leadership lesson I keep coming back to: the same instincts that make a good economic development strategist — spotting an underserved market, understanding a community’s real needs before assuming what they are, building trust before building product — are exactly the instincts that make a children’s book, or a Hollywood career, succeed on merit rather than wait decades for a gatekeeper to catch up. Representation isn’t charity. It’s unmet market demand, hiding in plain sight, in industry after industry — and every year it goes unbuilt is a year a child doesn’t get to see themselves as the hero, or the star, of their own story.

I’m now working toward donating one million books to one million children worldwide, partnering with organizations including the African Library Project, Book Aid International, and grassroots literacy programs across Africa and the diaspora. Not because it’s a feel-good side project to my “real” work — but because I believe literacy access is economic development, and it shouldn’t take a generation, or an entire industry’s history, for a child to see proof that they belong in the story.

If you’re building anything — a company, a policy, a curriculum, a product — and the people you’re building for have never fully seen themselves reflected in what already exists, you’re not looking at a niche. You’re looking at a market nobody’s served yet, and possibly, one that’s been waiting decades for someone to stop waiting.

Denise Mobolaji-Ajayi Williams is the creator of Akiti the Hunter, Founder & Executive Producer of BAPS Animation Studio, CEO of SV-NED Inc., a Forbes Business Council member, and a UN Peace Ambassador.