Ruddy is a serial entrepreneur, media personality, writer, and event producer. He is widely travelled across Africa, and has produced events in Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroun, Liberia, Kenya, Sierra Leone, and the UK. He honed his leadership skills by previously working as a brand representative for global entertainment giant Viacom’s MTV Base and then as innovations manager for Ghana’s leading media brand, Multimedia Group Limited, the parent company for Joy FM.
He has also worked at Media Ghana as COO. He was able to spearhead the repositioning and transformation of its radio, TV and telecoms assets in the UK, Liberia and the USA. While there, he led the development and initial build of Ghana’s first triple-play service.
Business Leader, Opinion Shaper, Pan-African Culture Promoter
Ruddy currently serves as Chief Executive of The Rave Group, an investment business interest in marketing communications, cross-platform content, production, technology, and experiential and digital marketing services that he founded in 2016. The business is pan-African in outlook with a presence in Accra, Kigali, Johannesburg and London. In the 9 years since its founding, the business has built up a stellar client roster, including Vodafone, Ecobank, Paramount, DSTV, Diageo, AB InBev, Bloomberg and more. In 2021 the business pivoted to focus solely on building Africa’s next integrated live entertainment business that executes large ticket festivals, awards, tours, and concerts.
He is also the Executive Producer for AfroNation Ghana Festival, a part of the global AfroNation network, the world’s No.1 urban beach music event targeted at the African urban diaspora. He was the director of the wildly successful 2019 edition of the AfroNation Ghana that brought over 20,000 attendees and 40 artists from all over Africa together over 4 days. He is also the Founder and Chairman of Muse Media Networks, a multi-platform, youth-focused digital publisher with vertical extensions on TV and radio.
Having built a name for himself as a producer and creator of artistic and cultural events as well as an administrator and a founder, Ruddy realizes that the talent of its artistes and professionals is not enough to sustain the African cultural and creative industry, but that African cultural promoters must start to treat it as a business, working with corporate organizations to support its growth as well as government agencies to support its growth with finance and policies that favour its development. He himself has been working with government agencies in his country of birth to ensure the creation of policies that support music tourism.
Moving Forward
Ruddy believes that the only way the creative industry,, not just in Ghana but in Africa at large, can achieve economic impact on the lives of Africans is for it to become a marketable product that can attract individuals and organizations from other parts of the world. His current initiative, Afronation Ghana,, is focused on using music tourism todrive economic growth, cultural exchange, and industry development.
It is for this reason that he is also an active member of Arts Connect Africa. He believes that our goals of education for creative industry professionals, cultural exchange, and economic impact are in line with his own goals of economic growth, cultural exchange,, and industry development. Beyond his desire to connect to the youth through experiential events, he continues to invest in youth-led networks in his native Ghana and elsewhere, with the belief that youth are the future of Africa, especially in music.
At Arts Connect Africa, we are proud to associate with and to celebrate Ruddy Kwakye as an impact maker on the African continent for his work as a founder, promoter and investor in the African music industry in particular and the creative industry as a whole.
