Carry1st Africa Cup 2026 Grand Finals Set for Abuja This September, Featuring Africa’s Largest Mobile Esports Prize Pool

By Ayo Ake

Five Regions. Eight Teams. Two LAN Finals. One Grand Stage in Abuja.

Africa’s biggest mobile eSports tournament crowns its 2026 champion at a live Grand Finals event in Abuja, with the winning team advancing to the Call of Duty®: Mobile World Championship.

Carry1st, in partnership with Call of Duty: Mobile, recently announced that the Grand Finals of the Carry1st Africa Cup 2026 will take place September 5-6 at the Los Angeles Event Centre in Abuja, Nigeria, capping off the continent’s premier mobile esports tournament and the official African Qualifier for the Call of Duty: Mobile World Championship.

Now in its third year, the Carry1st Africa Cup has grown from a first-of-its-kind event in 2024 into one of the largest mobile gaming tournaments on the continent. This year, the tournament is aiming to become the largest Sub-Saharan African mobile esports gathering to date.

The Road to Abuja

Regional Qualifiers have been underway since June. Winning teams from each region will advance to compete live at the Grand Finals in Abuja on September 5-6, where the overall champion will be crowned and earn the right to represent Africa at the Call of Duty: Mobile World Championship.

Grand Finals tickets are set to go live in August, giving fans across Nigeria and the wider continent the chance to be part of the live event in person.

The Carry1st Africa Cup 2026 underscores the rapid growth of competitive gaming across Africa, where a digitally connected generation is redefining what it means to compete on the global stage. With LAN events bringing fans and players together in person, and online regionals ensuring accessibility across the continent, the tournament is built to be as wide as Africa itself – and as fierce as its talent.

About the Carry1st Africa Cup

The Carry1st Africa Cup is the premier mobile eSports tournament on the continent and the official African qualifier for the Call of Duty: Mobile World Championship. Since launching in 2024, the tournament has grown into a landmark event for African esports, combining competitive mobile gaming with premium content – including a docuseries and a bi-weekly esports podcast to build a lasting cultural moment for gaming across Africa.

About Carry1st

Carry1st is Africa’s leading publisher of games and digital content. Its mission is to scale awesome content in frontier markets by solving hard problems. Carry1st develops, licenses, and publishes games and monetizes them effectively with Pay1st, a proprietary payments and online marketplace, and the Carry1st Shop, to better monetize content in the region. The company has scaled games such as Call of Duty®: Mobile. Founded in 2018, the company is backed by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), BITKRAFT, and Google.