'How we're keeping Africa Oyé affordable'

Africa Oyé, the UK's biggest celebration of African music and culture, returns to Liverpool's Sefton Park this weekend

Jun 16, 2026

Africa Oyé returns this weekend after a year’s hiatus to work out how it can continue despite rising costs and ever-increasing audiences. Amid the delight that it’s coming back there have been questions and concerns raised over the changes, which include it becoming a ticketed event for the first time in its 34-year history.

The festival’s director Paul Duhaney spared me some time for a chat during a busy week of meetings for the organisation, to share more information about what to expect and the efforts they’ve put in to make the event as affordable as they can.

What made you move from a free, unfenced event to a ticketed one?

It was mainly around health and safety. The cost implications of those health and safety measures meant that it was no longer viable to have it as a free festival. We just couldn’t make it work as a business model.

The amount of people you get determines how much you have to pay for equipment and how much security you have to have, and how many toilets. But the main thing was that it was open plan and that it was an environment that was susceptible to something happening because there were so many people - it was getting to 40,000 people a day last time. How do you mitigate if 60,000 people turn up this time? We need to know how many people are coming to ensure it’s a safe environment.

We wouldn’t have got a licence from Liverpool City Council if we hadn’t put these measures in place, so we literally had no choice.

What decisions did you make to try to keep the event affordable?

We covered as many bases as we could in terms of the concessions we’ve put in place. People can’t bring barbecues and stuff like they used to but we’re allowing them to bring a small picnic with them, we’re making sure that all the traders have at least one affordable meal on. We’ve got pub prices as opposed to festival bar prices on our bars.

Most importantly we’re allowing passes out so if somebody wants to come in, stay for a couple of hours and pop over to Lark Lane and or any other place and have a drink or something to eat and then come back, they can do that.

We understand that there are lots of families and if you’re a single parent with four kids you’ve got to feed them - we have to keep that in mind and keep the festival as accessible as possible.

We’ve also given away about 2,000 tickets a day to local residents, to local groups, community groups, and corporate companies have also been buying batches of tickets to distribute.

Paul Duhaney, artistic director of Africa Oyé (Image: Wesley Storey)

Tell me about the new family zone

We used to have an Active Zone, which was a lot smaller, and now we’ve increased that offer because we’re aware there’s going to be more people who come with families. So we’ve actually got a dedicated family zone with lots of free workshops and activities going on on both days for people of all ages and abilities. There are lots of kids rides and fairground stuff around there as well.

What else can we expect this year?

Obviously we’ve got the DJ stage with specifically local DJs this year. We usually invite DJs from outside the city too but because we’ve had to scale the capacity down from 40,000 to 12-15,000 we wanted to make sure the local DJs were looked after first, so that’s all that programme apart from our headliners, BBC Radio 1 DJs DJ Edu and Seani B.

Then on the international main stage we’re really lucky to have Fatoumata Diawara, one of the biggest stars in African music headlining on Sunday, and also Patoranking on Saturday evening - one of the biggest stars in Afrobeat, he’s got millions and millions of views on his various social networks. That’s supported by a massive programme from all over Africa and the diaspora incorporating calypso, Afrobeat, traditional Ghanian music…

And we have about 100 traders there selling food, arts and crafts and all kind of things like clothing.

Africa Oyé is at Sefton Park, Liverpool on Saturday 20 and Sunday 21 June. Tickets are priced £19, £16 NHS/student, under-12s are free and there’s a discount if you’re buying four or more tickets in one transaction.