About the festival
Built in Jamestown by the people who play there
Three editions old, run by three people and forty volunteers, on two hundred metres of colonial sea defence that nobody was using.
Founded 2024
Third edition
Jamestown, Accra
About the festival
Together towards something louder
Echo is a three-day gathering for musicians, producers, makers and the people who turn up for them — built in Jamestown by the people who play there.
About Echo
Artists across six stages
Workshops, talks and clinics
People through the gate last year
Jamestown, Accra
The old harbour wall, three nights, sound carrying over the water to Korle Gonno.
How we work
Four things we will not trade
A festival is a set of decisions about money and access made a year in advance. These are ours, written down so you can check them.
01 · Money
Everybody on the bill is paid
There is no exposure slot and there never has been. The smallest fee on the 2026 bill is ₵2,400 and the open-call acts are paid the same as everyone else in their slot.
02 · Access
The wall stays open to the street
Under-twelves come free with an adult, the Sunday morning set is free to anyone who walks up, and two hundred passes go to Jamestown households every year.
03 · Craft
Half the programme is teaching
Thirty workshops and clinics, capped at twenty so questions get answered, taught by the players and engineers who are on the bill that weekend.
04 · The site
We leave the yard cleaner than we found it
Two skips, a deposit with the harbour authority we have never lost, and a crew of forty who stay until Monday afternoon doing the part nobody photographs.
Who runs it
Three people and forty volunteers
Echo is put on by a company limited by guarantee. Nobody takes a dividend, because there is no mechanism to.
Yaw Ankomah
Founder & programmer
Booked the first eleven acts off his own phone in 2024 and still writes the bill. Plays trumpet badly and will tell you so.
Esi Nyarko
Production
Runs the site, the licences, the harbour authority and the crew. If the weekend goes quietly it is because of her.
Kwame Boateng
Sound
Specced the main rig for a stage with the sea behind it, which is a harder problem than it sounds and the reason people talk about the sound here.
Three reasons
What the weekend is for
Leave with something you can play
Thirty workshops and clinics across the weekend — talking drum, live production, mixing for small rooms, writing in Twi and Ga. Every one of them hands-on, every one capped at twenty people.
Meet the rooms you have been emailing
Label A&Rs, venue bookers, festival programmers and producers from Accra, Lagos, Abidjan and London, in a yard where nobody has to pretend they are too busy to talk.
Play to a crowd that came for this
Twelve thousand people who bought a ticket for three days of music they had mostly never heard. Our open call puts eight of them on a main stage every year.
What people say
Ask the people who came
I came to play twenty minutes in the yard and left with a booker from Abidjan in my phone and a producer I still work with. Nobody is grandstanding here — it is a working weekend that happens to have a crowd.
Singer, played 2025
27–29 November 2026 · Jamestown
Get tickets.
Weekend passes are ₵420 until the end of September and go up after that. Under-twelves come free with an adult.
