Hammerton Barca: Building Africa's First Structured Freelance Workforce for Sports Events
Africa’s sports and entertainment industry runs major events regularly, but the freelance talent behind them has never had a structured system to manage it.
Hammerton Barca partnered with Liveforce to build the first centralised workforce platform for local freelancers across the continent, replacing manual outreach with one clear system
Transforming Sports Event Management Africa
Company name
Company overview
Hammerton Barca manages freelance talent and event operations across Africa’s sports and entertainment sector, working with global clients including Live Nation, IMG, and Blast Esports.
Location
Africa (multi-country operations)
Size
Small/Medium
Using Liveforce Since
Since 2024
Impact:
✔ One central platform to build and manage a freelance workforce across multiple African countries
✔ Structured talent profiles replacing manual outreach and email-based coordination
✔ Faster workforce mobilisation for large-scale sports and entertainment events
✔ Professional-grade tools recognised by governments and international clients
✔ Career development infrastructure giving local freelancers structured visibility for the first time
THE GAP NO ONE HAD SOLVED
Major sports and entertainment events happen across Africa regularly. Concerts in Cairo. Esports tournaments in Johannesburg. Conferences in Kigali. International producers fly in, but when they need local freelancers, production managers, technicians, or hospitality staff, there is no structured way to find them.
No central database. No standardised profiles. No system that makes local talent visible to the global clients who need them.
Hammerton Barca’s portfolio spans large concerts, strategic consulting for sports federations, and operational delivery for international event producers. The company works with global organisations including Live Nation, IMG, and Blast Esports.
The work was growing. The pipeline was strong. But every new project exposed the same gap: finding and coordinating local freelance talent was still done through personal contacts, emails, and word of mouth.
The talent existed. The infrastructure to manage it did not.
NO INFRASTRUCTURE FOR LOCAL TALENT
Africa’s events industry has skilled freelancers spread across dozens of countries. Production managers in Kenya. Technicians in Uganda. Hospitality coordinators in Rwanda and Tanzania. The problem was never a shortage of people. It was the absence of any structured system to collect, organise, and mobilise that talent when international clients came calling.
Every time a new event landed, the Hammerton Barca team started from scratch. Manual emails. Phone calls across time zones. Spreadsheets that went out of date before the event began. For a company whose entire value rests on connecting global producers with local workforces, this manual approach was holding back every project.
The team knew that building a proper talent pipeline was the only way to scale. They needed a system that could hold freelancer profiles, track skills and availability, and make the right people visible at the right time. Without that structure, every event would continue to rely on the same informal, slow, and unreliable coordination.
The operation needed a system that could match the ambition.
BRINGING LIVEFORCE INTO THE OPERATION
Hammerton Barca needed a workforce management platform, but building one from scratch was not realistic.
Daniel Noake had used Liveforce through other clients before joining Hammerton Barca. He already knew the platform could handle large, distributed freelance workforces. The question was whether it could work in a market where most freelancers had never used any structured workforce tool before.
Liveforce gave the team one central place to build their freelance database across multiple countries. Instead of managing talent through scattered emails and personal contact lists, profiles, skills, and availability could sit in a single platform. When a client needed crew for an event in Nairobi or a production team in Cairo, the information was already there.
The platform also gave Hammerton Barca something they could show to clients and government officials: a professional-grade system that matched the standards used by staffing agencies in the UK and US.
FROM MANUAL OUTREACH TO A STRUCTURED WORKFORCE
The first real test came at the Sportsbiz Africa Forum in Rwanda. Hammerton Barca ran workshops focused on career development for local freelancers and introduced Liveforce as the platform that would hold their profiles and connect them with future opportunities.
For many of the freelancers at the forum, it was the first time they had seen a structured system for managing their skills and work history. Production managers, technicians, and event coordinators who had relied entirely on personal networks could now present themselves professionally through a single platform.
The database is still growing, but the operational shift is already clear. What previously required manual emails and phone calls to coordinate across countries now has a central point of reference. As the roster builds, the speed of mobilising the right people for the right events will increase with it.
The foundation is in place. Every new freelancer who joins the platform makes the next event easier to staff.
Before and after Liveforce
CHANGING HOW AFRICA'S EVENTS INDUSTRY OPERATES
The impact goes beyond operational efficiency. For freelancers across Africa, Liveforce gives them structured visibility for the first time. A production manager in Kenya can now present their skills and experience in the same format that agencies use in London or New York.
The partnership is also making an impression at government level. When Hammerton Barca presents to officials across Africa, the fact that they use a professional workforce management platform carries weight.
As the freelance database grows across countries, Hammerton Barca is building something that did not exist before: a structured, accessible workforce infrastructure for Africa’s sports and entertainment industry.
BUILDING MORE THAN A DATABASE
Hammerton Barca did not just find a platform. They built the first structured workforce infrastructure for an industry that had never had one, and gave thousands of freelancers across Africa the visibility they had been missing.
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