AREWA24, the leading Hausa language entertainment and lifestyle television channel and production studio in Nigeria and West Africa, is celebrating its seventh anniversary by giving its viewers the largest slate of new Hausa-language programming in the channel’s history.

AREWA24’s new slate of programming debuts in July, with new original dramas, a new women’s talk show, new kids’ “edutainment” series, fresh football shows alongside AREWA24’s other popular hit dramas and studio shows.

Many of these new shows will also be immediately available on AREWA24 On Demand, the channel’s global subscription-video-on-demand service connecting Hausa speaking families around the world to Northern Nigerian entertainment, culture and lifestyle. New seasons of AREWA24’s original runaway hit drama series, “Kwana Casa’in” and “Dadin Kowa”, are currently in production and will premiere in October.

AREWA24’s new slate of programmes leads with three new Hausa dramas: “Buka Afrikana”, an ensemble situation-comedy set in a local Nigerian Middle Belt diner, or “Buka”. “Labarna-Season-3, the newest season of one of the most popular Northern Nigerian hit drama series, and “Sirrin Boye”, a new Hausa mystery and crime drama. Also launching in July is AREWA24’s new ground-breaking women’s talk show, “Mata A Yau” (“Today’s Woman”), featuring four dynamic co-hosts from different backgrounds and ages, openly discussing important issues women are currently facing in Northern Nigeria.

AREWA24’s CEO, Jacob Arback, reflecting on the company’s growth over the past seven years, gives all the credit to the company’s management and staff and to the tremendous talent in the Northern Nigerian television, media and creative arts sectors.

“Many people don’t realise that there are over 80 million Hausa speakers in Northern Nigeria and the Sahel, and the region is bursting everywhere with young talent,” Arback says, adding: “What I am most proud of, however, is how our management and staff, comprised of such diverse Nigerian backgrounds, ethnicities, tribes, religions and geographics, can all gather as a team in Kano, Nigeria, to produce some of the best programming coming out of Africa today.”

AREWA24 is also expanding its kids’ entertainment and education programming in July, dubbing into Hausa for the first time ever the multi-award winning “Sesame Street Friends”, with all favourite Sesame Street characters, sketch comedy, animation and puppetry. Also debuting in Hausa on AREWA24 is “Super Sema”, the first African kids’ superhero animated series about an ordinary young girl on an extraordinary mission to protect her African village from a heartless villain and his army of pesky robots.

The Oscar-winning actress, Lupita Nyong’o, is a voice actress on the “Super Sema” series and is also a partner in the Nairobi-based Super Sema production company, Kukua. AREWA24 is rounding out its July new programme launches with two new football series: “Homage” and “Perfection.”