Creative economy thought leadership
7 December 2023
By Arthur Nkuna, Chair of the Arts & Culture Trust (ACT) Board of Trustees; Jessica Denyschen, ACT CEO; and Poovi Pillay, Executive Head for Corporate Social Investment at Nedbank.
Creativity should be one of our greatest economic and employment sectors and exports. We are a very creative country and we need to harness the value of our cultural and creative industries (CCIs). We have the talent, we are young and we are hungry, we are literally hungry, and now is the time to push open the gates of opportunity and income in arts, culture and heritage to boost job creation, innovation, tourism and economic growth.
According to the South African Cultural Observatory (SACO) which researches the country’s CCIs, they contribute more than R90 billion to the national economy, 3% to our GDP (same as agriculture) and 1 million jobs, which is 6% of all jobs in the economy. Yet the CCIs do not enjoy the same economic stature as other sectors, such as agriculture or tourism.
The Arts & Culture Trust (ACT) is working to change this and raise awareness about the CCIs extensive value chain. Theatre and corporate productions and music festivals, for example, require a whole ecosystem of skills, from the performers to the marketers, accountants, designers, wardrobe, IT, lighting, sound, scaffolding, security and catering teams, to name a few.
The creative sector is like food on the table. We all consume culture and creativity every day, whether we are watching a TV drama, listening to music, reading an article, or learning from educational content produced by creatives. The CCIs are so universal that we take them for granted instead of recognising their value as core services with the associated multiple employment and career opportunities.
ACT focuses on growing the CCI pipeline among our young people and communities so that it becomes self-sustaining rather than over-relying on short-term funding and grants. These are important but we need to create more long-term business opportunities in order to harness the potential of the sector.
ACT’s Thuthukisani Programme, funded by Nedbank, for example, was created to help businesses in the sector grow. The programme gives arts and culture entrepreneurs a cash investment to develop their business and participate in 1 on-1 mentorship with leading South African business developers.
What we have found over many years of supporting arts projects is that, regardless of the artists’ and creative industry practitioners’ talents, if they do not develop the appropriate business and entrepreneurial skills, they do not scale up or they struggle to make ends meet. This perpetuates the image of the struggling artist at a time when we want to change this perception, elevate the profession and get to a place where people in the sector can have good incomes and careers.
As part of this, the CCIs must embrace digitalisation and the opportunities that IT offers. Technology is the lever that gets our arts and culture out there into the borderless world, where our people can market their creativity and raise revenue from it. ACT has a strategy for digital skills development towards achieving this, as well as for career development in this space, such as gaming and animation and all the technical and creative skills that go with this.
Nationally we need enabling policies to support IT access and the growth of the CCIs. We need policies that address how our creatives are represented and remunerated on artificial intelligence (AI) platforms and ideally we need to create our own distribution platforms. As a project of the Department of Sport, Arts and Culture, SACO’s cultural information system is the platform from which government and policymakers can make investment, growth and skills development decisions. CCI’s need far more investment from government and from business. Let’s work together to see how creativity can boost business and the economy, and how the government and business can support the CCIs.
We don’t have all the answers but we want to facilitate these conversations and we want to be engaged in enabling policies for the CCIs. We need the CCIs to be knitted into the economic and cultural fabric of our country. It is not an add on, it is essential for employment, careers and community cohesion; it is intrinsic to our social and economic development as conscious, productive human beings.
