By Adelia Saunders
3 May 2008 [MEDIAGLOBAL]: From Bollywood in India to Nollywood in Nigeria, Brazilian soap operas to Ghanaian talismanic jewelry, creative industries are creating jobs and generating income in developing countries. With the potential to strengthen cultural identities and promote innovation, the creative economy is increasingly recognized as one of the world’s most dynamic emerging economic forces—and as a development imperative.
“Creative economy is vaunted for its considerable potential for social inclusion — creativity and talent are equitably distributed across ethnic, geographic and socio-economic lines,” said Yiping Zhou, Director of the United Nations Development Programme’s Special Unit for South-South Cooperation, introducing the Creative Economy Report 2008, which was launched at twelfth United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD XII) in Accra, Ghana.
Defined in the report as “cycles of creation, production and distribution of goods and services that use creativity and intellectual capital as primary inputs,” the creative industries are becoming ever more globalized, accounting for $424.4 billion in exports in 2005, 3.4 percent of world trade.
Propelled by China’s market dominance of manufactured creative goods, which include items such as televisions and computers, the developing world has rapidly gained prominence in the global creative economy. In 2005, developing countries exported $274 billion worth of creative products, up from $51 billion in 1996.
While these gains are striking, the fact that they largely represent growth in manufacturing sectors means such figures may not reflect the aspects of creative economies with the greatest potential to foster the cultural development and creative innovation needed to pull the world’s poorest countries out of poverty.
Creative economies are fundamentally different from industrial economies, which can form in a matter of years, said Shalini Venturelli, Director of the International Communication Division of the School of International Service at American University. They require dedicated policy-makers, massive investment in education and plenty of imagination. “Working on a creative economy means building the capacities of human resources—not metals, mining, minerals, land. It’s really fertilizing human thought, human capability and building human talent. And that is a definite long-term investment issue,” Venturelli said in an interview with MediaGlobal.
Largely left out of the international creative market, African countries in particular stand to benefit from such investment. With its rich cultural resources, Africa still claims less than one percent of global trade in creative goods.
“African countries and stakeholders need support to bring their products to the well-organized market,” Marc Nekaitar, of Agoralumiere, an NGO that promotes African film industries, told MediaGlobal. “We need to use creative economies as sources for social inclusion, for local affirmation of peoples’ identity, and also for how we present ourselves to the others. We need to use this as one of the tools to reach the Millennium Development Goals.”
The Creative Economy Report, jointly produced by UNCTAD and UNDP’s Special Unit for South-South Cooperation (SU/SSC), identifies creativity and access to information as key drivers of development, and provides a first-ever assessment the United Nations’ potential to help grow creative economies in developing countries. “Greater analysis is needed on internal market mechanisms and the creation of demand for a creative economy value chain on a national basis,” said Zhou, the UNDP SU/SSC director.
The report calls for further discussion on issues of international intellectual property rights, which it says must be equitably established with the interests of developing countries in mind in order to make creative sectors both profitable and accessible.
But trade agreements should not be a priority, John Howkins, a private consultant and Director of the Adelphi Charter on Creativity, Innovation and Intellectual Property, told MediaGlobal. “The main problem is the failure of most governments in developing countries to comprehend the nature of the creative economy and to take the necessary steps to encourage it [in] their own cities.”
Sharing technology and information among and within countries is key, and the report stresses the need for partnerships between governments, private enterprises and civil society across national borders and socio-economic levels.
“If you look at the course of human history over thousands of years, the more monopolized knowledge is, the less innovation you’re going to get,” Venturelli, the American University professor, said. “Having a diverse base with lots of experimentation from the peasant level to the small craftsman, the small enterprises to the large enterprises, the state sector, the NGO sector—all of that diversification of experimentation is what really causes the dynamic effect.”
The international community alone cannot will creative economies into being, she said. National governments must prioritize creativity at the community level, particularly in education. Without this long-term commitment, developing countries will continue to be dependent on imported ideas.
There is no simple solution. “The creative economy is a way of building indigenous power and indigenous talent and indigenous intellectual conceptual resources that can help societies to come out of the poverty trap,” Venturelli said. “The future is going to be in societies that are most adept at coming up with new thinking and new ideas about solving human problems, not about replicating other people’s ideas.”