Editorial

Supporting Africa-Europe collaborations on creative economies: An equitable research agenda

Roberta Comunian, Eka Ikpe, Duro Oni

Copyright: © 2024. The Author(s). Licensee: AOSIS.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

The African Union (AU 2024) ‘Agenda 2063: Second 10-year plan’ acknowledges the importance of culture in achieving ambitious continental development. According to UNDP (2023), Africa’s share of the global creative economy remains low, accounting for only around 2.9% of global creative goods exports, but African creative output more than doubled from 2004 to 2013 with increasingly global reach and influence and has bucked the trend of economic decline in crises (AfrEXIM Bank 2022).

Against the backdrop of incredible potential (Nzeaka, Ehondor & Ashiru 2021), much more needs to be known about how the creative economy functions in the African context, as well as through links to trading partners and global value chains. This is not least because of the knowledge spillovers through ideation and innovation as well as the dynamic technology engagement that the sector generates and the potential for structural transformation, intra-African and global trade (AfrEXIM 2022). These have contributed to the need for a reference point for research in the creative economies (Comunian, Hracs & England 2020).

In September 2023, a group of African and European academics, with the support of the African Research Universities Alliance (ARUA) and The Guild of European Research-Intensive Universities (The Guild), launched a new Africa-Europe Cluster of Research Excellence (CoRE) ‘Creative Economies: Cultures, Innovation and Sustainability’. This work builds on the acknowledgement that research on creative economies has been mainly focused on the Global North and has not placed enough value on cultures, heritage, innovations and ideas from the Global South (De Jesus, Kamlot & Dubeux 2020; Sternberg 2017). Even if perspectives from the Global South are being published in international journals (England, Ikpe & Comunian 2024; Kilu, Alacovska & Sanda 2024; Snowball & Gouws 2023), research on Africa and in support of policy and development of African scholars researching creative economy is still very limited.

The launch in 2024 of the African Journal of Creative Economy offers new momentum through an African-led publication to nurture African and global scholarship in this area (Snowball & Haines 2024). The work of the CoRE strongly complements the agenda and objectives of AJCE. It aims not only to promote scholarship and innovative research on creative economies in Africa but also to encourage equitable collaborations and support new and emerging scholars across Africa and Europe. The CoRE builds on the shared agenda of sustainable development goals (SDG 2021) and an understanding of how culture and creativity have an important role to play (Wiktor-Mach 2020) across economic and social development as well as international cooperation.

The creative economy has been a context of dynamism globally and in contemporary Africa (SACO 2022; Snowball, Collins & Bickerton 2023). In Africa, specifically, cultural and creative industries enable us to examine opportunities for broad-based socio-economic impact. Yet the sector is hampered by extractive patterns of global trade and value capture as well as gaps in education and skills development, investment in research and innovation, intellectual property regimes, infrastructure, technology, finance and policy. Interventions to address these challenges are crucial as the creative economy has the potential to contribute to 10% of global gross domestic product (GDP) by 2030 and lead efforts towards sustainable development, economic resilience and technological innovation (UNCTAD 2021).

Bringing together an interdisciplinary long-term perspective on the creative economy, the CoRE examines its transformational potential through identifying, empowering and protecting the value of creativity for inclusive and sustainable growth and socioeconomic transformation. It places particular importance on the impact that is possible through collaboration across spheres of policy, industry and third-sector organisations (Comunian, Hracs & England 2021; Snowball, Drummond & Tarentaal 2024).

The CoRE team has identified three central research themes that allow for impact-driven interdisciplinary interrogation to showcase the innovation of Africa’s creative economy and support its transformation. These themes offer propositions for curating a research agenda for creative economy in Africa, to foster intergenerational impact-inspired knowledge creation through co-working across established researchers, early-career researchers and postgraduate researchers, policy actors, practitioners and wider communities:

• Sustainable and inclusive business models and markets for the creative industries underpinned by technology and sustainability: This theme enables a better understanding of financial and business operation models, nationally, regionally and internationally to support CE development in Africa. It explores the tensions between low disposable income and public finance and expanding youth and middle classes and the implications for opportunities and new financial models in Africa (Njuguna et al. 2021).
• Innovation, creation, protection and development for cultural and creative producers and/or production: The theme captures innovative and sustainable practices of cultural and creative producers in Africa to understand how they address domestic, regional and continental markets and connect with regional, global production and value chains. It will provide a better understanding of issues of precarity and informal work (Joffe & Mukanga-Majachani 2023), as well as innovative practices and platforms that might shape new work models.
• Heritage, communities, cultural capital and inclusive development models: The theme examines how CE shifts the understanding of development in Europe and Africa. It will critically consider how interdependencies across economic, social, cultural and environmental value can underpin inclusive transformation and change alongside heritage preservation and community development. CE is also at the forefront of a better understanding of circular economies, sustainable practices and innovations addressing environmental concerns and are strongly intertwined with the objectives of the sustainable development goals (UNESCO 2019).

There are some important intersectional additions to the three main themes outlined. With the dynamism and complexity of the African continent, it is necessary to be alive to the value and implication of the plurality of cultures and perspectives that this endeavour brings to the table. A reflection on innovation and how it emerges and is fostered is significant, recognising the movement across space and time of indigeneity and autochthony that complicates equating innovation to a market-driven technological platform or device. Lastly, regarding sustainability, we connect to innovative practices in African contexts, interconnectedness of the Global North and the Global South, their common fragilities, the necessity of collective responses and the power hierarchies that can undermine transformational action.

Two practices also drive the CoRE community while researching creative economies in Africa. Firstly, empowering impact and the role of higher education in creative economy research, by incentivising platforms for HE (research and graduates) to collaborate with local communities and industries to support development in Africa. Secondly, building bridges and networks across Africa and Europe, by acknowledging formal and informal inter-Africa and African-European cultural markets, particularly the roles of diasporic networks and international cultural institutions in these cultural flows.

Acknowledgements

The Africa-Europe CoRE ‘Creative Economies: cultures, innovation and sustainability’ is a collaborative project led by King’s College London, Rhodes University and the University of Lagos. It currently includes also academics across the following African and European countries (in alphabetical order) and universities: Denmark (University of Aarhus), Ghana (University of Cape Coast, University of Ghana), Kenya (University of Nairobi), Nigeria (University of Lagos and Obafemi Awolowo University), South Africa (Rhodes University, Stellenbosch University and Witwatersrand University), The Netherlands (Groningen University), Uganda (Makerere University), and UK (King’s College London).

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