ISSN

not available (PRINT)
3005-9429 (ONLINE)

Focus and scope

The African Journal of Creative Economy (AJCE) has an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary focus that includes the following fields:

• Cultural Economics
• Creative Industries
• Arts and Culture Management
• Cultural Studies and Cultural Policy.

The journal’s focus is on researching and discussing theoretical and practical issues pertaining to the cultural and creative economy in Africa. Research from outside Africa will also be considered as long as it is relevant to the African creative economy in terms of policy lessons or comparative analysis. The journal is primarily aimed at those researching, studying, and developing policies and practising activities that have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent, and which have the potential to contribute to employment, economic development and wealth creation. Rather than simply applying theories and models of the creative economy developed mostly in the Global North, the journal aims to publish research based on learnings from the African and Global South context, problematising commonly held (western) understandings of concepts like heritage, sustainability, and precarious employment.

AJCE will cover all aspects of the creative economy, including clusters, creative labour markets, creative districts, international trade in cultural goods and services, demand for and participation in cultural activities, and the creative ecosystem. It will primarily use the definitions of the Cultural and Creative Industries developed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and published in the Framework of Cultural Statistics (FCS). The creative economy includes:

• Cultural and natural heritage: museums (also virtual), archaeological and historical places, cultural landscapes, and natural heritage.
• Performance and celebration: performing arts, music, and festivals, fairs and feasts.
• Visual arts and crafts: fine arts, photography, and crafts.
• Books and press: books, newspapers and magazines, other printed matter, library (also virtual), and book fairs.
• Audio-visual and interactive media: film and video, tv and radio (also internet live streaming), internet podcasting, and video games (also online).
• Design and creative services: fashion design, graphic design, interior design, landscape design, architectural services, and advertising services.

Historic data

Internationally, there has been a growing recognition of the multiple values associated with the cultural sector and the creative industries. Creative economies are not only essential to the innovation, technology and economic development of many cities and regions but are also cornerstones of sustainable development, community engagement and dialogue across cultures and generations.

In 2008, the African Union produced the ‘Plan of Action on the Cultural and Creative Industries in Africa’. The Plan has as its primary goal ‘to tap into the vast economic and social potential of African cultural and creative resources in the African global development process’. The African Union Agenda 2063 recognises the potential of the cultural and creative industries more generally in Aspiration 5, “Africa with a strong cultural identity, common heritage, values and ethics” (AU, 2015: 157). This mirrors the increasing number of African countries that have development cultural policies that seek to promote and develop the sector.

However, research on cultural economies and policy has tended to be focused on Western countries in the global north, with much less coming out of the African context. This journal seeks to fill this gap and was developed in tandem with a new Cluster of Research Excellence (CoRE) supported by both ARUA (African Research Universities Alliance) and The Guild (an alliance of European universities) called “Creative Economies: Cultures, Innovation and Sustainability”. It aspires to become an international point of reference for research on creative economies.

More generally, the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions adopted in 2005, and which came into force in 2007, is described by UNESCO as ‘a milestone in international cultural policy’. The Convention came at a time of WTO restructuring, when developing countries were concerned about maintaining their cultural diversity and industries at a time of expanded global trade, increasing transnational digitisation of cultural production, and ensuring more coherent control of intellectual property rights. For its architects, the 2005 Convention was ‘at the heart of the creative economy’ and would shape ‘the design and implementation of policies and measures that support the creation, production, distribution of and access to cultural goods and services’ (UN, nd). The Convention sought to emphasise that, ‘while cultural goods, services and activities have important economic value, they are not mere commodities or consumer goods that can only be regarded as objects of trade’ (UNESCO, n.d).

Under the terms of the Convention, and at the behest of developing countries, an International Fund for Cultural Diversity was established, as such countries did not want the diversity of cultural expressions confined to the diversity of developed country cultural expressions (De Beukelaer & Pyykkönen, 2015). The tension between pronouncement and practice regarding the Convention and the associated Fund, and subsequent challenges such as the advent of the mega digital and streaming platforms and their growing predominance in the globalising creative economy, are issues that require more extensive scholarly scrutiny.

The later 2000s and after, have seen a growth of scholarly and research networks and institutions globally, including in the Global South. Several cultural and/or creative economy observatories have been formed. Such developments have found echoes in African economies, but state support for such structures has been modest by and large. There is, however, a distinct and growing awareness of the need for more specialised research and inquiry on entwined matters such as national, regional and international cultural policy, and the national and transnational implications of the creative economy and the CCIs.

The AJCE is a key part of this vision, offering an open-access platform for sharing research that aims to support the development of more equitable, innovative, and sustainable creative economies.

Publication frequency

The journal publishes one issue each year. Articles are published online when ready for publication and then printed in an end-of-year compilation. Additional issues may be published for special events (e.g. conferences) and when special themes are addressed.

Types of articles published

Read full details on the submissions guidelines page.

Open access

This is an open access journal which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. This is in accordance with the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) definition of open access. Learn more about the journal copyright, licensing and publishing rights.

Review process

The journal has a double-blinded peer review process. Manuscripts are initially examined by editorial staff and are sent by the Editor-in-Chief to two expert independent reviewers, either directly or by a Section Editor. Read our full peer review process.

Marketing

AOSIS has a number of ways in which we promote publications. Learn more here.

Membership

AOSIS is a member and/or subscribes to the standards and code of practices of several leading industry organisations. This includes the Directory of Open Access Journals, Ithenticate, Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, CrossRef, Portico and the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Learn more here.

All articles published in the journal are included in:

• GALE, CENGAGE Learning

We are working closely with relevant indexing services to ensure that articles published in the journal will be available in their databases when appropriate.

The full text of the journal articles is deposited in the following archives to guarantee long-term preservation:

• Portico
• AOSIS Library
• SA ePublications, Sabinet
• South African Government Libraries

AOSIS is also a participant in the LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) initiative. LOCKSS will enable any library to maintain their own archive of content from AOSIS and other publishers, with minimal technical effort and using cheaply available hardware. The URL to the LOCKSS Publisher Manifest for the journal is, https://ajce.africa/index.php/ajce/gateway/lockss. Please inform us if you are using our manifest as we would like to add your name to the list above.

A journal's Impact Factor was originally designed in 1963 as a tool for libraries to compare journals, and identify the most popular ones to subscribe to. It was never intended to measure the quality of journals, and definitely not the quality of individual articles.

The Impact Factor is a journal-level measurement reflecting the yearly average number of citations of recent articles published in that journal. It is frequently used as a proxy for the relative importance of a journal within its field; journals with higher Impact Factors are often deemed to be more important than those with lower ones. Therefore, the more often articles in the journal are cited, the higher its Impact Factor.

The Impact Factor is highly discipline-dependent due to the speed with which articles get cited in each field and the related citation practices. The percentage of total citations occurring in the first two years after publication varies highly amongst disciplines. Accordingly, one cannot compare journals across disciplines based on their relative Impact Factors.

We provide several citation-based measurements for each of our journals, if available. We caution our authors, readers and researchers that they should assess the quality of the content of individual articles, and not judge the quality of articles by the reputation of the journal in which they are published.

 *Journal launched in 2023.