Chapter 10: The ‘Creative Village’: A Creative Entrepreneurship Framework for Catalysing Africa's Creative and Cultural Industries

This chapter explores a practical way of realising Africa’s creative and cultural industries (CCIs) potential as a new frontier for development. It answers the question of how can young African creatives be nurtured to build creative enterprises? Using insights from extant literature identifying some of the key contextual challenges, we developed and deployed a prototype innovative platform called the ‘Creative Village’ to address these challenges in a practical way at one of Africa’s biggest Music reality TV shows in Nigeria. A qualitative multistakeholder data collection approach called the Ecosystem Insights Approach (EIA) was adopted to explore these challenges and the appropriateness of the proposed Creative Village solution.

Findings identify some key constraints that creatives face such as weak structures and infrastructure, weak artist education, low levels of investment, and the underdevelopment of the music value chain. We conclude that the creative entrepreneurship framework called the ‘Creative Village’ and its key features is a viable way of jumpstarting and catalysing the already vibrant yet under-tapped CCI in Africa, but this platform must be built on five philosophical pillars: An inclusive platform for individual talents regardless of their gender, location or disability to find expression; developing a holistic, professional creative entrepreneur who understands their craft and the business of their craft; creating a platform that allows for different dimensions of authenticity to thrive; a platform that unifies different players in the Nigeria music ecosystem through the right partnerships; a platform that enhances local markets and connects musicians to regional and international market.