Following months of comprehensive planning, the federal government has unveiled details of its bold and strategic plans to generate at least $100bn and create over two million jobs from Nigeria’s creative economy yearly.
The government’s plan was unveiled Wednesday September by the Minister of Art, Culture and the Creative Economy, Hannatu Musa Musawa at a roundtable for local and international investors where she presented her ministry’s 8-Point Plan and Roadmap.
Speaking at the event hosted by the Ministry at the Wheatbaker in Ikoyi, the Minister said that if implemented to its fullest, the plan has the potential to achieve the above-stated objectives.
She lamented that despite its huge potentials, Nigeria’s creative industry currently contributes just $5bn to the economy, with its different sub-sectors at various stages of development.
The sectors include music (sound recording, live performances and music videos), visual media (movies, TV shows, comedy shows, podcast, content creation), visual arts & craft (canvas painting, design, sculpturing, woodwork and other craft works), heritage & museums, culinary arts, fashion, publishing (books, literary arts, poetry, magazine, etc), and video gaming.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics, Nigeria’s creative economy has a very low contribution to overall GDP in comparison with benchmark countries, with the industry contributing just 1.2 per cent to Nigeria’s GDP in 2022, the least when compared to other African countries like Morocco (2.7 per cent), South Africa (3 per cent), and Egypt (4.3 per cent). It also ranks low (1.0 per cent) in its ability to earn government revenue from the sector, compared to South Africa’s 12.5 per cent.
To achieve its ambition, Musawa said the ministry has identified 14 pivotal initiatives that will drive the sector’s growth and significantly boost government revenue $10bn- $20bn.
She grouped these initiatives under four unique pillars, namely: Technology, Infrastructure and Funding, International Culture Promotion, and Intellectual Property Monetisation.
Under the Technology pillar, the minister said the ministry intends to launch a digital content creation tool accessibility program to provide improved and discounted digital tools for Nigerian creatives.
Others include the launch the Nigeria content distribution initiative to increase the nationwide adoption of digital tools for content distribution, the launch of a study to estimate the size of the creative industry in Nigeria including a framework to size the market going forward, and the expansion of internet accessibility in underserved regions in Nigeria to expand the reach of the other digital initiatives.
For Infrastructure and Funding, she said, this entails cataloguing existing infrastructure for the Arts, Culture and Creative Economy and its current state, developing the appropriate infrastructure needed to the industry and leveraging public-private partnership to fund development, providing incentives to stakeholders in the creative economy to boost investment and adoption of strategic initiatives, and launching a creative accelerator program to provide capital, and capacity building to creative companies.