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Are you interested in how creative economise are contributing in Africa?
Our debate today works with the article titled Rethinking the contribution of creative economies in Africa to sustainable development. An empirical research of creative intermediaries in Accra’s contemporary art sector from 2025, by Jack D. Mensah, published in the International Journal of Cultural Policy.
This is a great preparation to our next interview with Raoul Rugamba in episode 416 talking about the opportunities within the African continent through arts and culture.
Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see how African creative economies can better support sustainable development. This article advocates for a regenerative cultural policy that treats arts as a holistic tool for achieving sustainability rather than just a source of financial growth.
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Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today we will introduce a research by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original investigation, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole documentation. This conversation was produced and generated with Notebook LM as two hosts dissecting the whole research.
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Speaker 1: Usually when we evaluate an economy, it is like measuring a timber forest. You count the trees, you measure the yield, and you calculate the board feed.
Speaker 2: Right. It is very clean, highly quantifiable.
Speaker 1: Exactly. It is clean, quantifiable, and incredibly comforting for policy makers who just want to chart GDP growth on a graph. When you look at the contemporary art sector in acro, there are almost no formal metrics,
Speaker 2: and there is definitely no massive state funding either,
Speaker 1: right? Zero. Yet there is this underground, highly connected network that is keeping the city’s social and cultural fabric alive. So today we are asking. Is this grassroots network a brilliant new model for sustainable development? Or is it just a desperate survival tactic in a failed system?
Speaker 2: And to dive into this, we are grounding our discourse in Jack D Men’s 2025, empirical research on creative intermediaries in across contemporary art sector.
Speaker 1: Mensa argues that we need to drop the traditional economic growth model entirely. For this context, he says we need to embrace what he calls a regenerative cultural policy, and I happen to think he is spot on. I will be arguing that these creative intermediaries operate as holistic, enabling assets that inherently repair the structural gaps in their society.
Speaker 2: And I will be taking the position that framing these grassroots, highly informal survival strategies as a comprehensive regenerative model. It risks romanticizing, state neglect. It obscures the fundamentally economic market driven nature of what these actors are actually forced to do.
Speaker 1: So let us define what we are actually looking at here. Because the Western creative industry’s paradigm, which basically just views culture as a machine for GDP growth and exports, that model has utterly failed the African context.
Speaker 2: I agree it is a flawed extractivism model. That part is true.
Speaker 1: It extracts, but Mensa has research proves that culture in Accra functions through what researcher Cacia calls cultural enabling. Rather than just acting as traditional businesses, these intermediaries function as enablers and bridgers.
Speaker 2: Bridgers.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Bridge. That means they are physically providing the spaces, the education, and the social cohesion that the government simply does not provide. They are advancing the UN sustainable development goals intrinsically through their cultural work, not just as some accidental byproduct of selling a painting.
Speaker 2: The problem with framing it that way is that it completely ignores the mechanism of how these spaces actually stay open. Yes, the Western GDP growth model is flawed. Look at how men’s own data categorizes these actors. He interviewed 11 intermediaries in opera, right? And the data shows they are functioning heavily as economic imaginaries and taste makers,
Speaker 1: but that is just one facet of their role.
Speaker 2: It is the crucial facet, though. What does economic imaginary actually mean in practice? It means that because the state provides zero funding, these intermediaries have to invent their own economic models from scratch just to keep the lights on. They are forced to broker commercial deals and integrate into the global market to survive. Framing this as some radical departure from the economic growth paradigm is an intellectual stretch. It is micro capitalism stepping in where the state has failed.
Speaker 1: You are looking at the revenue, but you are totally missing the actual output. If you look at the on the ground reality in Accra, their role is bridgers, connecting isolated communities. It is overwhelming.
Speaker 2: Is it though?
Speaker 1: Oh, absolutely. Take the foundation of Contemporary Art or FCA Ghana. Their primary objective isn’t selling paintings to European collectors. They literally took artists into the abandoned Acoma J space in Jamestown to collaboratively create murals with local community members, or consider the attitude project that is entirely focused on peer-to-peer education and dispelling public misconceptions about visual arts. Think about this mechanically, like a keystone species in ecology. Just like a sea otter keeps a kelp forest alive, and they do not do it by growing kelp, they do it by eating the sea urchins that would otherwise destroy the forest. These are intermediaries stabilize social fabric by absorbing the deficits that government leaves behind. How can you view this purely as economic survival when the outputs are so heavily focused on community dialogue and peer-to-peer education?
Speaker 2: Look, I understand the sea Otter analogy, but otters do not have to pay rent in Jamestown. These initiatives require capital. If you are listening to this and wondering how a community mural project sustains itself, the answer is aggressive commercial networking. Let us look at Eric Aguilar’s Agency. Art Life Matters from the exact same dataset,
Speaker 1: right? He does incredible work.
Speaker 2: He does, but he partnered with Samsung. They are curating local art to be displayed on Samsung’s digital frame TVs, which generates a $2,000 a month revenue stream for top artists.
Speaker 1: Which is fantastic for the artists.
Speaker 2: It is fantastic, but that is not peer-to-peer community healing. That is a highly commercial corporate partnership. Or look at Lesi, Gamma’s agency Art Mattis. She’s bringing in finance professionals and corporate lawyers to teach artists how to read contracts.
Speaker 1: Exactly. So they do not get exploited
Speaker 2: so they can navigate the global art market successfully. I’m not saying it is bad, I am saying these are highly commercial market oriented actions. Necessary for basic livelihood to call this a regenerative cultural policy makes it sound like a deliberate, holistic government strategy. In reality, it is brilliant, desperate hustle in a vacuum of institutional support.
Speaker 1: But why do those commercial partnerships disqualify the work from being regenerative? A mechanism can be financially, self-sustaining, and still structurally repair a society. I see how a single mural or a Samsung TV deal might seem isolated to you, but when you zoom out, this scales directly to the sustainable development goals across different societal dimensions.
Speaker 2: Can this actually scale up to a national economic level though? Because the UNESCO culture, 2030 indicators, which are the standard metrics for this kind of thing, they do not even map properly onto what these ACRA based actors are doing. Mensa admits that himself in the research.
Speaker 1: Yeah. They do not map onto UNESCO’s indicators because UNESCO’s indicators are built for Western formalized economies. The scale of the impact here is undeniably cross-sectoral hitting SDGs for prosperity, knowledge, and inclusion. Let me give you the perfect example of how this mechanism scales in practice. Look at Ode Tevye’s New Bouquet Foundation.
Speaker 2: What did they do?
Speaker 1: They didn’t just host an art show. They went up to W in the Upper West region and connected ACRA based visual artists with traditional weavers. Then they brought in the W Methodist School of the Blind and the School of the Deaf. By fusing these contemporary creative minds with traditional, marginalized artisans, they completely bypass the failing state infrastructure.
Speaker 2: I do not deny the ingenuity of that project.
Speaker 1: It is more than just ingenuity. They taught the weavers how to use smartphones for digital market access, allowing them to take direct orders and produce furniture. It hits the SDG targets for equitable access, social inclusion, and skills for employment, all at once, creating a self-sustaining micro economy. Even on the environmental front, which wasn’t even men’s primary focus, the mechanism is exactly the same. The global North thumbs, tons of unusable second-hand leather jackets in Ghana, instead of letting them rotten landfills, local artists and designers repurpose that heavy leather into protective uniforms for pineapple farmers to prevent agricultural injuries. That is the literal definition of cross-sectoral regenerative impact. They’re taking waste, applying creative mediation and solving an agricultural safety crisis.
Speaker 2: Okay? The pineapple farmer jackets and the smartphone weavers and WA are incredible stories. I give you that, but relying on isolated anecdotal projects to claim the informal creative economy is a structural driver of the SDGs is actually quite dangerous.
Speaker 1: Dangerous. How on earth is that dangerous? It proves their efficacy on the ground. It proves they’re solving problems the state cannot or will not solve.
Speaker 2: It is dangerous because of how policymakers interpret that resilience. If you publish research declaring that informal art intermediaries are magically solving environmental waste, agricultural safety, and social inclusion on their own through cultural enabling. You are giving the government a permanent excuse to never step up.
Speaker 1: That is a very cynical way to look at it.
Speaker 2: It is the reality of policy. It masks the severe lack of institutional support. You are essentially telling the state, Hey, do not worry about funding the arts and do not worry about agricultural safety. The artists have a regenerative policy for that. These actors are highly resourceful. Yes. But elevating their survival tactics to the level of a successful policy framework takes the pressure off the state to build actual formal infrastructure.
Speaker 1: But waiting for top-down formal institutions modelled on Western institutions is exactly what is stifled African creative economies for decades, the state isn’t going to suddenly adopt a European arts council model. And honestly, even if it did. It wouldn’t fit the cultural context.
Speaker 2: Maybe not, but they need to do something
Speaker 1: by acknowledging these intermediaries as profound agents of holistic development. By seeing the invisible network for what it actually is, we validate their methods to fully utilize the creative economy in Africa. We have to stop demanding that it look like a formalized timber forest and embrace this cultural enabling
Speaker 2: look. Validating their methods shouldn’t mean accepting their precariousness. I want this network to thrive just as much as you do, but their fundamental need remains economic viability. If we lose sight of the fact that they are operating as economic imaginaries out of sheer necessity, we obscure the reality of their daily struggle. You simply cannot build a sustainable national economy solely on the backs of exceptionally resilient individuals patching the gaps left by the state.
Speaker 1: It seems the tension between recognizing that incredible grassroots resilience and demanding formal structural support remains unresolved
Speaker 2: indeed. But there is immense value in examining these global south perspectives. It forces us to challenge our entrenched assumptions about how culture and development. Actually intersect when the safety nets are completely removed.
Speaker 1: Absolutely. We encourage you to critically examine Jack Menz as research to form your own conclusions. When you look at an ecosystem, you can choose to only measure the visible output, or you can look deeper at the mechanisms keeping it alive. The question is, once you recognize that hidden network, how do you make sure it survives without crushing what makes it special?
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