Arts and culture are important to national economies. Arts and culture-related industries, also known as “creative industries,” provide direct economic benefits to countries and communities. They create jobs, attract investments, generate tax revenues, and stimulate local economies through tourism and consumer purchases.
These industries also provide an array of other benefits, such as infusing other industries with creative insight for their products and services and preparing workers to participate in the contemporary workforce. In addition, because they enhance quality of life, the arts and culture are an important complement to community development, enriching local amenities and attracting young professionals to an area.
Governments increasingly recognize the importance of the creative sector to their states’ economy and ability to compete in the global marketplace. A number of factors underscore the connection between economic competitiveness and creativity. For example, in the current global economy, creative and new media industries are growing in number and playing increasingly prominent economic and social roles. Companies’ decisions about where to locate their businesses often are influenced by factors such as the ready availability of a creative workforce and the quality of life available to employees.
Arts and culture can play a major role in community development and redevelopment by creating new jobs as well as fostering an environment and amenities that attract talented young workers. Tourism centered on arts and culture can contribute to national economic growth by providing a diversified and sustainable means for creating jobs and attracting revenue.
In this environment, a country’s arts and cultural resources can be economic assets. The arts and cultural industries provide jobs, attract investments, and stimulate local economies through tourism, consumer purchases, and tax revenue. Perhaps more significantly, they also prepare workers to participate in the contemporary workforce, create communities with high appeal to residents, businesses, and tourists, and contribute to the economic success of other sectors.
Countries define their creative economies in a variety of ways, depending on the composition and character of businesses, nonprofits, individuals, and venues that exist in any given areas. The creative economy may include human, organizational, and physical assets. It also includes many types of cultural institutions, artistic disciplines, and business pursuits.
Industries that comprise the arts and culture sector may include advertising, architecture, the art and antiques market, crafts, design, fashion, film, digital media, television, radio, music, software and computer games, the performing arts, publishing, graphic arts, and cultural tourism.
From the work of nonprofit arts agencies to the impact of cultural tourism, it is clear that the creative sector is important to state economies all across the country. The creative industry in Arkansas, the United States for example, employs nearly 27,000 individuals and generates $927 million in personal income for Arkansas citizens in 2020. Creative enterprises are the state’s third largest employer after transport and logistics and perishable and processed foods.
In the state of North Carolina, the wages and income of workers employed by creative industries infused $3.9 billion into the state’s economy in 2020. And in Massachusetts state, the 17.6 percent yearly growth of the cultural sector contributed $4.23 billion to the state’s economy.
To help their countries realize the full potential and economic benefits of the arts and culture sector, governments must identify the pivotal creative industries or clusters in the state. Then, they can adopt strategies that support and strengthen these industries. These include offering incentives targeted at the arts and culture sectors as well as development initiatives, entrepreneurial training, marketing programs, or public-private collaborations to encourage growth and invest in specific creative clusters.
In the United States state of Michigan, for example, has enacted a comprehensive incentive program, which includes tax credits, designed to entice film projects to locate in the state. The state of Kentucky offers a “Craft Marketing Program” that provides business and product development services to participating artists and helps market their work both inside and outside the state.
In addition, some states are encouraging collaborations between artists, designers, and product engineers in a variety of manufacturing and high-tech industries. In California, for example, the University of California Santa Cruz has partnered with local industry and the city of Santa Cruz to establish the “Santa Cruz Design Innovation Center”. The center’s goal is to leverage local design talent to grow design-based business and attract new businesses to the area. Such collaborations stimulate new thinking, encourage new product development, and make the most of a state’s collective creative and business resources.
The creative industries offer numerous benefits to national economies, and countries have an opportunity to both improve livability and boost national economies by investing in the arts and culture.
The creative industry as economic assets
Family planning – a magic bullet to eradicate poverty and ensure robust economic development
By Ephrem Berhanu
The International Conference on Family Planning (ICFP) will be held in Pattaya City, Thailand from 14-17 November 2022. The theme of the conference is “Family Planning & Universal Health Coverage: Innovate. Collaborate. Accelerate.” The theme highlights importance of family planning to ensure universal health coverage. Creating access to good family planning and sexual reproductive health services not only improves health outcome s but also fuels robust economic development.
Since the first ICFP conference held in Kampala, Uganda in 2009 it has got momentum in bringing the issues of family planning to decision makers and its importance to health and economic wellbeing of a nation. Ethiopia hosted the third conference 2013 following the successful launch of Family Planning 2020 (now FP 2030) during the 2012 London Summit on Family planning. It brought together more than 3,400 delegates to celebrate progress made towards achieving “Full Access, Full Choice”. It was organized in Ethiopia having seen its achievement in advancing access to family planning.
Investing on family planning, is for a lifetime of returns from health, education and empowerment to economic growth and environmental health.
What is family planning
Family planning allows couples to have informed decisions regarding spacing pregnancies and number of children that they want. It has a lot to do with the improvement of health of mothers, children, family, and community. Couples who have adequate knowledge about family planning will be able to space pregnancies at the recommended time that will give them time to care for the new baby. Family planning consists of wide arrays of contraceptives, including implants, pills, surgical procedure to limit fertility, intrauterine device (IUD) and condom. Family planning can also include abstinence and calendar method.
Brief family planning context in Ethiopia
According to UN Population Projection 2022, Ethiopia had a total population of 121,599,592 with an annual population growth rate of 2.57%, the total fertility rate, or the average number of children per women over the course of her lifetime is 4.1. Women of reproductive age constitute 23% of the population (Mini EDHS 2019).
The Ethiopian government made a commitment to increase family planning finance from the government budget which used to heavily dependent on foreign funding, improve contraception and commodity security, improve access to adolescent and youth responsive health system for contraceptive use with the aim of reducing teenage pregnancy among adolescent girls from 13% to 7% by 2025 and 3% by 2030, ensure availability of quality family planning and services. (FP 2030 Ethiopian Government Commitment)
Demographic divided
Demographic divided will be witnessed when the country’s population characteristics changes because of demographic transition. Demographic transition will happen when a country manages to have decreasing level of mortality and fertility which leads to elongated lives and lower average number of births per women. As we can see from the above facts, Ethiopia annual fertility rate is 4.1 and it used to be 7.2 in 1990. The transition will be happening in different stages during which population growth first accelerates and then slows down. The transition results changes in the population structure by age with a gradual increase in the share of older population. The reduction in fertility at the intermediate stage of the transition, the relative size of the birth cohorts begins to decline.
The working age population growth outpaced that of the children and older age people provides opportunity for accelerated economic and social transition to sustainable development known us the “demographic dividend”. For this result to materialize
This is where family planning is doing its magic through helping countries to change population age structure from the combination of decline in both child mortality and fertility. This will result in broaden the working age population which paves that way for rapid economic growth. To harness the benefits of demographic dividend countries are required to make investments on human, social and physical capital including health and education. The benefits of family planning include saving lives of women and children, offering women more choices. When population growth becomes slower and manageable it contributes for the demographic transition but also will help in protecting the environment.
Hence, countries need to promote voluntary family planning, allocating resources for family planning commodities, training health professional and community-based health workers to support and counsel women and their spouse about the different options available, and most importantly comprehensive sexuality education in schools.
Ephrem Berhanu, is the managing director of one of the largest youth development organizations in Ethiopia, Talent Youth Association.
Opportunities
Last weekend I paid a visit to some coffee farmers in Sidama and Guji. Fact of the matter is, there is never enough time to visit such areas and meet with the farming communities, considering the distances and conditions of the road that take you there. Such journey begins in Addis Abeba and it takes the good part of an hour to just get out of the city these days. Interesting enough, there is a dual carriage road with three lanes on each side, before getting closer to the entrance of the Express Way. On this particular stretch there are speed limits of 50 and 40 km per hour. This seems a ridiculous speed limit, given the size of the road and number of lanes. It is a milking cow for the traffic police though who measure passing vehicles speeds and stop all cars “over speeding” to give them a ticket. Eventually you will enter the Express Way which now continues until Ziway, while construction continues to take it up all the way to Hawassa. From there the road continues to Moyale. So far so good. From Yirga Chefe to Guji, it is a different story though. While construction is going on, much of the road is a real challenge and things will be much worse during the rains. Going back later that afternoon and evening we had to negotiate the road from Yirga Chefe to Hawassa in the dark, which was a real challenge. During the early evening hours the road is crowded with pedestrians, donkey carts, bajage, cattle, trucks, name it.
One thing that keeps surprising me is the speed at which drivers push their cars, trucks and buses, with no fear or consideration for the danger they pose to themselves and others. In fact, on one occasion, an oncoming Isuzu truck lost control and started to swerve towards us, missing is by a few inches only. That could have ended differently, like it does for so many. During our trip of three days, we saw six serious accidents along the way, all caused by over speeding I am sure, cutting in and overtaking at the wrong places. Why are they all so much in a hurry while the risks area so obvious? Mind you, there are speed humps here and there on the road, meant to slow down drivers, as they approach a residential area or a curve in the road for example. Some of these speed humps are so big, that they form a danger by themselves. Hitting them, even at a moderate speed, will cause the driver to lose control.
In any case, I conclude that most drivers overspeed and seem to be in a great hurry to get to their destination. They just can’t seem to accept that somebody else will be there before them.
I wish people behaved the same when they see opportunities to do business. Oh yes, people will rush to take an opportunity if there is quick money to be made. Not so when it comes to setting up something new, something more durable and sustainable. We even discourage each other to try something else or something new. We are very convincing in our advice that something will not work in Ethiopia instead of encouraging someone to try. Remember, trying and fail is better than failing to try!
But, when somebody has an original idea, wants to try something new, something out of the ordinary, is about to take a risk, there is more often negative feed back than encouragement. And as people here rely much on the advice and council of close ones, the risk is rarely taken. Thus, many opportunities are lost. It seems saver to do what others are doing also, copy what seems to work for others. But without having the original idea, without having a vision for success, this road will only take us to mediocrity or failure. Beware that the ones that are really successful are the ones who dared to take a risk ………
…….. and work hard, very hard, to make it happen. Which brings me to another interesting observation. Many people believe that once you are in business, money will be made just like that. You start a business, and you drive a new car, build a house, travel the world. Not without hard work, you don’t. When a new business begins to pick up, returns will need to be reinvested immediately to be able to manage the growth. More workers need to be hired, more equipment is required, more production is needed to meet the growing demand. No time yet to buy a new car or pay more salary to yourself. It normally takes a few years before you can really pick the fruits of the work.
Those who recognise an opportunity and are willing to take the risk, work hard and reinvest in their business may succeed, while learning on the way, no guarantees though.
Learning is what needs to happen, in an environment that is relatively safe. Like a child that learns to walk, with the watchful and encouraging words of the parents. It is here, where the authorities and development partners have a big responsibility. It is not sufficient for experts to come in and judge that a product is not good enough or too expensive. They need to support the producers in further designing and developing their products. It is not sufficient to make funds available to develop policy; policy needs to support those who are willing to take a risk. It is not sufficient to encourage export; the whole supply chain needs to be considered. There are opportunities indeed, but they can only be taken step by step and with integrated support.
Nobody knew how to run before learning how to walk first. And no parent wants to expose a child to danger, while exploring the world and growing up. Instead, they encourage, support and guide.
Ton Haverkort
