The Federal Government of Nigeria has disclosed the specifics of its strategic plans to leverage the country’s creative economy to produce over two million employment and at least $100 billion in revenue annually.
At a roundtable for regional and global investors on Wednesday in Ikoyi, Lagos, the Minister of Art, Culture, and the Creative Economy, Hannatu Musawa, outlined her ministry’s eight-point plan and roadmap.
Despite its enormous potential, Musawa bemoaned the fact that Nigeria’s creative industry, with its multiple sub-sectors at varying levels of growth, currently contributes only $5 billion to the country’s GDP.
According to her, data from the National Bureau of Statistics shows that Nigeria’s creative economy contributes very little to the country’s GDP overall when compared to benchmark nations. In 2022, the industry’s share of Nigeria’s GDP was just 1.2%, the lowest amount when compared to other African nations like Morocco (2.7%), South Africa (3.1%), and Egypt (4.3%).
She added that, in comparison to South Africa’s 12.5%, Nigeria rated poorly (1.0%) in terms of its capacity to generate government money from the sector.
Musawa stated that “the ministry has identified 14 important measures that would drive the sector’s growth and considerably raise government income $10bn – $20bn” in order to fulfill its ambitious goal.
She categorized these projects into four distinct categories: technology, finance and infrastructure, promoting international culture, and monetizing intellectual property.
In order to support these measures, the minister unveiled plans to give Nigerian creatives better and more affordable digital tools, introduce the Nigeria Content Distribution Initiative, size the creative industry research, and increase internet connectivity in underserved areas.
In terms of funding and infrastructure, she explained that this involves listing the current state of the Arts, Culture, and Creative Economy’s infrastructure, developing the infrastructure that the sector needs and utilizing public-private partnerships to finance its growth, offering incentives to industry participants to encourage investment in and adoption of strategic initiatives, and establishing a creative accelerator program to give capital and capacity building to creative companies.
“The ministry will establish a culture promotion office collaborating with Nigerian embassies abroad, to promote Nigerian arts, culture, and creative economy, and leverage AFCTA to boost Nigerian creative output export regionally and globally,” stated Musawa in reference to the promotion of foreign culture.
Musawa stated that in order to maximize the revenue from intellectual property, the ministry would work to create globally standardized collection management organizations for the majority of the industries. It would also start a copyright oversight program in collaboration with the Nigeria Communications Commission in order to improve copyright standard tracking, monitoring, and enforcement.
Musawa claims that it will also operationalize Nigeria’s IP licencing structure and create and implement an intellectual property framework.
The creative economy in Nigeria “has the potential to grow by 400 percent by 2027, positioning the sector to leapfrog in the long term and deliver the vision for the sector,” according to Musawa.
She went on to say that the Ministry has already launched a number of projects and joined partnerships in order to achieve its objectives.
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