Creating Linkages for Creative Industries

There was a thoroughly exciting meeting yesterday. A variety of people engaged in and with creative industries, some hands-on, some in policy, some in thought and some in hope that successful creative industries might be a reality one day in Kenya.

It all started in December last year when I received enquiry, as I often do, from somebody planning to travel to Kenya. Since I was about to go to Estonia for Christmas I suggested we talk further once I am there. I prefer to meet with people, instead of using technology to talk. This was a great choice and opened for me the world of creative industries and the training and business centre that supports business people in the creative field Tartu Centre for Creative Industries (TCCI). Juta Kuhlberg, one of the people planning the trip to Estonia generously took me around these amazing three buildings that hold the offices, a shop and workshop rooms, the centre of creative arts of every form. Within just couple of minutes of her telling me about the activities of the centre, I knew a copy of it is badly needed in Nairobi!! And so came the idea that she would do a presentation about the centre during their only free morning in Nairobi.

When I came back to Nairobi I started to look for a good audience for such a talk. In Estonia the centre falls under Tartu municipal government. Trying to tell Nairobi City Council about a centre for creative arts … well .. maybe when it becomes a county … NCBDA could be an other logical host, however in the past years its clout and credibility have been on the decline. So Kenya Private Sector Alliance (KEPSA) was the obvious choice. It was great that they also found the topic of interest and responded positively, calling in their network of partners, Creative Arts Association within KEPSA Youth Sector.

A week later I was attending Rotary Club of Nairobi East meeting and there was a talk by Sylvia Gichia, the Director of Kuona Trust. I suddenly realised that what they do has an overlap with what I saw at TCCI. I had no choice but to invite Kuona Trust representatives to the presentation.

A week to the presentation I was sitting in the café at the gate of Nakuru Narional Park. I had a five (5!!!) hour wait while my son and his travel companions admire the flora and the fauna. I normally read the newspapers online. I only buy a paper copy when I realise I have a bit of a wait. This was 5!! hour wait.  I bought the full set of three – Nation, Standard and Star. I had 1 thermos of tea, 4 pieces of spinach pies, 3 newspapers and 5 hours. So there it was! An article about a new ‘baby’ under the wing of ICT board – a mandate to develop new media and the creative artsindustry. What? Really? More people to invite!

So it came to be that in the board room of Kenya Private Sector Alliance met their own sector group dealing with creative arts, ICT Board Creative content Task Force, who have an impressive 5-year roadmap with an aim to have arts provide 10% of Kenya’s GDP and Kuona Trust, who have been promoting and marketing art and artists in Kenya for over 20 years. Some of these players in the same industry, pushing the same agenda, had not met before face to face! At the head of the table was Juta Kuhlberg, with 3 years of experience of running TCCI, with 36 art based companies in incubation and festivals, auctions and family days taking place, providing publicity and joint marketing for the centre and its inhabitants.

It seemed that the Kenyan side of the table was pleased to get assurance that indeed their discussions, the models, the thoughts, the imaginations of how creative industries could become to take shape, can be a reality and indeed are working in a strange small country called Estonia. 

To add icing to the cake Marge Eelmaa of Marketing Institute mentioned a trade related global forum that brought participants from 27 countries to Tallinn, the capital of Estonia and added some exiting buzz words like “revolutionizing export” and “brand building in export markets”. The audience felt that Brand Kenya could borrow a leaf or two from Estonia, just on the basis of having leafed through the booklet A Dozzen Questions about Estonia, while waiting for quorum for the meeting. Indeed Estonia has gone out of its way to create a brand, larger than life for a small country with a population of only 1.3M.

When the presentations were done, questions asked and answered, words of advice exchanged and multilateral wish to work expressed, the Kenyan side of the table decided to stay on and make use of the fact that they were all in the same room, on the same agenda and they learned about each other and about possibilities within them to move things forward.

What made it exciting for me was to have had the intriguingly perfect timing for such knowledgeable speaker to be available at this particular time in this important conversation in Kenyan economic space, to find around the table people open to collaboration, to see the inspiration from the presentation allow people to find strength in themselves to keep trying to make art in Kenya a formidable form of business.