Overcoming the challenges in Africa's digital creative ecosystem
Yesterday at Africa Games Week, a talk discussed the challenges of the creative industries pipeline across Africa.
The presentation was based on new research led by Dr. Tegan Bristow from the Wits University School of Arts, in partnership with the Fak’ugesi African Digital Innovation Festival at the Tshimologong Innovation Precinct. The research particularly focused on the role of intermediaries in digital creative industries (animation and games), and mapping the gaps in the pipeline.
Bristow defined intermediaries as "the people and organisations who help produce, develop, distribute, aggregate, and monetise creative work in a way that helps to scale up the African Digital Creative Industry." That includes the entire value chain from pre-production (incubation, funding, infrastructure development, pitching, and more), to production and distribution (established studios, publishers, distributors and so on).
The goal of the research (which you can sign up to receive on this page) was to understand the health of the African digital infrastructure, and was achieved by talking to 166 individuals from across the creative industries in 2022 to map out the current landscape and challenges of the ecosystem.
"The entire value chain within the African continent is not well considered," Bristow said, later adding: "One of the biggest issues we have on the continent is digital infrastructure support and how digital creative industries are able to connect into that and work with that for monetisation [as well as] from a general distribution perspective."
The research team identified five threats to the ecosystem across the African continent, starting with the fact that the value chain is heavily weighted towards production
Read more on gamesindustry.biz
