Budding fashion designers, visual artists, animators, musicians and other creative entrepreneurs are being offered financial support through a new multi-million dollar fund launched by the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) and designed to help the region diversify its economy and increase its cultural capital.
The Cultural and Creative Industries Innovation Fund (CIIF) will provide grants of up to US$150,000 to innovative new projects from all artistic endeavours but is focusing specifically on five niches — fashion and contemporary design, visual arts, audio-visual design, festivals and carnivals, and music. These have been identified as “priority areas” for the Bank which is focusing not just on finance, but also providing technical support and improving the regional business environment for creative arts over the long-term.
Projects under the scheme should not last longer than two years and are expected to last, on average, six months to a year. But budding entrepreneurs won’t be left in the lurch; the aim of the Fund is to support sustainable development and ensure that creative workers get the tools they need to build a thriving, lasting business.
Improving the arts infrastructure
Cultural and creative businesses face many hardships in the Caribbean. For the region’s artists, following their dreams is rarely an easy path as they struggle to get funding, have limited access to global markets and cannot navigate the challenging economic environment. Many simply do not have the resources to compete and turn their passion into a viable business. Lisa Harding, Coordinator of MSME Development at the CDB, says: “We recognise that access to finance is one of the major constraints of the sector. This fund is seeking to fill that financing gap in the market.”
The CDB is determined not to waste the region’s homegrown talent and wants to change the landscape through targeted support, better training and improved platforms for growth. The Bank is initially contributing US$2.6m to the CIIF, which will become a multi-donor fund over the long-term. Grants are streamlined into three categories with three distinct goals: to create an enabling environment, to improve data intelligence and market research, and to boost the competitiveness of small and medium-sized enterprises. This opens up the fund to a range of applicants including those from academia, government, business support organisations, NGOs and entrepreneurs.
Regardless of their circumstances and standing, all applicants must display innovation, collaboration and sustainability as these are core values for the programme. CIIF Co-ordinator Dr Marielle Barrow Maignan says: “Innovation is thinking about where we want to go in building technology [and] other sectors into how we operate within the creative industries sector. We want innovation to be hardwired into the fund in terms of its culture and its governance.”
In terms of collaboration, Maignan wants to see initiatives with widespread benefits, saying: “We are looking for projects that really seek to bring others up. We are looking for projects that span other countries.” Entrepreneurs will also be encouraged to network with others in their niche through the CIIF Creative Talk which allows stakeholders to brainstorm ideas, make connections and learn from others more entrenched in the sector. The CIIF Grant Writing Studio will also act as an ‘ideas incubator’, where inspiration can be hammered out into practical real-life business models.
CIIF organisers are hoping the Fund will attract significant buy-in from member countries, recognising that governments have a role to play in enabling their cultural industries. Funding through grants can go a long way towards giving those in the sector a helping hand but policy, legislative and institutional change is also necessary to sustain any development in this area. “We need this community to be built around the Fund in order to ensure the Fund’s sustainability and also to ensure that the projects within the Fund are sustainable,” says Maignan. “Even though we all enjoy culture, it is a lot deeper than we think. It is about embedded meanings, it is both the mundane and the extraordinary. To ensure we can all continue to enjoy it, we have to all support it.”
Diversification
Largely reliant on tourism as its main engine of economic growth, the Caribbean has traditionally viewed its cultural offerings through the lens of the tourism sector. But these industries have the potential to be money-makers in their own right.
According to the World Bank, cultural and creative industries generate around US$2,250bn in revenue worldwide and are responsible for 3 per cent of the world’s GDP. This dynamic market is growing, and could be the perfect vehicle to address some of the Caribbean’s biggest issues such as youth unemployment, poverty and social inequality. Harding says: “We hope that, through the Fund, we can finance exciting innovative projects that would help build the sector and diversify our economies even more and take our creative industries to another level.”
The CIIF is currently issuing a call for enabling environment grants, the deadline for which is February 28th. To apply, or get more information about CIIF, visit the programme website: www.caribank.org/ciif
