By: Staff Writer
June 21, 2024
A United Nations Trade and Development specialist said that the creative industries have an “important role to play in the new economy,” but the direct input of the Caribbean in the $1.4 trillion sector is hard to show because of lack of data.
Marisa Henderson, Chief of the Creative Economy Programme in UNCTAD, said on the panel, “Imagineering: Using Creative Industry Research to Devise Development Strategies,” that: “We believe strongly that the creative industries have the potential to increase economic resilience, and social cohesion. In addition, the new circumstances we particularly found ourselves during the pandemic, and the importance of women and gender, and the sustainable practices, I think the creative economy has an important role to play in the new economy.”
Following the Bridgetown Covenant, 2019, UNCTAD had two important mandates to complete. The first was in 2021 where they were given the mandate to promote the creative economies and the second mandate was in 2023 to report to the General Assembly in 2026 of the UN on the importance of creative industries for the creative economies.
Henderson also said: “The latest research, which has not been published yet, but it’s going to be published in July, show that the total exports of creative services worldwide is reached record levels of $1.4 trillion in 2022, to almost double the exports of creative goods in 2022, which reached about $713 billion.”
The data for the Caribbean with regard to their percentage of that $1.4 trillion is hard to extrapolate because there just was not enough data from the region.
Marsha Cadogan a Jamaican IP and legal specialist, who serves as the project manager for the CDB’s Cultural and Creative Industries Innovation Fund, also said: “The project that we did was focused on measuring the economic impact of the creative industries on GDP.
“The project was really focused on training particular key stakeholders from four different countries (Jamaica, Grenada, St. Lucia, and Trinidad and Tobago) to be able to carry out this study because it is important to have knowledge transfer, and now knowledge transfer of course on the appropriate personnel.”
The training spanned months working with statistical offices and personnel trying to compile the information needed to inform the studies results.
Cadogan also said: “So we had public private partnership, public being the Central Statistics Office of St. Lucia, but also internationally we partnered with WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization), and so we had WIPO reviewing the information that we wrote. We actually wrote a manual, which consists of six modules, which were given to the trainers.”