Creative Vibrancy Index for Africa: A Promising and Much Needed First Step

Measuring creative vibrancy is becoming an increasingly popular way, first, to shine a spotlight on the state of arts and culture in a given place. Second, sharing the results is a tool for educating stakeholders and inspiring actions to support and enhance urban cultural richness.

The Creative Vibrancy Index for Africa (CVIA) was launched April 27, 2023, in Nairobi. This initiative gathered quantitative and qualitative data on the support for arts and culture and creative industries in 12 cities across Africa. The CVIA was developed by the Creative Economy Practice at CcHUB in partnership with Africa No Filter with additional funding and support from the British Council.

The CVIA is, according to its developers, the first known index for African cities. In order to make policy decisions, policymakers need data. For creative practitioners to advocate for their industry, they need data. CVIA makes a major contribution to cultural policymaking, analysis, and advocacy simply by providing that data in a transparent, comparable format. Though not perfect, the CVIA is a much needed initial step towards raising the visibility of Africa’s rich urban cultural offerings within discussions on the continent and globally.

Why develop an index? What is in the Creative Vibrancy Index for Africa?

There is no single definition of cultural vibrancy, nor a universal measurement tool. Building an index is one way to try to draw boundaries around a complex, abstract idea and assign some empirical measures. It is useful because it can incorporate multiple domains that are theorized, in this case, to contribute to the richness and vitality of the arts and culture and creative industries ecosystems. It also facilitates comparisons by assembling the same data across different contexts. And, it is sometimes easier for stakeholders to grasp the synthesized numerical story conveyed by an index than tracking lots of disparate pieces of information.

The CVIA is constructed of three main themes with several sub-themes under each: 1) Cultural Vibrancy, composed of Venues and facilities, and Participation and attractiveness; 2) Enabling Environment, composed of Openness and Trust, Governance Quality, International Connections, and Censorship; and 3) Creative Economy, composed of Intellectual property and innovation, and Education/Capacity. Altogether, 22 indicators were utilized and scored and weighted across the three themes.

How does it compare to other indexes?

The CVIA is explicitly modeled on the European Union’s 2019 Cultural and Creative Cities Monitor, which has the same three thematic pillars, though somewhat different sub-themes and even more indicators (29). While the majority of its data are drawn from EU statistical databases, this edition of the Cities Monitor innovated use of “experimental data” in the form of web-based OpenStreetMap and TripAdvisor to provide data for several indicators of Participation and attractiveness.

SMU/Data Arts just released its 2022 Arts Vibrancy Index Report & Map, identifying the 40 most arts-vibrant communities across the US. Its index is built on three pillars as well, but somewhat differently conceptualized and measured: supply (Arts Providers); demand (Arts Dollars); and public support for arts and culture (Government Support), with a total of 12 indicators. It relies heavily on Internal Revenue Service 990 forms submitted by US nonprofits and data from federal and state arts agencies.

What works about the CVIA?

As mentioned, overall the CVIA is a pioneering effort to trial a methodology, gather initial data, and create a baseline on cultural vibrancy — any single one of these tasks being a big lift. Moreover, the CcHub team did this herculean labor for a dozen cities across the continent. The team should be commended for both its ambition and focus. The launch of the CVIA provides a welcome redress for the relative absence of Africa from global urban cultural policy analysis and data collection efforts.

Some additional notable strengths of the CVIA are that it:

· Makes a good case for the city as the primary unit of analysis, as the EU and SMU/Data Arts models do. The CVIA encompasses a diverse set of cities, representing various linguistic and geographic sub-regions of the African continent.

· Expands the type of arts and culture physical infrastructure to include creative/cultural hubs, defined as “physical or virtual places that bring enterprising people together who work in the cultural and creative industries.” Creative hubs and co-working spaces are an important emerging trend and strategy being promoted by stakeholders across Africa to support the development of creative and cultural sectors.

· Recognizes the transformative effect of the internet on arts participation and consumption by including an indicator on “mobile internet percentage” (under Cultural Vibrancy/Participation and attractiveness. The other models still concentrate on physical venues and facilities. The role of virtual arts and culture presentation and audience preferences for online consumption is still evolving, but it is forward thinking of the CVIA to pay attention to this aspect from the outset.

· Accounts for the effect of personal/artistic freedom on creativity, by including the sub-theme of Censorship (under Enabling Environment). Neither the EU or US indexes mentions this facet, which points to an interesting blind spot in their conceptualization of barriers present in those contexts as much as to empirical differences between their and the African enabling environments.

Data gaps, areas for potential improvement, and methodological queries

The CVIA deserves to be commended for undertaking this initial effort. Being a pioneer means doing all the hard work to create something out of nothing and putting it out into the world for others, experts and non-experts alike (like me), to probe and query the index’s methods and decisions. Front-of-mind questions for me relate to:

Data gaps

· The Methodology Report notes the pervasive challenge of inadequate/total lack of robust and available data for the indicators. In particular, though the CVIA is meant to highlight the city as locus for cultural vibrancy, the majority of indicators had to rely on national data as a proxy. That being the case, it still would have been helpful if the methodology explained how the boundaries of each selected city were defined. Both the EU Cities Monitor and the SMU/Data Arts indexes are clear in their definitions of the city unit (for instance, the US Census’ Metropolitan Statistical Area). Those two indexes also grouped cities of similar population size to make comparisons more relevant. CVIA is dealing with a much smaller sample size, but this stratum level could be factored in future iterations.

· Another important gap is the near absence of data reflecting the audience’s engagement, the demand side (per SMU/Data Art’s definition) and what Cities Monitor calls “perceived satisfaction with cultural facilities.”

· Exercises like the CVIA underscore the weaknesses in robust statistical databases and replicable public opinion research across Africa on a variety of topics. This is true for many policy areas but particularly striking for cultural policymaking, such as including arts and culture. The need to generate city-level data and public opinion surveys would be high priority recommendations coming out of the CVIA process. Afrobarometer, are you listening?

Data sourcing

· For Enabling Environment/National Cultural Policy, the report notes that this is measured by the presence or absence of an elaborated national cultural policy to support creativity in each city gathered “from desk research and focus group discussion.” It might have been useful as well to go further to cite a source like UNESCO’s Diversity of Cultural Expressions Periodic Reviews.

· For the Enabling Environment/Censorship/Personal freedom ranking, the report cites World Population Review as the data source. However, World Population Review is just an aggregator pulling data from the underlying data source, in this case, of the Human Freedom Index 2021. This index is actually compiled by the Cato Institute and Fraser Institute, which would be important to make transparent as these organization’s political views are relevant to assessing potential biases of their data and analysis. Some other indexes such as Freedom House’s Freedom in the World and V-Dem might also be considered.

Indicator selection

· Attention to the political, economic, and social conditions as factors enabling or inhibiting creativity is a valuable insight of the CVIA model. For Enabling Environment/Censorship, the indicator of Personal freedom, defined as “an individual’s freedom of opinion and expression, equality before the courts, security of private property, and freedom to come and go,” (aside from the data source validity noted in the point below) is a thought-provoking choice.

· As was discussed extensively at the recent 9th World Summit on Arts & Culture, artistic freedom, which UNESCO defines as “the freedom to imagine, create and distribute diverse cultural expressions free of governmental censorship, political interference, or the pressures of non-state actors. It includes the right of all citizens to have access to these works. . .” is front and center on the culture sector’s mind now. But what data source is really measuring it now in a way that could serve CVIA and others as a monitoring and accountability tool? The Index Index, made of four rankings (one overall Index, as well as rankings for each individual freedom of academic, digital, and media/press freedom), was offered as one possibility. Speakers noted that regional methodology and data collection that spoke to the context of Africa was needed, and the nascent Pan-African Network for Artistic Freedom (PANAF) might hold the qualitative beginnings of such a process that could lead to comparable quantitative analysis suitable for an index.

Improved on-the-ground data validation

· A random check of the city with which I am most familiar found some anomalies. CcHub, where the report was launched, does not appear on the list of creative/cultural hubs for Nairobi. Naivas Supermarket Riruta (Nairobi) seems an unlikely “arts festival.” One of my favorite cinemas in Nairobi, Century Cinemax Junction, doesn’t appear on the city’s cinema list.

Presentation of findings

· The Methodology Report would benefit from a thorough copyediting and fact-checking (are the city populations on page 16 accurate?). The References section does not include a number of works cited in the text of the Methodology Report itself.

· There are considerable inconsistencies between the web interface of the database and the Methodology Report. Film festivals are not a sub-theme in the CVIA but appear in the database; examples of film festivals appear there in several indicator counts but not all of them show up in the “Film Festival” indicator count. Kinshasa appears to have been grouped with East Africa region rather than the Central Africa region.

Deeper dive: Film’s place in the CVIA

I was pleased to see that the film industry showed up explicitly two times in the CVIA. This is especially timely considering the landmark recent (2021) UNESCO study The African Film Industry: trends, challenges, and opportunities for growth. (The CVIA does not cite this study in its References, however — a missed opportunity to have leveraged some of the data and analysis in that comprehensive survey.)

Film’s first appearance in the CVIA is the indicator “Cinemas” under the theme of Cultural Vibrancy/Venues and facilities. The data are derived from “Google Earth, survey, and desk review.” Cinemas also appears in the EU Cities Monitor, with the data source being “OpenStreetMap.” In SMU/Data Arts, cinema and film-related activity are presumably included under the two indicators of “nonprofit arts and culture organizations” and “arts, culture, and entertainment firms.”

It’s perhaps not surprising that Lagos scored highest. It does seem a little suspect that Nairobi would come in second followed by Cairo and Johannesburg. As mentioned before, these counts of physical infrastructure might call for further fieldwork and data validation.

Film’s second appearance is the indicator “Local films” in the theme of Creative Economy/Intellectual property and innovation, populated with “data from Statista.” Neither Cities Monitor nor SMU/Data Arts have a similar indicator.

The data show Cairo tops the list, followed by Lagos, Johannesburg, Accra, Nairobi, Harare, and Dakar. Five cities scored 0 on the local films indicator: Dar es Salaam, Kinshasa, Luanda, Marrakech, and Tunis.

By contrast, both UNESCO’s African Film Industry and Statista (it appears, though I wasn’t able to access the subscription-only data, the data cover note quotes the same figures offered by UNESCO) were able to provide annual estimates for local films for Nigeria (2,599) Ghana (600), Kenya (500), Tanzania (500), Tunisia (185), and Egypt (60). South Africa is a perplexing lacuna in both data sources, given the size of the market and the generally better than average film industry data available in South Africa.

I would be keen to learn more about why CVIA does not seem to be relying on UNESCO’s continent-specific data for this indicator (and which on the surface seems to be the source of Statista’s numbers as well). Using different data would probably have advantaged Dar es Salaam, for example, as Tanzania recorded higher annual local film output than many other countries.

I found Local films an especially fascinating choice of indicator for cultural vibrancy. Though The African Film Industry found plenty to be hopeful about, the current baseline for local film production in Africa was generally observed to be sub-optimal. What is the theoretical or empirical evidence that the CcHub team looked to that led them to choose local films output as one of the select indicators to make the CVIA? Especially as several cities, even using UNESCO’s data, would have negligible results to report.

Is there an advocate for the film industry on the index team that hopes these findings can be an advocacy tool to support the call for a revitalized locally-led film industry? Are film industry advocates aware of the power of the CVIA for making their case?