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Who is in the room when South Africa's creative economy is decided?

  • Collen Dlamini
  • Aug 28, 2026
  • 1 views
Who is in the room when South Africa's creative economy is decided?
The creative economy cannot thrive while the policies, capital and institutions that shape it remain fragmented. As Creative Cnergy prepares for its 2026 symposium, Collen Dlamini argues that bringing government, investors and creatives into the same room is only the beginning: the real measure of progress is whether coordination leads to practical change.
Of all the commitments made at Creative Cnergy in April 2025, one sounded almost too small to mention. Gayton McKenzie, Minister of Sport, Arts and Culture, told us he would start meeting more regularly with Parks Tau, Minister of Trade, Industry and Competition, to align the policies shaping our creative economy. On paper, it was procedural. In a sector weakened by government departments working past one another, it was anything but. A filmmaker feels that fragmentation quickly. An incentive may sit with one department, copyright with another, AI and digital policies somewhere else again. Yet those decisions land in the same production, often the same balance sheet. Creative work exists in one economy. The institutions around it tend to see only their piece of it. That tension underpinned our first Creative Cnergy symposium in 2025. The Industrial Development Corporation, South Africa's national development finance institution, used Creative Cnergy to launch its R1 billion Youth in Film Fund for filmmakers under 35. CIBA, the Chartered Institute of Business Accountants, committed to creating financial literacy guidlines for creatives. Those commitments gave us something concrete once the room emptied. After Sandton After the symposium, we worked with CIBA to develop the Financial Mastery Guideline promised at Creative Cnergy. It takes questions around tax, record-keeping and irregular income and makes them usable. Completion meant the work could travel. We took it further than Sandton. At the Empower Youth Summit in the Vaal, we used the guideline in a financial literacy masterclass reaching close to 2,000 young people. We have since formalised a partnership with Empower Youth to continue the work in township communities. Geography matters. Financial literacy sounds orderly inside a conference programme. At grassroots level, it is the difference between knowing what your work costs and guessing, between arriving at a lender with records and a story nobody can price. It becomes real when somebody is trying to live from creative work. A later session on wellness and mental health exposed another reality. In our sector, mental health too often enters the conversation after tragedy. Irregular income can make conventional medical cover difficult to carry. I keep thinking about insurers designing for incomes like ours. We spend enormous energy asking how young people enter these industries. We should ask what allows them to remain. The work since the first symposium has changed how I understand the conference. It is where people who rarely share a table recognise parts of the same problem. Its value is tested afterwards, when an idea becomes useful elsewhere. What surrounds talent Investment exposes that fracture. South African creativity travels, but capital often approaches the businesses behind it with caution. One television production can employ more than a thousand people. Yet a creative entrepreneur can still find themselves explaining the sector before their concept gets a hearing. That is why we partnered with the South African Cultural Observatory. Its research gives government, banks and investors firmer evidence of the jobs and value this sector already creates. But data does more than describe an industry. It influences whether institutions believe it deserves finance. If banks cannot see the employment around creative work, caution looks rational. Better evidence changes that conversation. On 3 September, it needs to be in the room where investors decide what to back. Case studies sharpened the point at the 2025 symposium. Clive Kenny, an economist at UK-based Frontier Economics, showed how deliberate policy choices in South Korea helped investment follow talent. South Africa need not imitate South Korea. What we needed was to see what happens when policy and investment pull in the same direction, and how much creative success depends on what a country builds around its artists. The example turned the scrutiny back on us. Talent has never been our shortage. The question, rather, is what we have built around it. Aligned for Impact That question followed us into this year's theme, Aligned for Impact. Alignment can sound like conference language until you see its absence. Government can consult creatives after policy has taken shape. Departments can pursue separate mandates while their decisions collide. Creatives can occupy the same sector without building relationships that enlarge what becomes possible. Artificial intelligence makes the problem difficult to ignore. A policy shaped within the communications portfolio still reaches the songwriter whose work trains a model and the artist whose intellectual property becomes harder to trace. Copyright reaches the same livelihood from another direction. Intellectual property is our currency. If the law fails it, the loss is carried by the creator. Creative Cnergy 2026 takes place in Sandton on 3 September, built to put these dependencies in the same room. Senior government officials responsible for different parts of the creative economy will have to confront why policy still develops in silos. The people shaping technology will sit alongside those representing the rights embedded in creative work. Investors will hear the economic evidence behind a sector they are often hesitant to finance. The test is whether putting those people together changes what any of them does next. That is how I will measure success. If policymakers and investors leave seeing a sector with economic weight rather than a cultural add-on, the terms of the conversation have shifted. If copyright reform moves towards serving creators within twelve months, that shift has consequences. The same is true if AI policy formulation starts with creative-sector expertise instead of inviting it in after positions harden. The strongest evidence will be what people do together afterwards. We will follow those commitments, but that is only part of the work. Empower Youth Vaal is the model I keep returning to. A promise about financial literacy made in Sandton became a guideline, then a masterclass used by young people elsewhere. That is the movement Creative Cnergy has to keep making between symposiums. So my invitation on 3 September extends beyond creatives. Whether you work inside the sector, finance it, regulate it or live with the culture it produces, you already stand somewhere inside this economy. Join us with real intent, prepared to locate yourself within it, and to ask what decision is yours to make. In 2025, two ministers agreeing to speak more regularly mattered because our sector had grown used to separation. The deeper test in 2026 is whether coordination begins before a filmmaker loses financing or an artist discovers that ownership has already been decided elsewhere. Alignment matters when the creator no longer has to carry the cost of everyone else working apart. Collen Dlamini is co-founder and executive director of Creative Cnergy, a policy and investment platform bringing government, investors, industry leaders and creatives into closer conversation around South Africa's creative economy. A creative-sector advocate and strategist, he is interested in how policy, finance and institutional cooperation can create conditions for creative work to thrive.

Source: African Business ↗

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