Rethinking our approach to analyzing Digital Creative Industries (DCIs) in Uganda
A considerable wealth of data exists on the more established sectors of Uganda’s economy including agriculture, manufacturing, and services. Despite the continued growth of creative industries including digital creative industries (DCIs) in the country over the years, there remain significant data gaps on the sector which in many ways hampers its further growth given a limited understanding of it and thereby a likelihood that efforts to boost the sector are usually misguided in terms of core areas of focus to address.
With this background as an antecedent, Pollicy set out to contribute to the limited availability of data on DCIs in Uganda through a mapping of the landscape of the sector in Kampala, Uganda which was aimed at understanding the experiences of digital creatives with a focus on issues of access and use of digital technologies in their work, a look at the role of emerging technologies on the sector as well as an examination of the policy ecosystem governing the sector. All this has been compiled as a report titled Enduring blindspots and Infinite Opportunities- Digital Creative Industries in Uganda which is available as open data here.
Summarily, key findings of this report include first a need to clearly define digital creative industries in Uganda. The fact that there exists no single definition of the industry coupled with its interdisciplinary nature points to its knotted nature that needs to be unraveled especially at a policy level to enable smoother decision making from the top downwards and vice versa.
The other key finding of this report was the fact that there exists sexism towards women in the sector who are also fewer in number compared to men. This is somewhat attributed to the working conditions in the sector which are discriminatory in terms of role limiting for women, hiring, and pay structures that are more stringent and less favourable overall to women in the sector. This paper also found the general public’s perceptions as one that sidelines the sector as a viable industry of work.
Overall, these findings were explored through the themes of access with the more ubiquitous digital creative goods and services being the low level technology and easier to produce using for instance smartphones and low processing PCs including photography, videography, and graphics designing. This was premised on socioeconomic constraints, limited human capital development as well as major funding gaps in the country. The other theme explored was trading where we found demand for digital creative goods and services to still be generally low with the hugest consumer here being advertising and media industries.
In exploring new technologies including blockchain, and immersive technologies such as AR, VR, XR, and AI adoption by digital creatives in their work, we found a surface level understanding of these but even more so a hesitancy to adopt them for a number of reasons, especially economic ones.
As regards policy pertaining to DCIs, we found that most of the laws, especially IP laws are obsolete and others are barely being implemented.
With this, Pollicy being one of the intermediaries in the DCIs in Uganda hopes to utilize its positioning to contribute to the sector through continued research. Adopting the value chain analysis approach of examining DCIs where we analyze the sector beyond just the creatives adopted from the Forum for Intermediaries in DCIs under the Fak’ugesi Festival where Pollicy featured, we believe this research is an attempt at understanding every level of the DCIs and thereby hopes to open up this conversation with all the other relevant stakeholders including creatives and intermediaries along this chain for a more robust gap analysis as well as solution finding.
Government, IP lawyers, distributors and marketers, telecommunications, festival organizers, private sector, researchers, and the media among other key stakeholders in the DCIs are bid to realize their criticality to the growth of this very promising industry in terms of returns to all players conclusively.
